Kratom advocates take their fight to Washington as potential federal ban looms
“Our goal is to educate in an effort to be proactive rather than reactive,” a spokesperson for Kratom Community Grassroots, a nonprofit advocacy organization, told HuffPost. “Many legislators are leaving office with new Representatives and staff taking their place. Educating will be an ongoing endeavor to increase awareness and maintain our access to kratom.”
The group said advocates specifically talked to congressional aides about the FDA’s recent use of a “misguided computational model” to classify kratom as an “opioid,” as well as controversy over the agency’s mandatory recall of kratom products following positive tests for salmonella. (Kratom Community Grassroots called the latter issue a “closed case with no source identified.”) They also challenged the FDA’s presentation of 44 deaths that it claims were associated with kratom. As HuffPost has reported, almost all of the cases cited by the agency involved the use of many different substances ― as many as 9, according to one autopsy. One alleged kratom-associated death involved an individual who was killed by a gunshot wound to the chest. Another died by suicide … Earlier this year, the FDA announced it had run a computer analysis showing that kratom was an “opioid,” and that the agency could therefore “predict its biological function in the body.”esearchers have called that computer model’s accuracy into question and argued that the “opioid” label is so broad and obvious that it’s meaningless. Compounds can interact with opioid receptors in a variety of ways, and not all of them involve the harmful side-effects that have made the opioid epidemic such a deadly and addictive problem today.
Original Article (Huffington Post):
Kratom Advocates Take Their Fight To Washington As Potential Federal Ban Looms
Artwork Fair Use: Matt Kelly
