Kratom Crazies: Hero Complex and Media Panic Fuel Poor Legislation

The media loves to manufacture a crisis and many politicians love to play the hero to step in and save the day!

Today’s example of this is the absolute hysteria over an Indonesian leaf called Kratom.

People in Idaho have been using Kratom for years and even decades, often for arthritis and pain management, but also mood enhancement or even opioid withdrawal.

But this 2026 legislative session the hysteria got so intense that a freshman Idaho House member drafted a bill to ban natural leaf Kratom statewide and place it on Idaho’s Schedule One List alongside meth, heroin and fentanyl.

KTVB recently ran this sensational headline calling Kratom “Gas Station Heroin.” ‘Gas station heroin’: Idaho family shares warning after mother’s death linked to potent kratom compound | ktvb.com

The article opens up with a sad story about a 50-year-old woman, Kristy Boswell, who reportedly died after taking Kratom. However, you don’t have to be a member of the Health and Welfare Committee to know that medical issues can be rather complex.

To its credit, the KTVB article states that Ms. Boswell struggled with drug and alcohol addiction during her life. So, it seems logical that her body may have been weakened by those addictions over time.

But what a lot of people get wrong is Ms. Boswell did not, apparently, take Kratom. She took a compound called 7-OH.

Now it is true 7-OH is a compound found in Kratom. Due to our technological skill we are able to isolate the chemical compound in a lab and put it into a pill and sell it.

Here’s a question: did you know you can find cyanide inside apple seeds? It’s true and if you ate enough of them eventually it would make you sick and maybe even die.

But you probably wouldn’t ask your State Representative to draft legislation to ban apples from the grocery store over it.

What was hard for me to understand in the Committee hearing was why the author wouldn’t just propose a ban on 7-OH only. There seems to be widespread agreement on that. But instead of taking the victory and removing 7-OH (gas station heroin) from the shelves, she pushed for an all-out ban on natural leaf kratom as well.

The truth is Kratom has been available to the public for decades. In the Committee hearing and in preparation for the hearing to ban Kratom and 7-OH, we learned many people had taken natural leaf Kratom for up to 20 years with much benefit.

Why would we want to take natural leaf Kratom away from people for whom it is helping?

Further, it is ironic that the people trying to ban Kratom highlight the claim that withdrawal is very dangerous, and yet that is exactly what they will be causing with their ban.

And despite using that claim for political gain, proponents of the ban offered current Kratom users nothing to help them withdrawal, effectively pulling the rug out from under them with little warning.

There was a Senate bill sponsored by Sen. Tammy Nichols that would have put Kratom on a regulatory structure (like most other imported products) where Kratom would be tested before distribution but the legislation was not able to find enough support before the session concluded.

Hopefully next January if the legislature takes up the issue we can tune out the emotional over-reaction and carefully listen to all sides.

By Rep. Rob Beiswenger, Republican, District 8, Member of the House Health and Welfare Committee