Here’s an interesting surprise out of Arizona—lawmakers recently added two chemicals unique to the kratom plant to a list of designer drugs to ban. But then, after a newspaper asked the bill’s sponsor why it was trying to ban kratom, those substances were removed from the list:
Many advocates of kratom were aware of the proposal to ban the substances in Arizona, and although New Times sent a message to the bill’s sponsor, Republican Representative Eddie Farnsworth, seeking an explanation for adding kratom to the list, he didn’t provide one.
However, Farnsworth proposed an amendment Thursday in the House Judiciary Committee (which he chairs) to remove the kratom-related substances from the list, which includes about 40 other substances to be banned.
Fancy that! Legislator makes knee-jerk, prohibitionist move, reporter asks questions, legislator reconsiders.
That’s a refreshing break from the usual cycle of drug politics.
The Stranger wrote about the rush to prohibit kratom—a plant that has been used for its low-grade medicinal and mildly intoxicating properties in SE Asia for centuries—back in 2012.
There hasn’t been much rigorous contemporary research on the benefits (or harms) of the leaf. In the story, we predicted that since it was appearing on the heels of the (legitimately worrying) bath-salts craze, lazy journalists and politicians looking to score easy points would demonize kratom before they’d even learned how to spell it.
At the time, it looked like things were going that way. In the wake of DEA warnings (based on ridiculously anecdotal and shoddy data from the 1970s) and overheated news stories, state legislators had begun toying with the idea of banning kratom. One example from that story:
In Iowa, state representative Clel Baudler began moving to ban kratom just two hours after he first heard of it. “We have to get ahead of this thing before it gets out of hand,” he was quoted as saying in a story on WOI-TV.com, which reported that kratom is “a hallucinogen, addictive, and can be life-threatening.”
In a telephone interview with The Stranger, Representative Baudler said he first heard about kratom on a radio show where he’d heard from a medical examiner that “the effects were not good—not good at all.” He said his push to ban it, via an amendment to another bill, had passed the state house “unanimously” but was now in the senate, where it was sitting in a committee run by “an ultra-liberal,” and that he’d been working hard all week to make sure it passed.
When asked why he was describing kratom as “a hallucinogen” and “life-threatening” when researchers and the medical literature directly contradicted these claims, he responded: “I absolutely disagree with you. It is banned in the two countries where it’s grown and banned in a whole bunch of European countries, like Australia [sic]. And it has absolutely no medical value.”
But kratom has been considered of medical value—for treating problems as small as diarrhea and as huge as drug epidemics—since the 19th century. As we were talking, I was sitting inches away from studies contemplating its medical value. (And an atlas.) And once a drug is banished into schedule one—i.e., is legally considered to have no medical value—it’s much more difficult to secure grant funding to research it. (According to Sanho Tree, a drug-policy expert at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, once a drug becomes schedule one, there are “infinitely more hoops you have to jump through and you’re basically at the mercy of the DEA” to do any research.) And research is precisely what kratom needs.
Given all that, could Representative Baudler point to any actual scientific studies supporting his charge that kratom is a “life-threatening” “hallucinogen” with “absolutely no medical value”?
“No,” he said. “They’re all at my office in Des Moines, and I’m at home.” Could he remember even one study? Or the name of the medical examiner he’d heard on the radio who’d instantaneously inspired his crusade? “No.”
Good on the Arizona legislature for taking a moment to think about the larger implications of their drug bill.
And, as we said back in 2012, what kratom needs now is more serious research.
