Chances are that you have never heard of Feel Free before. It comes in a shiny blue bottle sold at convenience stores across the country as a social lubricant and substitute for alcohol. It proudly proclaims that it’s primarily kava—a south east asian tree root that has lots of traditional uses. But until recently, it was less forthright about its other, much more powerful ingredient: kratom.

A few years ago I started seeing signs for kratom at my local head shop and figured that it was some sort of cheap marijuana substitute, but I didn’t give it another thought.

What I didn’t know is that since 2016 the FDA has been trying ineffectively to get the addictive opioid-esque leaf off the streets, while a powerful drug lobby has used a familiar playbook to keep it legal(ish).

The kratom industry is worth approximately $1.5 billion today.

In an amazing investigative series, the Tampa Bay Times tracked Kratom production from farms and ports in Malaysia and Thailand through shipping routes to Oakland and then overland to processing and distribution centers in Colorado, Georgia and Florida. They uncovered documents attributing kratom, at least in part, to more than 500 deaths in Florida alone. Back of the envelope math suggests the national total would be in the thousands.

And while kratom is having its heyday in the press, the various health elixirs based off of it are getting a lot less attention.

I only became aware of Feel Free once people started sliding into my DMs from a reddit board called https://www.reddit.com/r/Quittingfeelfree/ While scientists are already hard at work researching the nuances of kratom addiction, posters told me Feel Free was somehow much worse than they could have ever imagined.

Because whatever the issues people were having with kratom, Feel Free was somehow different. People who had been using kratom on its own for years without a problem said that this blue bottle tipped them over the edge into dependency.

One woman whose daughter died with blue bottles all around her called it “Evil Incarnate.”
Botanic Tonics, the company that makes Feel Free uses a proprietary blend of ingredients that synergies into a concoction that users tell me feels almost tailor made to foster addiction.

It was only after I started looking into the founder’s background that things started to click. . .

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