VIDEO – THEN WHAT? –
April 2, 2026 – Mac Haddow, a senior fellow with the American Kratom Association, argued for regulation rather than a ban.
“Properly regulated kratom products are safe and should be allowed on the marketplace with good regulations,” Haddow said. Kratom is a tropical plant from Southeast Asia. Products made from its leaves are sold in stores as powders, capsules, gummies and beverages. But testimony and agency warnings focused on products that do not come solely from the plant itself. Natural kratom leaf contains a compound called seven-OH at less than 2% of its total makeup, but when chemically extracted and concentrated in a lab, experts said it becomes a different substance that acts like an opioid in the brain.
“We’re routinely seeing that kratom ranks upon the top 5 most frequent positive results from our drug testing,” said Wehme Hutto, executive director of the Ernest E. Kennedy Center for Berkeley County’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission.
Hutto said that within nine months, 91 clients tested positive with concentrated kratom.
“What we’re seeing is no longer from a farm, it’s from a lab and it’s from an unregulated lab,” Hutto said.
