Supporters tout benefits of kratom, but will it stall Michigan drug fight?

Kratom products may help relieve anxiety or depression for some people or provide an alternative to street drugs, such as heroin or fentanyl
Others argue kratom products pose a danger, especially to children and people in recovery
The products continue to be available at gas stations, vape shops and liquor stories as efforts to limit sales have flagged

In its battle against opioids, some worry that brightly packaged, relatively new products sold in liquor stores, smoke shops and gas stations could send Michigan into relapse.

Doctors say a growing number of patients are losing years of recovery because of kratom, a drug some say is safe and medicinal but others contend is addictive, harmful and even deadly.

“I’ve had multiple patients come to me (who) used heroin 10 years ago. They’ll say, ‘Doc, like I started using this, and five days later I felt like I was just right back on heroin,’” said Dr. Eliza Hutchinson, who leads medication treatment options for addiction at Packard Health, a community clinic that partners with University of Michigan’s Medical School.

It’s difficult to know how many Michiganders use kratom — it’s not usually part of regular drug screens. And when it is linked to overdose deaths, there are often other drugs involved.

Hutchinson and other treatment providers say they’re also seeing new addictions to kratom, made from the leaf of a tropical tree, and particularly a kratom derivative known as 7-OH.

Both kratom, which often is sold in powder or leaf form, and 7-OH, which often is sold as tablets or energy shots, work on the brain’s opioid receptors. Both also remain legal and available to youth at local gas stations.

But even the sponsor of legislation to “get a little control” over the industry acknowledges the safety — at least of kratom, if not 7-OH — which has been used by people in southeast Asia for its medicinal benefits.

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“A lot of people in the recovering community use it to help wean themselves off of stronger drugs such as heroin and morphine,” state Rep. Cam Cavitt, R-Cheboygan, told fellow lawmakers last year as they considered the Kratom Consumer Protection Act that he sponsored.

“And our veterans use it primarily for PTSD,” Cavitt said.

That makes regulating kratom, while keeping it available to those who say it helps them, complicated.

In Kalamazoo, Melody Woolf is able to walk and to be a mom, she said, because of 12 years of daily kratom use, which she began after fibromyalgia and other severe pain kept her mostly bedridden — often in tears — for years as her children grew up without her.

Powerful opioid painkillers, including fentanyl patches that her doctor prescribed, didn’t curb the pain, she said: “It just made me not care as much.”

After years racked by pain and an opioid haze, Woolf heard about kratom from a Facebook group of chronic pain sufferers.

“My doctor said ‘Give it a whirl,’” she said.

Woolf mixes powdered kratom into hot water several times a day now. It reduces her constant pain by half or more, she said — enough that she can run routine errands, take her granddaughter to the zoo, and lobby for regulations that allow kratom to stay on the market, she said.

A woman poses behind the counter in a store — Ohio issued a temporary ban on kratom products in December, boosting sales for the Liquor Cabinet in Lambertville, Michigan, 2 miles north of the Ohio border, store manager Jessica Kawiecki said. (Robin Erb/Bridge Michigan)

shots of kratom products on display in a store — 7-OH products often feature colorful packaging. (Robin Erb/Bridge Michigan)

The American Kratom Association has pushed Michigan and other states to regulate kratom. It’s asked for age restrictions, packaging requirements and third-party testing to ensure the quality of kratom.

But notably, it also argues that 7-OH should be banned because of the potency.

John Cleveland, representing the Lexington, Kentucky-based Holistic Alternative Recovery Trust, last year told Michigan lawmakers that 7-OH is safe. He told lawmakers in October that the kratom association is using 7-OH as a “sacrificial lamb” to ensure conventional kratom remains legal

Cleveland’s organization supports regulation around packaging and age restrictions for 7-OH.

‘Suit-and-tie’ customers

At the Liquor Cabinet in Lambertville, 2 miles north of the Ohio line, store manager Jessica Kawiecki said she’s reassured of the products’ safety because of the “suit-and-tie” customers who buy kratom powder and capsules and the brightly-packaged 7-OH products.

If there are health hazards, she said, kratom is “like booze or cigarettes. You research it and, as an adult, you make your own decisions.”

Sales surged, she said, after Ohio placed a temporary ban on all kratom products in December.

Others have turned to kratom as a substitute for street drugs such as fentanyl.

The controversy over kratom is a “distraction” from the real problem, which are street drugs including illicit fentanyl — often made more deadly because of additives that are cut into for illicit sales, said Steve Alsum, of the Grand Rapids Red Project, a long-time harm reduction program that provides drug users with clean needles and test kits.

In 2023 and 2024, fentanyl, alone, was linked to about 125,000 US deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I get really frustrated when I hear public health folks getting worried and concerned about kratom, because it’s really a distraction from the main issue out there, directing time and energy and resources towards it that should be directed to what’s really going on,” Alsum said.

Relapse

But addiction experts worry that kratom products could set Michigan back in its battle against drugs.

Millions of dollars in opioid settlement funds to help people in recovery have strengthened programs, and overdose deaths have fallen — from 3,096 Michiganders in 2021, the peak of the state’s overdose deaths, to 1,938 in 2024, according to most recent data.

“A drug like 7-OH — that has the potential to really derail us,” said Scott Esteban McCabe, director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health at the University of Michigan’s School of Nursing.

Kratom use is at an all-time high — more than 5 million people in the US have used kratom in their lifetime, according to preliminary research by McCabe.

Side view of a man gesturing while speaking — Regulating kratom products is complicated, said Sean Esteban McCabe, director of the Center for the Study of Drugs, Alcohol, Smoking and Health at the University of Michigan. (Courtesy of Sean Esteban McCabe)

Using data from national drug surveys, McCabe also found that more than half of kratom users meet the criteria for substance use disorder in the past year — mostly abusing alcohol and cannabis, for example. They also have higher-than-average rates of suicidal ideation, anxiety, and psychological distress — an indicator that many may need treatment, he told Bridge recently.

In the two days prior, he told Bridge, three different people told him their recovery had been “derailed by 7-OH and kratom.”

Kratom’s minor side effects include nausea, itching, sweating, dry mouth, constipation, increased urination, irregular heart rhythms, vomiting, drowsiness, loss of appetite and sedative effects.

But in worse cases, users have reported anorexia, insomnia, seizures and hallucinations, according to the DEA.

A 2019 review of overdose deaths published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention implicated kratom in 152 of the 27,338 deaths, although the same study noted that other drugs could not be ruled out as the cause of death. And kratom has shown up in toxicology screens in Michigan deaths, too — again, often with a mix of other drugs.

Meanwhile, the Michigan Poison & Drug Information Center received 347 calls about kratom exposures over five years, including 87 cases in 2025.

While 7-OH didn’t appear until April 2025, it accounted for more than 1 in 4 by the end of the year, according to Dr. Varun Vohra, the center’s director, a clinical toxicologist and associate professor of emergency medicine at Wayne State University.

Moreover, nearly 30% of the 7-OH calls required admission to an intensive care unit compared to about 20% of people using kratom. The numbers are small, but they “suggest rapid market penetration” of a product for which withdrawal is more severe and requires more health care resources, Vohra told Bridge in an email.

Specific to 7-OH, the US Food and Drug Administration last year took the first steps to classify it as a controlled substance.

products on display on a store shelf — Kratom and its products are sold in many forms, including capsules, powders, tablets and liquid. (Robin Erb/Bridge Michigan)

Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, the state’s chief medical executive, said she worries consumers are wooed by marketing that promises a “natural” supplement or by brightly colored packaging. And they may be falsely reassured because the products are legally in gas stations and stores, she said.

“I particularly worry about teenagers and young adults who might not know what exactly they’re purchasing,” she told Bridge Michigan. “You’re seeing products that are marked as ‘natural’ or ‘herbal.’

“The labels can be very misleading. There’s no standard dosing,” she said.

Additionally, without more research, it’s unclear the extent to which kratom may interact with medications, including common prescriptions, Bagdasarian said.

Local matters

No longer willing to wait on state or federal legislation, some Michigan communities are taking up the matter.

Last month, Clinton Township became what may be the first local Michigan government to regulate the product, banning kratom sales to people under 21. Anyone who sells to a minor faces a $500 fine.

Clinton Township Trustee Shannon King began by trying to ban all kratom products, but found the issue more nuanced. (Courtesy of Shannon King)

“It’s mind-blowing to me that you can walk into a store and buy it legally,” District Court Judge Carrie Lynn Fuca, who began Clinton County’s drug court in 2020, told Clinton Township trustees in January.

Mount Clemens and Warren also are considering regulations, according to Clinton Township Trustee Shannon King, who spearheaded the effort and CARE of Southeastern Michigan, a long-time substance abuse provider that worked with King.

Regulating kratom products, King found, was a lot more complicated than he originally thought.

“It may be providing you what you need and working out well. But for others — especially if you’re still growing and your brain is still developing or you can’t self-regulate — it can be very dangerous,” he told Bridge.

Several addiction medicine experts told Bridge they also struggle with how to regulate kratom products.

But, said McCabe at the University of Michigan, “doing nothing is not an option.”

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