The law and the profits: Inside kratom’s political underbelly

Haddow said as many as 15 million people used kratom regularly in 2021 — triple the 5 million users the organization estimated in 2017. So few deaths, set next to such a large user base, would indeed suggest kratom is relatively safe.

But a broader independent drug-use survey estimated far fewer kratom users. In a study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine parsing 2019 survey sampling 56,000 Americans over age 12, Joseph Palamar of New York University estimated 2.3 million Americans had used kratom over the previous year.

If Palamar’s estimate is correct, then kratom is about six times more dangerous than it would appear using the AKA’s user figures.

Haddow scoffs at Palamar’s estimate, pointing to a letter written to the journal by AKA-paid researcher Jack Henningfield and others objecting to the methodology. The letter cited another survey which put the kratom-using population over 10 million, adding “informal discussions of these authors with kratom marketers suggests the volume of imports, sales and apparent consumer base has continued to grow, possibly accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic given widespread use of kratom to self-manage opioid use disorder.”

If kratom is saving lives that would otherwise be lost to heroin and fentanyl, statistics don’t yet show it. This past November, the CDC estimated more than 100,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses, mostly opioids. It was a record; annual overdose deaths have doubled since 2015.

Deaths from pure kratom are too few to be statistically noticed in these figures, but so far appear to be in the low double digits annually. A 2018 study by British scientists of 152 kratom-related deaths estimated that 23% of the victims died from kratom overdose alone. “It would appear that kratom (mitragynine) has a higher lethality index than novel amphetamines, benzodiazepine analogues, cannabis, piperazines, and synthetic cathinones, but one that is lower than amphetamines, benzofurans, cocaine/crack, and other more potent substances,” the researchers concluded.

To be sure, even assuming a large undercount of kratom deaths, kratom is more than 100 times safer than heroin. But kratom partisans usually compare it to caffeine, noting that kratom is related to the coffee plant. And if you divide the reported caffeine deaths (fewer than 100 since 1959) into the worldwide population of caffeine users (billions) —or even just by the 278 million U.S. caffeine users — kratom is easily 40 to 1,000 times more dangerous.

So why doesn’t the FDA regulate it?

The agency won’t say. After numerous phone calls and emails, an FDA spokeswoman emailed two paragraphs attributed to “an FDA official”:

“The FDA is concerned that kratom appears to have properties that expose users to the risks of addiction, abuse, and dependence. FDA is actively evaluating all available scientific information on this issue and continues to warn consumers not to use any products labeled as containing the botanical substance kratom or its psychoactive compounds, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine. Science and evidence matter in demonstrating medical benefit, especially when a product is being marketed to treat serious diseases like opioid use disorder (OUD).

“The FDA stands ready to evaluate evidence that could demonstrate a medicinal purpose for kratom. However, to date, we are not aware of any evidence that would meet the agency's standard for approval of kratom as a drug. We also note that kratom products have been associated with significant potential safety concerns.”

The email linked to an FDA webpage last updated in 2019.

Since its ill-fated effort to get kratom scheduled by the DEA, though, the FDA has issued warnings to kratom companies. “Simply, selling these unapproved kratom products with claims that they can treat opioid withdrawal and addiction and other serious medical conditions is a violation of federal law,” the agency says.

And in 2014, FDA issued an “Import Alert” authorizing federal agents to seize any kratom products entering the United States. It sounds like a ban, but U.S. Customs and Border Protection has enough personnel to inspect just one shipping container for every 30 that enter U.S. ports. More than 60,000 containers enter the U.S. every day.

The FDA announced kratom seizures in 2014 ($5 million worth) and 2016. This past May, the FDA announced it had seized 34,000 kilograms of bulk kratom from a Florida-based kratom seller called Premier Manufacturing Products. The kratom, in barrels and individual capsules and everything in between, was worth $1.3 million according to the FDA. It was to be “marketed under the brand names Boosted Kratom, The Devil’s Kratom, Terra Kratom, Sembuh, Bio Botanical, and El Diablo.”

Premier — and several related companies — fought the seizure in federal court, claiming the feds had no right to take the material as it is not a “new dietary ingredient” and there is no proof it’s harmful. But this past October, a judge ruled the haul had to be destroyed at the companies’ expense. They submitted a $175,000 bond to cover the cost.

Dan Fabricant headed the FDA’s supplements division when the import ban was implemented. He banned kratom back then, he says, because sellers introduced a “new dietary ingredient” without applying to the FDA, and many made wild claims about kratom’s benefits. “It was very administrative,” he says.

Fabricant now heads up the Natural Products Association, the supplement industry’s largest trade organization. In that role, in 2017, he spoke in favor of the FDA’s effort to make kratom criminally illegal. He’s since had a change of heart.

“There’s been a ton of safety studies, and they have a ton of data,” Fabricant said in a recent phone interview. “Now they’re working with professionals like Mac Haddow, who know how things are regulated.”

Haddow also lobbies for Fabricant’s organization.

And indeed, Haddow knows the law: he helped pass it, after putting its principal author in the U.S. Senate.

Haddow managed Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s 1976 campaign, when the then-political newcomer unseated three-term Democratic incumbent Frank Moss to win his first term in the U.S. Senate.

That unlikely victory kicked off Hatch’s 42-year reign as a conservative standard-bearer until he retired in 2018, and it also launched Haddow’s political career. Haddow served in the Utah Legislature and, after working on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, took a high-level staff job under Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret M. Heckler.

It didn’t last. While serving as Heckler’s chief of staff Haddow established a nonprofit called the T. Bear Foundation, aiming to encourage hand-washing in pediatric hospitals. According to news reports, he elbowed the person who thought up the concept aside, staffed the charity with cronies, wrangled $300,000 in federal funds and hit up big pharmaceutical companies for donations while selling teddy bears for a profit. Haddow acknowledged to Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz that the arrangement “creates an appearance that I'm uncomfortable with, quite frankly.”

Indictments followed.

Haddow pleaded guilty to illegally funneling $55,330 to himself and his wife (who supposedly took more than $20,000 of it to write speeches for Heckler) and lying about it on ethics forms. In 1987, U.S. District Judge Gerhard Gesell sentenced Haddow to a year in prison, fined him $15,000 and ordered him to pay $12,000 restitution.

According to Haddow, he pleaded guilty to a federal crime because someone misplaced an ethics waiver form until after he was convicted, at which point it was found and mailed to the presiding judge. He said the form would have exonerated him but for a 10-day lapse between the time his wife was employed as a speech writer and the date on which the Heckler signed the form.

“I pled guilty to a 10-day delay from when my wife was paid to when the document was signed,” he said.

Haddow served three months in a minimum-security federal penitentiary, joining the more than two dozen Reagan administration officials marked with a criminal record. It hardly slowed him down.

As a lobbyist, Haddow remained close to Hatch. In 1994, Haddow joined other Hatch staffers in helping to write and pass the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). “Hatch was driving that,” Haddow said. “I was right there with him. He had weekly meetings with the dietary supplement industry.”

So closely are Hatch and Haddow associated with DSHEA that in 2017, the Natural Products Association gave its inaugural lifetime achievement award to Haddow and his brother and lobbying partner John, for helping to pass the law. Hatch received the “Industry Champion Award.”

The landmark legislation, staunchly opposed by the FDA, clarified the legal status of thousands of over-the-counter supplements and streamlined the regulation of new ones. Under DSHEA, manufacturers and importers of new dietary ingredients could simply tell the government they were safe and begin selling them after 75 days — unless the FDA acted. Sellers of existing ingredients would get no oversight no matter how they combined them — unless people started dying. If that occurred, the onus was on the FDA to prove the product was unsafe.

Critics warned untested products would cause illness and death, and they did. Ephedra marketed for weight loss and athletic enhancement killed dozens of people including Baltimore Orioles’ pitcher Steve Belcher, leading to the FDA to ban it in 2004 after years of delay. There were other products as well, often marketed, as kratom is now, as athletic performance enhancement supplements.

The supplements industry boomed from fewer than 4,000 products in 1993 to more than 85,000 today, even as reported adverse health events increased from 75,000 in 1990 to more than 2.2 million in 2020. Hardly anyone outside the industry claims the FDA could handle the work.

“The DSHEA act was a good start,” Haddow says. “It allowed the manufacturers to be innovative.”

American Kratom Association founder Susan Ash hired Haddow on advice of a friend and large kratom distributer who “mentioned that the only lobbyist familiar with kratom was Haddow,” she says. “He had a direct line to Senator Orrin Hatch [and] I knew that the only way we could keep kratom legal was if we could get to Hatch.”

With Haddow came Haddow’s friend Peter Candland. Ash says she was uncomfortable with their compensation, which was multiples of the $12,000 annual stipend she took. A year later the board ousted her.

“I was pulling a lot of money in and I think they saw a cash cow,” Ash said in an interview. “How could he do something so similar to what he was sent to prison for?”

AKA’s leadership ranks quickly filled with Haddow’s associates.

Dave Herman took over from Ash as AKA chairman. He was also vice president for policy for the nonprofit Alliance for Generational Equity, which paid Haddow as a lobbyist from 2008 to 2013. Prior to that Herman was executive director of the Seniors Coalition, an astroturf organization meant to counter the AARP for pharmaceutical companies. Its chief lobbyist? Haddow.

Board member Jamie Zeigler, who replaced Ross as AKA’s treasurer, had been a postal worker in Haddow’s neighborhood and, according to an online church bulletin, Haddow brought him into the Mormon church.

Ash says she had no idea Zeigler was Haddow’s associate. “The only reason I know his name is because he was just another activist,” she says.

Candland, a Brigham Young University alumnus and member of the Prince William, Virginia, County Board of Supervisors where he employed Haddow’s wife Alice as an aide, says he doesn’t know who suggested Zeigler for the board, but that he was not a kratom activist. “I can’t remember how he was referred to us by one of the other board members,” he said. “I’ll let Mac comment.”

Haddow says Zeigler was tapped as an expert in shipping and logistics. He does not say who tapped him, nor mention his own role in bringing him into the Mormon church.

From 2017 to 2019, the AKA paid Candland, both directly and through a consulting company he chartered in 2017, at least $340,000.

“You don’t pay someone $120,000 a year to do administrative tasks,” Ash says.

Candland says he raised funds, met with grassroots activists, worked on social media and traveled widely advocating on its behalf. He explained his inability to recall the details of how board members were chosen, and by whom, this way: “I did not get involved in the politics — lower case — of the board discussions. I really did just try to keep myself as a tool, for lack of a better word. An administrator.”

He left the AKA at the beginning of December 2021.

According to the AKA’s tax returns, from 2017-2020 it paid Upstream Consulting — Mac and John Haddow’s lobby shop — no less than $776,000. Pinney Associates earned at least $152,000 in 2017-18 to produce pro-kratom science. The law firm of Hogan Lovells made $316,000 and public relations firm The Hastings Group was paid $306,000.

In 2019 and 2020 the organization changed the way it reported its expenditures, no longer naming most of the recipients but instead reporting only generalities.

“From all appearances the AKA is Mac Haddow,” Ash says. “Let’s face it. It’s just Mac that’s calling the shots.”

See the AKA’s 990 tax forms from 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019

The AKA was but one stream of kratom-related income for Haddow and his associates. In 2018 Candland chartered The Center for Plant Science & Health Inc. a 501(c)(3) that shares a mailing address — a UPS Store next to a Domino’s Pizza in Haymarket, Virginia — and directors with the AKA. Only the treasurer is different: Chris Millard of North Ogden, Utah.

She is Haddow’s sister.

The center has no website and neither Ash, Drew Turner nor Chris Bell — all major figures in the kratom movement — had ever heard of it before I asked them about it in December 2021. Candland says the center was deliberately named that way to be low-key.

“This was at the height of, for lack of a better phrase, discrimination by the FDA against kratom,” he said. “We had one of our Facebook pages shut down by Facebook…so having a broader name gave us — it didn’t necessarily put a target on our backs.”

He added credit card companies even shut down the AKA’s ability to accept donations.

The new center had no problem with funding: it raised $815,000 in its first year, according to its tax return. Board members Dave Herman, Chris Bake and Millard received tiny stipends, while Candland, through his newly formed Red Letter Consulting company, took $50,000. Legal expenses topped $268,000, including $93,000 for Hogan Lovells. The center paid Pinney Associates $43,000 for scientific research, and a politically wired DC-based PR firm called Policy Impact Communications $47,000 for “policy analysis.”

But the largest single line item for the Center for Plant Science was $174,000, for “strategic consulting” by HPNA Consulting, which shares a post office box with Upstream Consulting.

“I do policy research and farm [other work] out to others,” Haddow explained, adding that he’s operated Health Policy Network Associates for 30 years as a sole proprietorship. He promised to share research papers he had pennedbut later changed his mind, saying they’re confidential.

He did send an email with an outline of HPNA’s duties, with 29 bullet points. The main takeaways: monitor reported kratom deaths, make sellers behave, flood social network and media reports with corrective comments.

See the Center for Plant Science’s 990 tax forms for 2018, 2019 and 2020

The Center for Plant Science’s 2019 revenue topped $1.1 million, and expenditures increased. Candland earned $123,000 to manage the operation. Unspecified legal expenses came in over $305,000. Travel cost $203,000. Advertising and promotion cost $44,000 and public relations another $52,000 in 2019 — notwithstanding the organization’s low profile. The document does not divulge who was paid for those services.

Pinney Associates received $146,000 from the center in 2019. But in 2020, a new entity appeared on the center’s tax return: B&C Strategies, paid $237,500.

The AKA also paid B&C Strategies $137,000, in 2019, according to its tax return.

Like Haddow’s HPNA, B&C Strategies is not incorporated. But it shares an address with Utah state Senator Curtis Bramble, R-Provo, who helped shepherd the AKA’s model legislation into law in the Beehive State.

“I have been doing international business consulting for better than 30 years,” Bramble said in a phone interview, explaining the kratom industry payments as routine. 

Bramble, who has served in the Utah Senate since 2001, sponsored the Kratom Consumer Protection Act and helped Utah become the first state to pass the industry’s bill. “I didn’t know what kratom was until I was asked at a national meeting if I knew anything about it.” he said as he introduced the bill in January 2019.

He called the industry-written law’s requirements for an age limit on purchasers and routine product testing by independent labs “common sense.”

“It wasn’t illegal. Let’s at least establish a baseline” for safe consumption, Bramble said.

After Bramble helped pass the law, Haddow asked him to help strategize for the industry on international business practices. “I wanted to see firsthand the supply chain, in terms of due diligence. See how the product was harvested and processed,” Bramble said, adding his travel on behalf of the kratom industry has taken him “to Indonesia twice…Borneo… we’ve had discussions in Europe. Mexico.” 

Bramble, who operates a solo accounting firm,called the $374,500 in kratom consulting fees a “small, small part” of his income. 

Utah’s ethics law forbids legislators from “any employment or other activity that would destroy or impair their independence of judgment,” “to lobby, consult, or to further the interests of any legislation or legislative matter,” or to “use their official position to secure privileges for themselves.”

When put to her as a hypothetical, Kim Bouck, executive director of the Legislative Ethics Commission, said Bramble’s behavior might run afoul of the law. But the commission cannot take any action unless two citizens file a complaint, at which point the commission would review the evidence, investigate further if needed and give a recommendation to the Legislature.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor and ethics expert at The Washington University in St. Louis, expressed surprise that Utah law does not require Bramble to publicly disclose the kratom payments.

“Those payments may influence him and the public ought to have access to that information,” she said. “If he has complied with Utah law then Utah needs to tighten up its ethics disclosures, because this law is inadequate.” 

She added: “Ethics goes way beyond bribes, and it goes to payments that a reasonable person could think could influence a legislator.” 

But Bramble called his consulting work business as usual. “The world’s a very small place,” he said. “I’ve had clients in China — a dozen at times — some of them on legislative tours, some on consulting.” 

The money keeps rolling in for Haddow too. The Center for Plant Science paid HPNA $694,000, bringing Haddow’s reported gross income over four years from the two related nonprofits to more than $1.4 million. Haddow said he can’t confirm that figure because some of the money may have been paid to other vendors.

“I don’t know what to say,” Ash said when Haddow’s compensation was read to her. “It literally took the wind out of me.”

This past November, Haddow filed to change the nonprofit’s name to American Kratom Foundation. On Dec. 6, he said the name will change again soon as it’s in conflict with a website called “Kratom Foundation.” The company behind that, he says, is Premier Manufacturing — company that unsuccessfully fought the FDA’s seizure of its kratom in Florida. An email sent to Premier bounced back as undeliverable.

Ash says her public ouster from AKA left such a bitter taste that she stopped using the natural product she credited with saving her life. “This has had such a negative impact on my life I don’t even take kratom anymore,” she said. “I can’t even smell kratom without having PTSD.”

She still believes kratom should remain legal but thinks the AKA’s model state legislation is toothless. It lacks an enforcement mechanism, leaving most states that adopt it — like Utah — in a similar predicament as the FDA.

The American Kratom Association, founded to represent kratom consumers exclusively, now seems geared to the interest of the biggest industry players. And until recently, when she cut all ties, Ash’s email inbox was constantly flooded with AKA’s urgent requests for money.

“During Covid they became very greedy. It appears that all they were doing was sending out these crazy fundraising pleas all the time, saying kratom was going to be banned in a month if they don’t donate right now,” Ash said. “The thing that concerns me is there are a huge number of people who take Mac Haddow’s word as gold.”

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