Dear Assistant Secretary of Health Karen B DeSalvo,
I am writing you to voice my concern over the Drug Enforcement Administration’s pledge to ban the herbal remedy Kratom and the grave mistake you have made by approving this emergency scheduling. If Kratom is placed on the Schedule 1 list hundreds of thousands of people will suffer. The DEA claims the legal status of Kratom is driving our nation into an imminent threat of public safety. But the true danger is the ban against Kratom driving people to other substances that already kills tens of thousands per year. The banning of Kratom is in fact the imminent threat to public safety. The DEA claims that 15 people worldwide died as a result of Kratom use over the past 2 years. However, they have no evidence supporting this claim. An independent toxicologist who reviewed these 15 cases stated that other substances played more significant roles in 14 deaths. The DEA states that Kratom is highly addictive and has no medical value, but there have been no formal human clinical trials to support either claim. Although Kratom has no current documented medical use, research on Kratom by the University of Mississippi and the University of Massachusetts led researchers to apply for a patent identifying Mitragynine, one of the active ingredients in Kratom, as a useful treatment for opioid addiction. Every reason the DEA has made to ban Kratom has been unjustified. Regardless, the scientific community should be tasked with scheduling substances, not cops. I find it appalling that the DEA has any right to create laws. Their sole task should be to enforce the existing law.
According to the American Academy of Pain Medicine, as many as 100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain. Because the CDC has made it even more difficult for chronic pain patients to obtain prescription medications, what alternatives are we left with? People use Kratom as a natural remedy people use to alleviate chronic pain, among other ailments. The DEA is alarmed by the increase of Kratom use in 2016. Well, it seems obvious that part of the increase is directly related to the number of people being unable to obtain medication as a result of the CDC's new opioid prescribing guidelines. When people are experiencing pain every single day, they will continue to seek out ways to alleviate their suffering. Since doctors will not prescribe pain meds like they used to, patients must find an alternate source. This is where Kratom comes in. The DEA needs to understand that people in chronic pain cannot simply deal with it and move on, and with an estimated 100 million people experiencing chronic pain today, there must be a source of relief. And pain management is only one aspect of Kratom. People also use Kratom to combat their depression, anxiety, PTSD, fibromyalgia, MS, lupus, addiction recovery, and other conditions. There is no better, cheaper, safer, and easier alternative than Kratom. If Kratom has no medical value, tens of thousands would not swear by its effectiveness.
Kratom is not an opiate as the DEA suggests. Kratom is a member of the coffee family, not the opium family. The two main alkaloids in Kratom partially bind with certain opiate receptors in the brain, as does dark chocolate. Only 2% of 6,000 Kratom users surveyed use Kratom for recreational purposes. Kratom is a highly effective tool that combats a large variety of ailments and is something the DEA should defend, not exterminate. Tens of thousands of people claim that Kratom provides more effective relief than prescription narcotics, but without the side effects and high risk of addiction. Any natural alternative to prescription and illegal narcotics should be embraced, not banned. As many as 30 million Americans are not medically insured and as such, they are unable to place themselves under regular physician care. They have no access to prescription medication and therefore must deal with their health problems while receiving no help. These people deserve to benefit from a natural remedy such as Kratom, especially since tens of thousands have spoken out in favor of Kratom, stating that Kratom has drastically improved their way of life. Please take my letter into consideration, which is all I ask. Thank you so much for your time.
Most respectfully,
- [Spaethon]
I did not receive a response to this letter.
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