The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been on a warpath against Kratom for years, saying it is a deadly opioid and must be banned. The FDA tried to justify its anti-Kratom stance by saying it killed 44 people. However, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) analyzed all of the ‘Kratom related deaths’, which is 152 cases, and found that almost all of them involved polydrug abuse, and ultimately not a single death could be scientifically proven to be due to Kratom.
That being said, the Kratom fight has often lost sight of the forest through the trees, or in other words gotten bogged down in the mud, via spending time focusing on these ‘Kratom related deaths’ and debunking them.
What really puts things in perspective, and reveals the FDA’s hypocrisy, is that tobacco kills 8 million people every year according to the World Health Organization (WHO), a number which has climbed from 6 million deaths per year in 2015.
This means that Tobacco kills approximately 22,000 people per day, over 900 people per hour, and roughly 15 people every minute.
That means in just three minutes Tobacco kills more people than the 44 ‘Kratom related deaths’ that the FDA claims. Once again, even these 44 deaths were fabricated, one of them was due to gunshots, another due to jumping out of a window, and the rest due to polydrug abuse.
The shocking thing is that tobacco is FDA approved. Indeed, since 2009 the FDA has had full regulatory control of tobacco, meaning they could ban it, but they choose not to. In-fact, they’ve done practically nothing to stop its spread.
In other words, tobacco is FDA approved and regulated, and the FDA is not calling for it to be banned, despite killing over 900 people an hour, but Kratom is not FDA approved and the FDA is calling for it to be banned even though it has caused zero deaths.
The hypocrisy of this situation is practically unbelievable, but there is a dark reason for all of this. Tobacco is a $700 billion per year industry globally, and therefore the tobacco industry can hire the best lobbyists and lawyers to control the FDA’s decision making. Essentially, money is being chosen over lives due to the corrupt nature of the system.
Likewise, the opioid industry is worth tens of billions of dollars per year, and in general the pharmaceutical industry is somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion per year. The FDA receives a lot of its funding from the approval of new drugs, and therefore is swayed by what Big Pharma wants.
As far as Big Pharma is concerned, Kratom is a threat to their profits, since Kratom is an excellent alternative to prescription opioid painkillers. Simultaneously, Big Pharma cannot patent Kratom since it is a plant, and therefore cannot make money with it, so Big Pharma wants Kratom to disappear, even though synthetic opioids and opiates kill 50,000 people a year, and Kratom kills no one. Once again, money is being chosen over lives.
Thus, the FDA’s war against Kratom is particularly absurd and untenable when considering that Kratom has killed no one, yet FDA approved tobacco kills over 900 people an hour, and over 8 million people a year. It is clear that money is being chosen over lives.
Therefore, all of the FDA’s anti-Kratom propaganda should be vigorously rebuked, since ultimately if they succeeded in banning Kratom it would lead to an untold amount of death and destruction, since chronic pain patients and those with opioid dependence would lose their only safe alternative to synthetic opioids and opiates, and that death and destruction would just be for the sake of Big Pharma making more money.