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 veggie  Registered: 07/26/04 Posts: 19,067 |
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Opioid Deaths Plunged While Kratom Was Legal. Louisiana Banned It Anyway
September 28, 2026 - Big Easy Magazine “Two Ole Miss deaths have put kratom back in the headlines before toxicology is complete. Louisiana’s experience shows why evidence should come before another drug-war verdict.” If you are interested in sensational headlines that turn the deaths of two young people into a verdict before toxicology results are available, this is not the article for you. If you are willing to slow down, examine the evidence in context and ask what is actually making people less safe, keep reading. The numbers alone should make us cautious. Over eleven years, the CDC identified 233 kratom-associated deaths reported to poison centers, and 79 percent involved more than one substance. Millions of Americans have reported using kratom. Those figures come from different data systems, so they cannot give us an exact probability of death, but they do show that fatal overdoses involving kratom alone appear to be rare. Kratom may ultimately appear in the toxicology reports of the two Ole Miss students. It may even be found to have contributed to their deaths. But a package found at a scene does not establish that its contents were consumed, and detecting a substance does not automatically make it the primary cause of death. Until the toxicology is complete, no one can responsibly say what killed either student. Warnings had also circulated about cychlorphine, a highly potent synthetic opioid found in counterfeit pills. There is no public evidence at this point that cychlorphine was involved in either death, and I will not replace one unsupported conclusion with another. That is precisely the point. We do not yet know. That uncertainty has not stopped some national coverage from placing kratom at the center of the story. A headline does not have to say outright that kratom killed these students for readers to walk away believing it did. When a substance found at a scene is allowed to stand in for a toxicology report, reporting stops informing the public and starts building a verdict from an assumption. Louisiana’s opioid deaths did not begin falling because lawmakers banned kratom. They were already falling dramatically while kratom remained legal and widely available throughout the state. That does not prove kratom caused the decline, but it does expose the black-and-white thinking behind Louisiana’s latest escalation of the drug war. Political leaders love the theater of a drug ban. They can hold a press conference, talk about protecting children and then point to arrests as evidence that they did something. The harder question is what replaces the prohibited product after the cameras leave. If people turn to counterfeit pills or an increasingly unpredictable street supply, the ban may have given politicians a victory without making anyone safer. According to Louisiana Department of Health figures highlighted by Louisiana First News, opioid-related deaths fell 59 percent between 2022 and 2025, compared with a 46.2 percent national decline. The 2025 figure is preliminary. State surveillance officials had already documented a 45 percent decline from 2022 through 2024, which means the improvement was well underway before Louisiana’s statewide kratom ban took effect on August 1, 2025. We should be precise about what this timeline establishes. Kratom cannot simply be awarded credit for Louisiana’s improvement. The national decline matters, and so do expanded naloxone distribution and fentanyl test strips. Greater access to buprenorphine was also part of the picture. What the timeline does establish is that Louisiana did not need a statewide kratom ban to achieve a steep reduction in opioid deaths. The state was making progress while adults could legally purchase traditional kratom. Lawmakers criminalized that access without first determining whether some Louisianans were using it to stay away from a much deadlier illicit supply. There is another part of the Ole Miss story that requires the same caution. Campus organizations circulated warnings about cychlorphine, an emerging synthetic opioid. Cychlorphine is real, and the concern surrounding it is not imaginary. An American College of Medical Toxicology report says reliable data remain limited, but the drug is thought to be as potent as or more potent than fentanyl. Routine hospital opioid screens and fentanyl test strips may not detect it. A North Louisiana Crime Lab bulletin issued months before the Ole Miss deaths reported cychlorphine in counterfeit pills from several parishes. According to the lab, early research suggests the drug may be considerably more potent than fentanyl. People may believe they are buying a familiar pill without having any idea that cychlorphine is inside it. None of that proves cychlorphine killed the Ole Miss students. There is currently no public evidence that it was found in either case. We should not replace one unsupported conclusion with another simply because the second conclusion better fits our argument. Until the toxicology is complete, the honest answer is that we do not know. That uncertainty does not weaken the argument I am making. It strengthens it. The entire point is that finding a substance at a scene, or even detecting it in someone’s body, is not automatically the same as proving it caused a death. Yet that distinction repeatedly disappears when kratom is involved. Kratom was not disappearing during the years Louisiana’s opioid deaths declined. Federal survey data estimated that 1.9 million Americans reported using it within the previous year in 2022. The CDC’s March 2026 report found that annual use remained relatively stable from 2019 through 2023, while estimated lifetime use rose from approximately four million to five million people. The same report described growing commercial availability and record import volume. We do not have evidence that millions of Americans use kratom every day, and we should not inflate the denominator to make a point. Louisiana also never produced dependable year-by-year user counts. What the available evidence supports is still significant: millions of Americans have used kratom, and it remained widely available while Louisiana’s opioid mortality fell. The CDC report identified 233 kratom-associated deaths reported to U.S. poison centers over the eleven years from 2015 through 2025. Every one of those deaths deserves to be taken seriously. But 233 reports over eleven years must be presented alongside the millions of people who report using kratom. Those numbers cannot be converted into a precise mortality rate because they come from different systems and do not measure the same population. Even so, scale matters. Reporting the numerator while ignoring the large population of users leaves readers with a distorted impression of the risk. The phrase “kratom-associated” also does an enormous amount of work. It does not mean investigators proved that traditional kratom leaf caused the death by itself. Poison-center records are incomplete, and researchers could not always determine which substance was most responsible. Of those 233 deaths, 184, or 79 percent, involved more than one substance. Opioids were reported in 62 percent. Benzodiazepines and stimulants were each reported in 20 percent, while ethanol was present in 19 percent. Forty-nine reports were classified as single-substance exposures. That designation means no second substance was reported to the poison-center system. It does not mean comprehensive toxicology ruled out every other drug or that a medical examiner proved unadulterated kratom leaf killed all 49 people. The study acknowledged underreporting and possible misclassification. It also said the data could not distinguish traditional leaf from concentrated or semisynthetic products such as 7-OH. Researchers were unable to determine which substance was most connected to the outcome in an individual case. An earlier CDC analysis produced a similar pattern. Across 27,338 overdose deaths in participating states during 2016 and 2017, 152 people, or 0.56 percent, tested positive for kratom. Medical examiners or coroners identified kratom as a cause in 91 cases. Only seven had kratom as the sole substance detected, and the CDC cautioned that additional substances could not be ruled out even then. Those seven cases represented about 0.026 percent of the multistate dataset. That is not a Louisiana mortality rate, nor does it prove kratom played no role in an individual death. It does show why “present,” “associated with” and “caused by” should not be casually treated as though they mean the same thing. We also need to stop placing traditional kratom leaf and high-potency 7-hydroxymitragynine products into one rhetorical bucket. Natural kratom contains mitragynine and small amounts of 7-hydroxymitragynine, commonly called 7-OH. Concentrated or semisynthetic 7-OH products can deliver the compound at levels that bear little resemblance to brewed tea or ordinary ground leaf. The CDC found that the sharp rise in 2025 exposure reports coincided with the emergence of these high-potency formulations. It could not determine which cases involved leaf and which involved concentrated 7-OH, however. It would therefore be just as irresponsible to declare that every serious outcome was caused by 7-OH as it is to blame every case on traditional kratom. What we can say is that federal regulators themselves recognize a difference. When the FDA sought restrictions on concentrated 7-OH products, it explicitly said the action was not aimed at natural kratom leaf. Louisiana’s Act 41 ignored that distinction and placed leaf, mitragynine and 7-OH under the same criminal prohibition. Lawmakers could have required testing and accurate labels for traditional products while treating concentrated 7-OH separately. They could have punished adulteration without arresting adults for possessing powdered leaf. Louisiana chose the broadest possible ban instead. Maryland offers a useful warning, although its experience has sometimes been described inaccurately. Maryland did not ban traditional kratom. The state regulated kratom products in 2024 and then prohibited sales of high-potency 7-OH in July 2026. Maryland’s Rapid Analysis of Drugs program reported three samples containing 7-OH during the second quarter of 2026. One contained only 7-OH. The other two contained five additional substances, including fentanyl and methamphetamine. Medetomidine and anesthetics were also detected. Those samples were collected from April through June, before the July ban took effect, so they do not prove that Maryland’s prohibition caused the contamination. Maryland officials have not announced that they regret the law. What the state’s own health department wrote is still revealing. Its quarterly report warned that regulating a substance can produce disruption in the unregulated market. Officials said they would continue monitoring the supply after the 7-OH ban and encouraged people to carry naloxone because fentanyl had already appeared alongside 7-OH. That is the danger Louisiana should have considered. Once demand moves outside a visible market, officials have less control over what products contain. Maryland is at least testing samples and watching for that movement. Louisiana banned traditional leaf without establishing a comparable system to track what former consumers began using instead. My own history with kratom needs to be stated clearly. On August 1, 2025, the same day Louisiana’s ban took effect, I bought Euphorbia Kava and Coffee Bar in New Orleans. I have never sold kratom because to do so would be illegal. Before becoming the owner, I had been a customer there for eleven years. I personally used kratom for years for the years leading up to the ban, and it helped me stop drinking alcohol. That experience is not a clinical trial, and I do not present it as one. It is still true. I watched kratom help other people step away from alcohol and opioids. Since the ban, I have known people who returned to harder drugs, and I know people who are struggling right now. Their experiences cannot establish that the ban caused every relapse. They are exactly the kind of consequences Louisiana should have anticipated and tracked before making possession a crime. Regulation in place of an outright ban could and likely would have prevented deaths. The inconsistency becomes even clearer when we consider Suboxone. Buprenorphine can produce physical dependence and withdrawal, yet it remains legal because doctors and policymakers understand that a dependence-forming substance can still reduce the much greater danger posed by heroin and fentanyl. That does not mean Suboxone should be banned. It means the same harm-reduction reasoning should have been applied before Louisiana criminalized traditional kratom. The relevant question was never whether kratom was completely harmless. The question was whether regulated access was safer than leaving vulnerable people with an unpredictable street supply. Our previous reporting documented similar experiences. Charlie Hoyle, a New Orleans systems analyst, said his alcohol cravings diminished after he began using kratom and that he stopped drinking in 2021. Tyler Patin, an architect, described using it alongside stretching and physical therapy for a lingering back injury. A 2020 study surveyed 2,798 kratom consumers. Of those respondents, 1,144, or about 41 percent, said they used kratom to reduce or stop prescription or illicit opioids. Another 411 attributed more than a year of opioid abstinence to kratom. The survey was self-selected and cannot establish clinical effectiveness. It does confirm that a substantial group of people was using kratom with the intention of moving away from opioids. Lawmakers had no justification for acting as though that population did not exist. Substance-use disorders do not vanish when a legislature removes one legal product. People change when they are ready and when treatment or support is available. Someone in the grip of compulsive use may cross state lines, seek an unregulated seller or buy whatever promises relief. When the legal option disappears but the pain or dependence remains, the replacement may be a counterfeit pill containing fentanyl. It may contain nitazenes or cychlorphine, neither of which the buyer expected. Prohibition can change the supplier without making the consumer safer. That is why the recent warning from the Northshore matters. On August 25, 2026, the DEA’s New Orleans division warned of a surge in fatal overdoses across St. Tammany, Tangipahoa and Washington parishes. Officials raised concerns about nitazenes, synthetic opioids that can equal or exceed fentanyl in potency and may appear in powders or counterfeit pills without the buyer knowing. The DEA had not confirmed that nitazenes caused those deaths when WWL Louisiana reported the warning. A regional spike also does not establish that Louisiana’s statewide decline has reversed. There is no evidence connecting every victim, or any identified victim, to previous kratom use. I cannot prove that the kratom ban caused those deaths. The same standard works in both directions: kratom being legal during Louisiana’s decline does not prove it caused the decline, and the ban preceding new synthetic-drug warnings does not prove it caused those warnings. What I can say, from personal experience, is that people close to me used kratom to leave heroin and fentanyl behind. Others used it to stop drinking alcohol. Some people I know have since relapsed, and watching it happen has been heartbreaking. It is also infuriating to see bipartisan support for expanding a drug war that has filled prisons disproportionately with Black and Brown people without eliminating drugs or preventing overdose deaths. Louisiana removed an option that some people believed was keeping them alive and did not bother to follow what happened to them afterward. The politicians who demanded action on kratom should now demand answers about the people displaced by the ban. Did they enter treatment? Did they return to alcohol or illicit opioids? Did they start buying products outside Louisiana? The state should publish post-ban overdose data and examine treatment admissions. Former kratom consumers should be interviewed rather than treated as though their disappearance from legal stores proves success. If even a fraction moved from a labeled product to a counterfeit pill, Louisiana has an obligation to count that outcome. The drug war repeatedly fails because it confuses banning a substance with ending demand. Addiction does not disappear with the governor’s signature. A prohibited market has no licensed seller responsible for testing a product or accurately disclosing what is inside it. That market rewards drugs that are stronger and easier to conceal. When authorities target one compound, illicit laboratories can alter the formula and introduce another. Nitazenes and cychlorphine are not signs that prohibition has finally succeeded. They are evidence of how quickly an illegal supply adapts. A little more than a year ago, the Louisiana Legislature voted overwhelmingly to ban kratom. The vote was 26-11 in the Senate and 89-5 in the House, with support from both parties. The political contradiction is hard to miss. Republicans regularly warn about government trying to protect adults from themselves. Ronald Reagan famously described the most terrifying words in the English language as, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Yet many Louisiana Republicans supported putting people in jail for possessing a plant. Democrats who describe themselves as progressive also voted for the ban. They abandoned harm reduction and helped expand the same punitive drug war they often criticize for producing racial disparities and mass incarceration. Act 41 subjected possession of more than 20 grams to as much as six months in parish jail and created serious prison terms and fines for distribution. Louisiana can now count arrests and seizures. Those figures cannot tell us whether fewer people are relapsing or dying. The CDC identified 233 kratom-associated deaths over eleven years, with 79 percent involving multiple substances. Millions of Americans have reported using kratom, but the available data do not allow us to calculate a reliable fatality rate. What they do allow us to say is that fatal kratom overdose appears uncommon, especially when compared with the death toll from legal alcohol or illicit opioids. The contrast with alcohol is impossible to ignore. The CDC estimates that excessive alcohol use causes approximately 178,000 deaths in the United States each year. That toll includes chronic disease as well as deaths arising from acute intoxication. Louisiana does not arrest an adult merely for possessing a bottle of whiskey. We regulate who may buy alcohol and require manufacturers to tell consumers what they are purchasing. Criminal penalties generally focus on dangerous behavior such as impaired driving. I do not want alcohol prohibited again. I want some consistency in how government evaluates risk. A culturally accepted and immensely profitable intoxicant remains legal, while a plant that many people say helped them stop drinking or leave opioids behind can send someone to jail. The alcohol industry also has money, cultural influence and political access that kratom consumers will never match. In the political world created by Citizens United, money does more than talk. It buys access to the people who write the laws. The lesson from alcohol is not that every risky substance should be banned. Regulation can impose standards while keeping consumers in a market that remains visible. The lesson from the opioid crisis is that an invisible market filled with counterfeit pills and synthetic opioids is where a mistake becomes fatal. Louisiana should repeal its blanket kratom ban and replace it with a system based on actual differences in risk. Traditional leaf products should be legal for adults and independently tested. Labels should disclose alkaloid content and warn about known interactions. Sellers should be licensed, and adulteration should bring meaningful penalties. Concentrated 7-OH products can be addressed separately instead of being used as a justification for criminalizing traditional leaf. Louisiana should also expand treatment and access to medications such as buprenorphine and methadone. Naloxone and drug checking should be widely available. People deserve honest information about dependence and dangerous drug combinations without every kratom-associated incident being portrayed as proof that the leaf acted alone. The state should finally conduct the study it should have completed before passing the ban. Compare the period before August 1, 2025 with what followed. Locate former kratom consumers and ask what they use now. Researchers should examine relapse and treatment entry along with emergency visits and deaths. Traditional leaf must be separated from extracts and high-potency 7-OH. A toxicology finding should not automatically be counted as a demonstrated cause of death. The National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, says fatal overdose from kratom alone appears to be extremely rare. It also notes that most reported deaths involving kratom have involved other drugs or possible contaminants. That does not make kratom harmless. It can produce dependence and withdrawal, and combining it with other substances can increase the risks. But it does reinforce the distinction at the heart of this article: finding kratom at a scene or detecting it during toxicology does not, by itself, prove that kratom caused the death. That context belongs in every story describing a death as “kratom-related.” The Ole Miss investigation offers a painful reminder of why this discipline matters. Two young men are dead, and their families deserve answers grounded in toxicology rather than headlines or political agendas. If kratom contributed to their deaths, that should be reported when the evidence establishes it. If another substance was responsible, the public deserves that truth with equal prominence. Louisiana’s opioid deaths fell sharply while kratom was legal. That correlation does not prove kratom saved the state, but it should have warned lawmakers against pretending prohibition was the only road to safety. Now unfamiliar synthetic opioids are appearing in counterfeit pills, and people I know are struggling after losing something they believed kept them away from harder drugs. Lawmakers do not get to declare victory merely because they made a plant illegal. They should have to demonstrate that the people affected by their decision are actually safer.
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