Caleb Brown: This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 23, 2016. I am Caleb Brown. The DEA is working to quickly, and if they can, quietly, ban a plant called kratom. There haven’t been any clinical studies of the plant but it has shown promise at helping people with opioid and other addictions. Andrew Turner is a veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress. He’s a former guard at Guantanamo Bay and a current user or kratom. He’d like to see it stay legal. We spoke last week.

Andrew Turner: Kratom is a — it’s a tree. The way you get it here, in the U.S., is a crushed leaf, powdered form. But it starts out on a tree in Southeast Asia, there’s farmers in Indonesia, and Malaysia, and Vietnam that pick the leaves, dry them out, break them down into their natural form of you know, as just a powdered or crushed leaf form so you can make it into a tea and ship it over here to the U.S. And the tree is in the same family as the coffee tree, but it’s not exactly the same. It’s a similar tree to that.

Caleb Brown: So in traditional medicine it’s been used for some time, but it’s people just chewing the leaves. Like a…

Andrew Turner: Thousands of years.

Caleb Brown:…like a cocoa leaf.

Andrew Turner: Yes sir.

Caleb Brown: So what’s the difference between you take that and turn it into a powder?

Andrew Turner: Well, so, because it’s got to be imported here to the U.S., the natural form typically seems to break down to where it doesn’t, over time, like when they ship it over here it just doesn’t have the advantage of being able to pick it off the tree and chew it like you could if you were in Indonesia or Malaysia and so they have to dry it. They found they’ve had to dry it and break it down into this form so people can actually consume it.

Caleb Brown: Alright so what has the DEA done with respect to this drug and why do you believe they’ve done what they’ve done?

Andrew Turner: So at the beginning of September the DEA put out a proposal for a ban to make kratom from completely legal to a Schedule I substance, along with heroin, marijuana, LSD, and said it has no medicinal benefit, so we’re going to ban it. And at the time most of us didn’t even realize how big of a movement of people out here in America are consuming kratom in one form or another, either in tea or just in its dried form. And there was just this public backlash, you know. There was — we — there was a group of us that had off and on, been kind of smaller activists working at the state level to keep states from banning it, you know, and maybe putting some type of regulations like age limits in place for purchase, but not outright banning it. And they’ve been pretty successful, so it started with a march at the White House. There was about 400 of us out there, several of us spoke. And that snowballed into a YouTube and Twitter movement, and next thing you know the media kind of was looking around saying hey what is kratom and where are all these people coming from? You know, and doctors and scientists that have been researching kratom were stepping up and saying you can’t do this, you can’t stop our research. We actually are looking into it and it looks like there’s a lot — even with anecdotal evidence there’s tens of thousands of people saying this is helping me with having an overall sense of wellbeing.

Caleb Brown: Alright, so what — who uses kratom? And what do they use it for?

Andrew Turner: Yeah, you know it’s — the who — anybody. It could be anyone. And even I didn’t realize the extent of that until the day we had a march the first week of September at the White House and I looked around and there was opiate addicts, and there was former heroin addicts, and there was, you know, people that had been addicted to pharmaceutical medications. And there was people like myself that deal with service-related PTSD and chronic pain. I mean it was just amazing the amount of people that take it for — to where it helps them manage other issues that are going on in their life, you know, with physical and mental health.

Caleb Brown: Alright, so some people have used it to step down off of opiates.

Andrew Turner: Right.

Caleb Brown: So what kind of numbers do you sense there are out there for people who have been able to sort of, because that’s obviously a very difficult addiction to break.

Andrew Turner: Sure. You know it’s — so initially no one really knew how many people had tried kratom, and it was kind of — everybody that I’ve talked to, you know, online and in person, on the phone, that have taken kratom, they all kind of went I only thought I was the one. I thought there was only a few of us and it was some kind of quiet thing, but the last count from the Botanical Educational Alliance who is — they work with a lot of the vendors here in America to make sure there’s some kind of standards out there for what’s coming in and making sure they are protecting the consumer like myself. From sales numbers just in the last eight to ten years, they are talking three to five million people in America. And this is, again, the numbers are telling them this. The sales numbers from the vendors, three to five million people in America have tried kratom for one reason or another. And it’s just amazing the thousands of people that are talking about having been heroin addicts, having been prescription opiate addicts. And now especially at this time when we’re talking so much about opiate addiction and the deaths that are happening and fentanyl and carfentanyl and all these other things on the street that are so bad, the DEA out of nowhere wants to ban kratom and their claim is there was fifteen deaths. That’s it. Fifteen. Not this year, not in three years. Just fifteen, here in America, and when it comes out about it, fourteen of those had other things in their system that do cause respiratory distress and would have killed these people. None of this made any sense.

Caleb Brown: So, one of the things that it’s important to note about moving a drug or a chemical from legal status to Schedule I is that the research does become virtually impossible without specific dispensation from the DEA.

Andrew Turner: Right.

Caleb Brown: So, what happens now, for research?

Andrew Turner: So not long ago I was on a press call with Dr. Andrew Kruegel from Columbia who has got probably one of the most up-to-date, current research people out there. He’s working with a team from the Kettering Cancer Institute, and even they said they would have to stop researching kratom because just to have it in the forms they did, because they extracted certain alkaloids out of the plant material, just to have it in that way, they would have to install a $10,000 safe right off the bat in each lab that they are keeping these substances in. And that doesn’t mean that they get a permit to study it. That’s the start. For every lab that they are studying it in they have to have that safe. And then from there they have to find an approved vendor, but the DEA doesn’t have any, because you can’t grow this in America. This isn’t like marijuana where, you know, they could grow it in greenhouses. This is something where we, for any kind of a viable crop, maybe Hawaii, maybe Guam, maybe Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, but it’s got to be a very warm, very humid, and somewhat windy environment, it seems like, to get the alkaloids to where they sit right in this plant. And it’s not just one or two, it’s twenty-plus alkaloids kind of coming together in a symbiotic nature to do what they do and they don’t know enough about it, but they’ve even, you know, on that press call one of these doctors, he’s a research scientist and they said you know this could be, we could be on the edge of the Holy Grail for pain management and the DEA wants to stop that completely.

Caleb Brown: This seems to be a similar story to what happened with LSD in the 1960s. It was a chemical that went from being completely legal and was used in research to being a Schedule I drug. It’s similar to pot in the sense that the only research that was allowed to be done was extremely limited. There were a few people in the United States that were allowed to have marijuana legally with a federal license and with MDMA, ecstasy, which is, as a research matter, has shown remarkable promise for treating people with PTSD and other things. And I’m trying to put the best spin on it from the DEA’s perspective, which is let’s crack down on it first and then go through this fairly long process of seeing what this drug is actually capable of doing for people who are suffering.

Andrew Turner: This is really the first big time they’ve used emergency scheduling like they did for a plant. Back in ’84 the Crime Control Act changed the Controlled Substances Act to allow emergency scheduling to be put in place. Emergency scheduling means virtually they can ban it overnight. They don’t have to take any public comment, they don’t have to listen to anyone, and then after the fact they can issue permits if they want to. And if you can prove that you meet, you can jump through all the hoops required, and if you can’t then at the end of two years they can then come up and say well, nobody has done any research, hey Congress, ban it now. Make it permanent, let’s get rid of it. And that’s what’s happened a lot of times but now we’re in an even bigger situation that Congress, the President, all the heads of these agencies keep coming and saying we’ve got to do something about this opiate problem. And then they’ve got something staring them right in the face that people are saying, you know, not one or two. And granted a lot of this is anecdotal evidence. You know, I made videos for YouTube just to show people my conditions when I don’t take kratom for an extended period of time, what happens.

Caleb Brown: Talk about that.

Andrew Turner: Well I deal with PTSD from my service, I deal with chronic pain from degenerative disc disease, but I deal with a fairly rare movement disorder called Meige syndrome. Meige syndrome causing dystonias in my face and neck and over a period of time they will flare up so bad, kind of in conjunction with my anxiety issues from PTSD with my pain, that it gets to the point where I look like a bobblehead doll. My jaw will extend to a point where I can’t barely speak and I lose the ability to speak. And that’s, you know, I’m not a good-looking guy, but I’ve got a great voice and I’ve always been able to speak and talk about things and I love to talk to friends and neighbors and, you know, at some point I plan to even run for city council in one of the towns right outside of D.C., and to not be able to speak for a period of time and it went for several months at one point when I was going through doctor’s care at the VA, where I could barely make functional words because of the dystonias, the tics in my face and jaw were so severe that it was almost just seizing my face.

Caleb Brown: And kratom helps.

Andrew Turner: Surprisingly it does. It doesn’t fix things, it doesn’t cure anything. It just — it helps with my anxiety, it helps with my pain. It makes everything a little more manageable. I still have pain every day. It’s not like I — I don’t take kratom multiple times in a day, I take it in the morning when my pain is most severe and I take kind of a slower-acting strain of the plant that kind of makes me comfortable throughout the day and because of that help with the anxiety and the pain, my tics kind of went away. They are not — they’re still there. I still feel the spasms in my face and my neck and my jaw move a little bit, but I can actually control it, whereas I couldn’t — I had no control over it before and, you know, if I get off kratom for an extended period, because every month I stop for four days and I do a cleanse and I just kind of make sure that, because I also don’t want to, you know, there is risks with it. There is people that have had withdrawal issues with it, there is addiction issues. That happens with anything we ingest that you can have some risks, but with this the benefit for me outweighs the risks immensely, and as long as I’m careful with it and I act responsibly about it, you know, I get so much benefit in my life whereas all the prescription medications I was taking for an extended period, they were just all the side effects. I wasn’t getting any benefits.

Caleb Brown: Assume that the DEA is going to move ahead with scheduling, putting it on the schedule, somewhere. Where should they schedule it, in your view?

Andrew Turner: They shouldn’t. Because if you schedule it, it’s done in America because we — the pharmaceutical companies don’t want anything to do with it. So what do we do? Because to be on the schedule, between II and V, is going to require somebody to market it as a drug that they can prescribe out. But the pharmaceutical companies don’t want that. They don’t want it. They’ve got a couple patents for a couple of the alkaloids, but they haven’t been able to develop any kind of a — something that they can put out there and run through the FDA process, and so at this point if they go to schedule it, it’s done in America. It’s gone. For all intents and purposes I’ll have to go across the border to Canada where it’s completely legal still.

Caleb Brown: So at any level, the DEA’s involvement, pretty much at any level, takes it out of circulation for people who need it?

Andrew Turner: Well, you know, something like say, years ago pseudoephedrine was a huge issue. And instead of putting it on the controlled substances schedule, they said hey we need to do some regulations. Let’s make sure the vendors that are selling it are licensed in a certain way, let’s make sure that the product is tested. Let’s make sure there is an age limit. You know they do the same thing with anything that people can make, you know, methamphetamines from, there’s regulations that the DEA and FDA can shoot for. The DEA and FDA could go to Congress and say help us create — because Congress is ready. There was fifty members of the House that signed a letter to tell Chuck Rosenberg stop. There was over ten members of the Senate that created — that helped us get this stopped, open up a public comment period, and pursue a better route. And they could go to Congress and say you know what, we could fix this. We could do something better. Let’s create some type of legislation you know, that can address something like this, a plant. Because the emergency scheduling was built, even the congressmen that had created it in the ’80s, it was for analogues. It was for stuff that could be changed so quickly that they had to battle it quickly. You can’t change kratom overnight. You know, for a commercially viable crop, it takes 30 to 50 years to grow. And that’s another scary part is, you know, they talk about all the slash and burn going on in Indonesia and Malaysia for the palm oil industry, well that’s what’s going to happen when the kratom plants are gone and the American market dries up. A lot of those farmers are going to go in and just cut that down and the next thing you know that’s palm oil, too. And they’re not understanding that this affects so many people in so many places in a weird way over this simple arbitrary thing that makes absolutely no sense, but it might make sense to somebody. There may be somebody that’s benefitting by a kratom ban.

Caleb Brown: Andrew Turner is an activist, a veteran with post-traumatic stress, a former guard at Guantanamo Bay, and a current user of kratom, which he’d prefer to see remain legal. Subscribe to this podcast at iTunes, Google Play, and with Cato’s iOS app. And follow us on Twitter, @CatoPodcast.