The FDA is now pushing to ban the highly beneficial plant kratom, which is curing opioid addiction. If we look deeper, we can see why they want it illegal.
Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to the government’s own account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016. The vast majority of those deaths are from opioid-based substances such as fentanyl, heroin, and prescription opioids. Now, a natural plant that is helping people kick their addictions to these dangerous opioids — kratom — is under attack by the FDA as it is threatening big pharma’s grip on the pain and addiction market.
On Tuesday, Scott Gottlieb, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, issued a public health advisory on kratom, outlining concerns about its “deadly risks.”
As HuffPo notes, Gottlieb’s statement outlined concerns about the herb’s potential for abuse and addiction. He claimed there was “clear data” on these harms, pointing to reports of 36 deaths associated with kratom-containing products and a tenfold increase in calls involving kratom to U.S. poison control centers from 2010 to 2015.
Although kratom users have touted the herb as a safe and effective treatment for conditions like chronic pain, anxiety and depression, as well as a replacement drug for opioid addiction, Gottlieb said there is “no reliable evidence to support” those applications, the HuffPo report continues. In particular, he called the use of kratom as an opioid substitute “extremely concerning” and suggested that it could actually “expand the opioid epidemic.”
However, the millions of people whose lives were saved by switching from opioids to Kratom beg to differ. Also, as you read below, it becomes entirely clear that Gottlieb’s assertion that there is “no reliable evidence to support” the beneficial effects of Kratom is a bold faced lie.
More importantly, these supposed “deaths” from Kratom are highly speculative as TFTP reported last year, the DEA attempted to claim that 15 deaths were attributed to Kratom. However, the American Kratom Association consumer group conducted an independent investigation and found that this was also disinformation.
The AKA actually hired a toxicologist who reviewed the cases and found that there was no evidence to support the assertion and that most, if not all, of the deaths may have been tied to other drug use. So, as the FDA now makes these same claims, we can assume that most of them are likely false.
But that’s not all, in order to understand why this push for a ban is happening, we can simply look at who is spearheading it: FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb.
For those unaware, before he was appointed as the commissioner of the FDA, Gottlieb was a resident fellow at the neoconservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. AEI has long pushed for the war in and US occupation of Afghanistan—which, since the US invasion, has become the world’s number one source of poppies.
AEI’s officers and board members are made up of warmongers like Dick Cheney, as well as Big Pharma insiders like Raymond Gilmartin, former CEO of Merck & Co., and mega bankers like Harvey Golub, the retired chairman and CEO of the American Express Company.
Gottlieb, himself, prior to assuming his role in making decisions on what people can and can’t put into their bodies, was an independent director at Tolero Pharmaceuticals and Daiichi Sankyo Inc. and a member of GlaxoSmithKline’s product investment board.
Yes, the head of the FDA was a director at Tolero Pharmaceuticals which was charged and forced to pay a $39 million fine for paying physicians ‘kickbacks’ to push their drugs, in violation of the False Claims Act, an anti-kickback statute.
Now, here’s where things get really interesting. Looking past GlaxoSmithKline’s plethora of unscrupulous acts, we can focus on a patent they filed—which happens to one of Kratom’s alkaloids—Speciofoline.
It just so happens that a patent was filed for Speciofoline on August 10, 1964. The patent claims the “alkaloid has useful pharmacodynamic activity, particularly analgetic and antitussive activity.”
The patent was filed by Smith Kline, of Glaxo Smith Kline, & French Laboratories.
Now, as we see the head of the FDA who was a former director at a pharmaceutical company charged with bribing doctors to push drugs and a member of GlaxoSmithKline’s product investment board—who patented one of Kratom’s alkaloids—the motive for banning this highly advantageous and healing plant becomes entirely clear. Hint: it’s not for your safety.
The FDA’s claims that there has been no research devoted to Kratom showing it’s incredible analgesic properties and its ability to ween people off of dangerous opioids are nothing short of bold face lies—as the patents on its alkaloids show.
Aside from a patent on Speciofoline, US 20100209542 A1 is an application that was entered for University Of Massachusetts Medical School, University Of Mississippi in 2010. The application specifically recognizes kratom as a treatment for opioid withdrawal. US 20100209542 A1 goes on to claim that kratom could be used to help withdrawals from other drugs as well.
In fact, three synthetic opioids were synthesized from the alkaloids in kratom from 2008- 2016: MGM-9, MGM-15, and MGM-16.
They were synthesized from kratom’s alkaloids Mitragynine and 7-Hydroxymitragynine: to make what is essentially patentable, pharmaceutical kratom.
The first study, published in 2008, took Mitragynine and used it to synthesize “MGM-9”. The study says:
“Mitragynine is a major indole alkaloid isolated from the Thai medicinal plant Mitragyna speciosa that has opium-like properties, although its chemical structure is quite different from that of morphine. We attempted to develop novel analgesics derived from mitragynine, and thus synthesized the ethylene glycol-bridged and C10-fluorinated derivative of mitragynine, MGM-9 [(E)-methyl 2-(3-ethyl-7a,12a-(epoxyethanoxy)-9-fluoro-1,2,3,4,6,7,12,12b-octahydro-8-methoxyindolo[2,3-a]quinolizin-2-yl)-3-methoxyacrylate].”
The second study published in 2014 synthesized MGM-15 and MGM-16 from kratom’s other primary alkaloid, 7-Hydroxymitragynine. The study says:
“In this study, we developed dual-acting μ- and δ-opioid agonists MGM-15 and MGM-16 from 7-hydroxymitragynine for the treatment of acute and chronic pain.”
The list goes on. One can find dozens of studies from the past few years, in which researchers synthesized new opioid compounds from kratom and tested them on monkeys (primates). This is a huge market.
See the pattern yet?
As the legal pain medication epidemic sweeps the nation killing thousands every year and converting its users into heroin addicts, the pharmaceutical companies are scrambling to find an alternative. Kratom could be that alternative.
However, since kratom can be grown in a greenhouse in your backyard, pharmaceutical companies can’t monopolize it — unless the government outlaws it.
If the DEA actually cared about the safety of Americans, the last thing they would do would push this plant into the black market where it is not put in check by consumers and ethical business practices.
As Susan Ash, founder of the AKA pointed out, “A lot of people say they are scared to death of relapsing without [kratom], and if this ban goes through there’s going to be an illicit black market, and who knows what people are going to be putting into this product, so deaths are going to increase by that in itself.”
Not only will its ban push kratom into the black market, it will create an entirely new stream of revenue for the police state. The millions of innocent people who currently use kratom will be turned into criminals — literally overnight.
We can expect to see armed raids on cancer patients and other people treating their pain with this plant. We can expect to see asset forfeiture rise and the wholesale theft of property in the name of enforcing the DEA’s ban. More dogs, kids, and adults will undoubtedly fall victim to the police state as it carries out the will of their corporate masters — laying waste to all those in their path.
And, all of this tyranny, prohibition, theft, and violence, will be deemed necessary — to keep you safe — in the Land of the Free.
