Miracle drug, or gas station opioid? Utah lawmakers take on kratom

In 2018, beset with health problems following the birth of her second child and finding surgeries and medication offered little relief, Britaney Crump tried taking kratom — and the relief was almost instant.

“She felt like she’d finally found something that would relieve her pain and calm her nerves. And for the first time in many years, she started to feel somewhat normal,” her husband, Lance Crump, said in an interview. “It was really, to her, kind of a miracle drug.”

But as time passed, Lance said, his wife developed a tolerance to kratom and would experience symptoms of withdrawal — mind fog, erratic sleep and eventually building into stomach pain.

Complaining of intense stomach cramps two days after Thanksgiving, Lance and their son were helping Britaney to the car to go to the emergency room when she stopped breathing. A paramedic neighbor tried CPR until the ambulance arrived.

Britaney is one of more than 40 Utahns who died of a kratom overdose that year, according to state figures.

Lance said he felt like he owed it to her to warn others and speak in favor of a bill before the Utah Legislature that would ban kratom entirely.

“I’ve experienced it with someone to the extreme,” he told lawmakers during a committee hearing discussing the proposed ban. “I would try to encourage [people], ‘Hey, there’s got to be a better way.’”

But following his pleas to the members of the Senate Business and Labor Committee, more than a dozen people lined up to say the same plant that Lance Crump says took his wife’s life has saved theirs.

“Today, I feel like my life is on trial,” Layton resident Laura Romney told the committee. As a trigeminal neuralgia patient, she said, “I spent six years rocking in bed in severe pain, and to see that this could be taken away from me is just devastating.”

Others described it as a powerful harm reduction tool that had helped them break alcohol and opioid addictions and as an important tool in improving their mental health.

The hearing on the proposed ban — Senate Majority Whip Mike McKell’s SB45 — stretched for nearly two hours, and after hearing from the public, some members of the committee expressed concerns about sending the bill to the floor. Lawmakers passed it through the committee nonetheless, and it is now working its way through the full Senate.

It’s one of several bills the Legislature is considering this year that would impact kratom’s use and distribution in Utah.

Sen. Evan Vickers’ SB42 targets synthetic and concentrated versions of kratom that contain high levels of its psychoactive ingredient — 7-hydroxymitragynine, known as 7-OH. His bill has passed the Senate.

A third bill, HB387, sponsored by House Minority Whip Jennifer Dailey-Provost, would require kratom processors and retailers to register with the state, ban the sale of certain kratom products and raise the age to purchase kratom from 18 to 21.

McKell, R-Spanish Fork, says he and Vickers are working together on the issue to find an acceptable solution.

In a House Business, Labor, and Commerce Committee meeting Monday, Dailey-Provost advocated for her bill as a backstop for regulating kratom should McKell’s proposed ban fail or if future federal regulations overruled the state ban.

“If it were to pass and we found ourselves in a place where we could not enforce our own policy, we would be left with what we have now, and that’s a regulatory vacuum,” the Democrat told the committee. “That is what is unacceptable.”

Vickers, too, joined the meeting to advocate for Dailey-Provost’s regulatory structure, but told the committee that lawmakers ultimately have a choice to make — to ban or regulate kratom.

The committee ultimately moved to pass Dailey-Provost’s bill out of committee, sending it with a favorable recommendation to the House floor.

‘Regulated as a prescription drug’

Kratom is extracted from a type of evergreen tree that grows in Southeast Asia. For centuries, the leaves have been ground and often made into tea.

It works similarly to an opioid, acting on the same receptors without the same level of respiratory depression, said Dr. David Kroll, a professor of pharmacology at Colorado University, who began studying kratom about a decade ago.

While working in North Carolina, he heard of people who saw benefits using kratom to help them wean off opioids and alcohol or treating post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms — especially at a time when the government was trying to limit use of hydrocodone and other pain medicines.

But over time, people build up a tolerance and have to take more, he said. An overdose from kratom powder is unlikely due to the volume one would have to consume, but producers have begun making highly concentrated products and selling them in bottles like energy shots, sometimes in gas stations.

“Now I’m even seeing other mitragynine relatives being synthesized that are even more potent than 7-OH [and] you run a lot higher risk of essentially an opioid overdose that causes you to stop breathing,” Kroll said.

The risk of a fatal event can rise sharply when kratom is combined with another depressant, even an antihistamine.

“In the ideal world, kratom would not be on the market as a consumer product. It would be regulated as a prescription drug,” Kroll said.

While Kroll says he used to be more dogmatic, he has developed more compassion for people using kratom, especially in its powder form. He remains opposed to the purified or concentrated forms, which he says are dangerous.

According to data from the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner, until 2017, kratom-related deaths were rare — fewer than five a year. Then in 2018, 16 people died. From 2018 to 2025, more than 200 Utahns have died from kratom-related drug overdoses and more than 100 in the last three years alone (although the final figures for 2025 are not available).

Overwhelmingly, those deaths are accidental and involve at least one other substance, according to the medical examiner’s data, according to Megan Broekemeier, Utah’s forensic epidemiologist.

“The most common drugs during this five-year period that were found in combination with kratom were fentanyl, gabapentin, ethanol or alcohol, methamphetamine and amphetamine,” she said during the hearing on McKell’s bill.

The individuals who died from kratom-involved overdoses were, on average, six years younger than other overdose deaths and men are even more likely to die of kratom-involved overdoses than those stemming from other substances.

‘The birthplace of the Kratom Protection Act’

All three of the bills would be a significant departure from the Kratom Consumer Protection Act, passed by the Legislature in 2019, which made kratom legal for adults with some exceptions. McKell, at the time a member of the House, voted in favor of its passage.

“Look, there are some votes that I’ve made that I wish I hadn’t, and that’s a vote that I made I wish I hadn’t,” McKell said. “I wish Utah was not kind of the birthplace of the Kratom Protection Act. It is, and I think it’s time to change it.”

During a committee hearing where McKell’s proposed ban was considered, Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, pointed to the Rhode Island ban as part of the reason he ultimately voted against McKell’s bill.

“It’s my understanding that Rhode Island brought it back because people were buying kratom on the black market,” Weiler said, adding that the ban “created more chaos and that he’s supportive of more regulation.

Regulation was the goal in 2019 when Utah became the first state to pass a law addressing the preparation, labeling and marketing of kratom. It was sponsored by Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, in response to reports of adverse effects from kratom use, including lawsuits from families who alleged it was responsible for their loved ones’ deaths.

After the bill passed, the American Kratom Association paid Bramble consulting fees, starting with $137,500 in 2019. The following year, The Center For Plant Science and Health — with many of the same executives as the American Kratom Association — began making consulting payments to Bramble & Company, the lawmaker’s consulting firm, according to tax filings by the two organizations.

All told, the two organizations paid nearly $1.4 million to Bramble’s company over five years.

The Utah bill became the industry’s model legislation, and over the ensuing years, while he was still a state senator, Bramble testified in support of kratom legislation in Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas, Wisconsin and Colorado. He was not identified in any of the legislative records as a representative of the industry, and, under Utah law, did not have to disclose the consulting payments to his business.

Bramble did not response to a request to comment.

Recently, as McKell has noted, the U.S.Navy banned service members from using any products containing kratom. The Army and Air Force had already done so.

And last summer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced restrictions on kratom-related products, with a focus on cracking down on 7-OH.

But industry leaders in Utah say a ban would devastate their businesses — and their clients.

Empowering bad actors?

Joel Badger, the owner of Grow Kratom, a kratom company and store in Salt Lake City, said. “It would hurt a lot of veterans. … It would hurt a lot of people with chronic pain. It would affect a lot of jobs.”

And not just the jobs of the Utahns who work in his store, Badger said, but also the jobs of the people throughout his entire supply chain.

Ryan Niddel, the CEO of kratom company Diversified Botanics, expressed similar concerns.

“We’ve got about 100 full-time employees. We’ve got 150,000 square feet in Draper,” he said during an interview. “We would, unfortunately, have to furlough our staff. We’d have to move home headquarters to a state with no potentiality for banning [kratom].”

Both Badger and Niddel said they are in favor of regulations — including banning 7-OH and some of the other proposals Vickers and Dailey-Provost have put forward — but a ban, they said, could further empower bad actors in the industry.

“Right now, anyone can go online and buy kratom from one of the thousand companies online,” Badger said. “They’ve got to do some enforcement.”

Niddel agreed.

“I’m not saying the kratom should just be sold everywhere and should be available to every person,” the kratom executive said.

He thinks people should be at least 21 years old and have identification, that serving sizes should be standardized and kratom should come in child-proof lids and be sold behind a counter. Niddel also thinks people need better kratom education, including warnings about not mixing it with other substances without consulting a health professional — and that that education needs to extend to the lawmakers pushing for a ban.

He has hoped, he said, to meet with McKell and talk to him about the legislation, but said he’s never heard back from the lawmaker.

“I say this with respect for him,” Niddel said of McKell, “he’s theatrical. … He knows how to sell the story. He knows the buttons to press. I have so much respect for that level of acumen in that environment, but he’s missing the whole context of how the industry works.”

Badger, for his part, said he actually voted for McKell, who represents the area where he grew up in Utah County.

“He’s my representative,” he said. “I don’t think a lot of his constituents appreciate how he has treated [kratom]. … I think there needs to be more diligence done, talking to both sides. He represents all of his constituents, and the fear mongering, it just doesn’t help.”

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