Chris Bell reveals how Kratom—a Southeast Asian plant with opioid-like properties but no confirmed overdose deaths—helped him escape six years of prescription pill dependency, including OxyContin and Vicodin. Unlike synthetic opioids, Kratom’s alkaloids bind loosely to receptors, offering pain relief and mood elevation akin to caffeine without severe impairment or withdrawal risks. He argues the DEA’s push to ban it stems from Big Pharma’s threatened profits, not science, citing DSHEA’s 1994 protections for supplements like Kratom already on the market. Bell’s documentary, A Leaf of Faith, slated for early 2025, aims to expose regulatory bias, backed by figures like Orrin Hatch and Bernie Sanders, while urging public comments at KratomComments.org by December 1st to prevent its criminalization. His case underscores how plant-based alternatives could reshape addiction treatment—if allowed. [Automatically generated summary]
No one's ever done any studies on it being a drug, and no one's ever done any studies on it being a drug.
Well, there's been actually a lot of studies on it being a supplement, but they aren't like these FDA-approved double-blind placebo studies that they're requiring for it to be on the market as a normal supplement.
I think a lot of times like what happened with me is I came out of anesthesia from a surgery and I was all doped up on the drugs and I didn't even know it.
So it just kind of like just kept going.
You know what I mean?
Like I never I never stopped getting high from the time I was in the hospital for like six years, you know?
So for me, it was like, you know, opiates were a real big problem.
They were ruining my life.
They were destroying me.
Now that I got sober two and a half years ago and I started taking Kratom, I feel great.
Like everything in my entire career is going, you know, skyrocketing.
Things are going great.
My relationship with my girlfriend's great.
Just everything's been good.
So I can't really see the bad in it.
So when they decided to make this a Schedule I drug, we decided to make a documentary about it and show the world what it really is.
Well, I felt like it was probably just a good way that people could relieve pain naturally, but I felt like if someone was going to describe it to me, I thought they were going to tell me about an opiate type of effect, that it just mellows you out, but it doesn't...
Yeah, and they have to do stuff to it to make it heroin.
They have to do stuff with coca leaves to make cocaine.
Marijuana and kratom are probably the two most similar drugs.
And when I went to interview Senator Mark Pocan last week, he was the one that wrote a letter to the government.
He wants to keep Kratom legal.
He thinks that it should be allowed for everyone.
And I said to him, what do you think about marijuana?
And he was like, I just think it should all be legal.
And it was the first time I was ever in the presence of somebody that works for the government saying that they think that weed and kratom and all this stuff should be legal.
And it's because he had.
He had a good head on his shoulders about the problems that people face every day.
You know, it's not black and white.
Like, I live in this gray area.
I don't, I'm in a lot of pain, but I don't want to take opiates.
LD50, we should probably explain to people, lethal dose at 50%, meaning if you take 50 rats and you give them a pound of this shit, 50 of them or, you know, 25 of them will die at a certain level.
There have been zero deaths, and there have actually been 15 deaths that have been brought to the FDA and the DEA's attention.
Those 15 deaths, I actually went and interviewed one of the mothers.
The kid was on three psych meds.
He was on or withdrawing from three different psych meds that have a black box warning that says, warning, if you're a teenager, you might commit suicide.
Basically.
And this kid committed suicide.
He didn't die from a Kratom overdose.
He died from committing suicide.
And his mother wants to blame Kratom.
She doesn't think that the psych meds had anything to do with it.
And I don't want to say that Kratom had nothing to do with it.
We don't really know.
And what I really call for with Kratom is just more research.
Like, I want people to put in the money to do the research to make sure that this is safe and Let's see if we can solve this opiate epidemic.
Let's see if we can crack down, basically lower the amount of opiate prescriptions we have in this country.
I just read an article the other day.
One in seven people in America are going to be affected with addiction problems.
Now, I can understand this woman whose son died being, I can understand her remorse and looking to point the blame at someone, and a lot of times people are reluctant to point the blame towards something that a doctor prescribed, and they'll automatically say, well, it probably wasn't that, it was probably this other thing that's not regulated.
She said, Chris, I'm gonna pray for you because I know you're taking Kratom, and I'm gonna pray for you that you're okay.
And I was like, you know, lady, you don't need to pray for me.
Like, I've been taking it for a year, you know?
And I think that people just get it wrong.
And I feel bad for her.
I feel bad for her in the fact that she can't just realize that, you know, she can't look at the research and see Because when I went and interviewed her, she said, well, I'm not even sure if Kratom killed him.
And this is after a gigantic – they mount this gigantic media coverage of this story, right?
Like this was all over.
And now like two years later after the damage has been done, she's kind of coming back and saying, well, I don't know if it was Kratom.
But she already did the damage.
These deaths are the reason why the DEA wants to ban it.
He's the spokesman for the DEA. And when I talked to Melvin Patterson, what he told me is that they lean on the FDA a lot for these kind of decisions, right?
So they go to the FDA and they ask the FDA, can you give us an eight-point – it's like some sort of – It's like an eight-point inspection to make sure that this drug is not dangerous.
And if it is dangerous, it's deemed dangerous, they'll take it off the market based on the FDA's research.
So the DEA had asked the FDA for that eight-point inspection.
The FDA never went ahead and did it.
So the DEA got upset and said, well, we're going to ban it anyway because we're waiting on you guys.
And then there was a big uproar.
There was 100,000 people Signed a petition, you know, partly due to you tweeting about it and things like that.
It was a guy, Andrew Turner.
He tweeted you.
He was an Iraq war vet.
And you should see his video.
He can't even speak without Kratom.
He cannot talk normal without Kratom.
He speaks with all these ticks and twitches in his face due to, they think, maybe PTSD and some other problems that had affected him.
And now he takes Kratom and those twitches all go away.
He did a video on YouTube That was kind of amazing.
He stopped taking it for six days and you can see all these twitches are evident and then he goes back on the kratom and they all disappear.
And why Schedule I? There's a couple of patents that are on the alkaloids that are in the plant.
So I think that Big Pharma would be the first place to look.
They have a couple of patents.
They want to basically take this I don't look at it as being that bad, but why make the organic kratom illegal in order to turn this into a more powerful drug?
They think that they can extract some of these alkaloids, right?
There's two alkaloids, metagenine and the other one is like 7-hydroxymetagenine.
It's like too technical for anybody to really care about, but there's two alkaloids that they really care about.
That help with opiate withdrawals and help with pain.
And those are the two.
And they actually just want to ban the two alkaloids, but you can't do that because it's in the plant.
So you have to ban the whole plant.
And to me, you know, you said it the best.
You said making something else illegal is like archaic.
It doesn't make any sense.
What are you going to do to the people?
You know, five states just legalized marijuana.
Now you're going to throw people in jail for kratom.
And the marijuana legalization, we've been reading a lot about that, and it's going to be what a lot of people think might be a mess because making it recreational opens it up to Marlboro and all these other companies that make tobacco products to now start selling cannabis and turning it into what we already have.
Well, I'm not opposed to them making it Commercial because I feel like the more people do it the better.
We're all gonna be sure I really I really believe that I mean people say oh you're a pothead thing like that, bro But I really think it's a it I think I mean you can call it a drug But whatever it is it is a component of life that makes people calmer makes people happier makes people more sensitive I just think it's better for people I was 100% against it ever since I was in college.
We lose a person to addiction every 19 minutes in this country.
Accidental overdoses.
I think I've said that stat several times on your show, and it's just, you can't say it enough.
You know, we have this giant opiate epidemic, and we have something here.
You know, in our film, we're starting to make a documentary about this, and in the film, you know, we show a guy who has a, not a huge habit, but six Vicodin a day habit and he cuts that down to zero using Kratom and we watch that you know that process because I feel like that's important to show that like hey you can actually do this now if we have people that are really really addicted to heroin and really really addicted to these other drugs they might need something like Suboxone and then Kratom you know like we don't really We don't really know.
My friend Kelly Dunn, who owns the company Urban Ice that we were just talking to, he actually bought a farm up in Washington, and it's his intent.
If people don't have money to go to rehab or do whatever, they can come up and visit him and get Kratom.
He's actually a licensed therapist and all that stuff like that.
So I feel like...
It's sort of this grassroots movement to try to get people to even try Kratom.
That's what I've been trying to do is get people like, hey, just try it.
Like you said, with marijuana, the more people that try it, the better off we'll be.
My first experience was, um, so my friend Kelly was very serious about this and he wants to help a lot of people.
He said, I'll fly to Sacramento.
I was living up by my brother at the time.
So he flew out to Sacramento to see me.
He gave me some kratom.
He went to his hotel.
I went to my house.
I had just been filming with my brother for like five hours straight and my arthritis was like at its worst point, like the worst it could possibly be.
You know, I want to hear something really interesting.
I was supposed to speak at an AA meeting the other day, and I got a phone call from somebody at the AA. If I took some right now, how much should I take?
But, you know, like, I was supposed to speak at an AA meeting, and I got a phone call from a good friend of mine, and she said, well, I'm confused now because I'm not sure if you're sober.
So is that maybe the same sort of concern that led the DEA to take a close look at this?
Because, I mean, if you look at it, I mean, everyone wants to worry that the DEA is in bed with big pharma and it's all about business and they're here to screw over the American people and keep these legal, natural things away from us.
But I had the same sort of reservations.
I mean, I didn't know until you came in here today, I didn't know that you could operate cars on it and doesn't fuck with you and that you take it before a drive.
I don't think I don't want to say, oh, everybody should take Kratom and everybody, you know, but I feel like I feel like I know that it's safe enough to try.
For example, I know it's safe enough for anybody to try.
So I've seen it.
I've seen it in, you know, thousands of people that are that are using it.
I get emails every day from people that take Kratom because we're doing a documentary.
And you know, as well, you know, when you're I feel that media has the power to change the world.
I feel like what you do, what I do, we actually have a voice and we have a power that can change people's minds.
My film, Bigger, Stronger, Faster, completely changed people's minds on steroids.
I don't even know what those things do, but I know we, like, as soon as Kratom was banned, we were on the internet looking for, like, well, what else is like it because I don't want to have to deal without it.
Well, I think it was you that tweeted something, and I might have retweeted or just read it, but you tweeted something about someone getting arrested Some big drug bust where they busted him for Kratom, which wasn't even illegal.
That was a guy, I think maybe because that guy's neighbors had it out for him.
They sort of had it out for him, and they saw these big green bags of what they thought was drugs at his house, and the cops went to raid it, and they were like, well, we're not sure what this is, so we're going to have to arrest you.
You know, the thing was when they made it illegal, I had two giant boxes of Kratom sitting in my garage and all I could think about was like, okay, the cops are going to come here and they're going to bust me because they know I'm doing a documentary about it.
But I decided that like, no matter what happened, I was going to keep those boxes in my garage and I wasn't going to worry about it because I figured like, what are they going to do?
Well, we're definitely more aware of that kind of greed and those kind of compromises where these companies compromise various branches of the government for their own personal interest.
And this Kratom is a perfect example of that because so many people, including me, know almost nothing about it.
This is a weird one.
You know, this is one where they almost got in Like, before people could understand what exactly it was, which is rare in 2016. There's something like that available.
The DEA has never seen, you know, a reply like this.
There was 100,000 people that signed, you know, a petition.
But one thing that I need to get out there to everybody, the one way we can keep this legal...
And keep other things legal as well, is everybody needs to go to a website that the DEA has set up.
It's called KratomComments.org.
So just K-R-A-T-O-M Comments.org.
You can go there and you can leave, you know, up to a 5,000 word message, you know, about Kratom.
And it doesn't have to be from somebody who takes it.
Like you could just be like, hey, I think this should, I watched this podcast and I really feel this needs to be researched more.
And, you know, whatever, whatever you feel, Needs to be said you can just say here so you know like I went on and I left a comment About why I use it and what I like about it And I feel like everybody that does needs to do that or they're not doing their job And what is that put that back up again Jamie please it says December 21st December 1st deadline submit your comments now.
It's like the most entertaining video I've ever seen, so even if it's not real, I love it, but I think it was a drug that they were selling in hedge shops down in Florida and it got banned within like, I don't know, a couple months of it being on the market.
All I'm saying is that when we sell things, you know, things that they sell in head shops, like they sold Spice.
Remember Spice was a synthetic marijuana.
And the problem with it is that a lot of times they're unregulated.
That spice just came on the market.
There was no regulation.
They were selling it in head shops.
They were getting away from it.
I think everybody puts this stuff on the market to get away with it.
But when Kratom was put on the market, it wasn't put on the market to get away with it.
The problem is there's a law in America called the DeShay Act.
Have you heard of that?
No.
DeShay is basically the Dietary Supplement Health Something Act, right?
I forget.
But basically what it does is anything that was on the market before 1994 gets grandfathered in and is a legal supplement.
So like even if they didn't do the research on it or whatever, before 1994 – and that's something that Orrin Hatch put in place to kind of keep the supplement industry – help the supplement companies.
It doesn't help us as a consumer because we don't know what we're getting because there's no regulation.
But I feel like that the Shea Act says if there was a supplement on the market before 1994, that it needs to stay legal.
And Kratom has been sold in Florida.
They've been selling it for 30 years.
You know, they've been selling it before 1994. So I actually went to the Freedom of Information Act and we summoned the records for importation of kratom.
Now, if we can prove that kratom has been imported to the United States before 1994, we have a pretty solid case to say, you know, look, this gets grandfathered in just like everything else.
I mean, I'm sure they're going to make it harder than that.
You know, I'm sure like if we have the proof, but I'm just going out at full blast.
You know, I feel like if you go at something with everything you got and you look down every avenue, you're going to find something, you know, it's kind of like a, I feel like a lawyer right now.
It's very unusual that there's something that's this well loved by the people that are taking it, but so little is known about it by most people, including me.
I take it usually every day, but I can give you some anecdotal evidence that I went to Thailand for two weeks a couple months ago, and I had been taking Kratom for four months straight.
Then I had two weeks in Thailand.
We were actually shooting a kickboxer movie.
And after I got back from Thailand, I wasn't jonesing for Kratom.
I didn't take it for two weeks because it's illegal there.
Well, not only that, if anybody would have an interest in not promoting something that's addictive, it would be a guy like you who has an intimate knowledge of what it's like to be addictive and under the spell.
You know, when you think about it, like in Prescription Thugs, you're making this documentary on pill addiction, and then you get hurt during the middle of it, start taking pills, and become addicted to pills during the middle of a documentary on pill addiction.
I hope not, because actually the next documentary is about cancer.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
Well, the reason I'm doing that, the reason I do all my documentaries is because, like I said, we have the power to change the way people think and we have the power to open up people's minds about things that they might not know about.
You're very good at exploring things in a very objective way, in a very honest way.
And I think that...
That's so important in today's day and age because it's so hard to know why a person's promoting something in one way or not promoting something in another way.
Well, it's interesting as life goes on and, you know, you change and evolve and, you know, your motivations change.
But I recommend your movies to a lot of people, man, particularly the prescription thugs because of this.
So many issues have come up over the last, you know, it seems like the last couple decades in this country are just unprecedented numbers of people that are addicted to pills.
You know, and when I say, so I guess I should mention that what I actually took, I don't even know if it was Kratom.
What I took was a product, and I'll never do this again.
It was like some extract that somebody gave me, and I tried it, and that's what made me sick.
So it could have been way stronger than regular Kratom.
There could have been something else in it.
But that was my first, like, okay, be smart about this.
Look at the packaging.
A big problem with Kratom is most of the Kratom that's on the market, this is the only company in the entire country or world that packages Kratom like a dietary supplement.
Every other supplement, if you look on the back, it'll say right here, not for human consumption.
But they haven't been as popular, so maybe, you know, like, I feel like they're not as popular because they're probably not as good or strong, but I don't know.
Yeah, we've kept trying to isolate, you know, and we've talked to the people that are against it, and there are Congress people that are against it.
There are grieving parents that are against it.
You know, like, nobody in Big Pharma is going to come out and say, hey, we're going to make this a drug and screw all of you.
Like, they're not going to really say that, so it's really...
When you get into Washington, like we were just in Washington for a week and everything's so shady and underhanded in my mind, like all these people are working together.
They're all in cahoots, you know, like everything seemed to be like, I don't know, just the congressman that I talked to, Mark Pocan from Wisconsin, marijuana and Kratom are both illegal there and he's kind of fighting for it to be legal.
And like I said, he's one of the only congresspeople I met that was like, Willing to go to bat for these kind of things.
And I think we need more congresspeople like that that are looking out for the citizens.
You know, everything's about protecting the children and saving the children.
But, you know, none of the people in the Kratom industry have never said, like, hey, let's age restrict this.
Let's make it, you know, 21 and over or 18 and over or 25 and over.
It doesn't, you know, whatever they want to do.
Like, no one's even...
The FDA has never even come and talk.
Like, it's impossible.
And this is the big problem.
It's impossible to talk to the FDA or DEA. I just spoke to the...
Spokesman for the DEA last week, Melvin Patterson.
And I said, hey, Mr. Patterson, I would really like to come down and do an interview with you.
He's like, oh yeah, sorry, we don't do that.
And I want to say, well, you work for me.
We pay their salaries.
I know people hear that all the time.
I think there just needs to be more transparency in the DEA and the FDA. The FDA is like Scientology.
You can't find out anything about it.
When you try to do research on it, you try to find out who's doing what or whatever, there's not a whole lot of transparency.
And that's why documentary filmmakers like me have to use the Freedom of Information Act, where if we request something from the government, You know, they have to give it to us, and that's something that really helps us.
So this is a, I mean, we're talking about what a rabbit hole this is, but this is a weird rabbit hole for you to have started this out as something like you're finding this plant to be beneficial, you see all these people that are benefiting from it, and you're like, hey, this is a great subject, I'm going to let the world know about it.
And then as you're doing it, you start feeling this dark push for it to be Schedule 1 and to start making it legal.
I mean, they've shown marijuana to cure some forms of cancer.
To say there's no medicinal value for it is completely ridiculous.
We need to start dumping our money into researching these plants, Because, like, look, you have these pharma companies, and I don't know if you've seen this show on Discovery where they show you how they come up with new drugs.
They basically take, like, there's a machine, and it's like this fucking robot, and it takes, like, every fucking substance in the world and combines it until, like, it makes millions and millions of different...
Different kind of fucking, like, things, you know?
Different kind of drugs.
And then they start testing it on, like, every different disease to see if it works.
So it's like, it's like shooting in the dark.
It's like, they have no, like, they're like, there's a machine that'll just make a drug, and then they figure out if it works on something.
Rather than, like, we already know that Kratom works for this, this, and this.
And we already know that marijuana works for this, this, and this.
Why not put the money into studying that, rather than shooting in the dark, making some weird, you know...
Well, I'm hoping that as time goes on, we're slowly starting to understand that it is impossible for your doctor to know all the ramifications and repercussions involved in any drug.
I didn't know that either, but I have my buddy Anthony Roberts.
He was like...
When I was doing Bigger, Stronger, Faster, it was this dude that would always hit me up online about stuff, and he kind of knew everything, so I hired him to work on this movie as a researcher and a writer, and he's been teaching me a lot about how to find stuff.
Kratom is the popular name for a tree, and the drug comes from its leaves.
The drug may be bought in leaf form, but in this country is more likely purchased as a capsule with a powdered leaf material or chopped up in the form of a leaf that can be used for a tea or for smoking.
You know what we said about, we were talking, I actually heard your podcast and you brought me up on another one of your podcasts and we were talking about time, the amount of time it takes to get sober.
Yeah, you go to counseling, you go to a therapist, and you talk to them about why you couldn't get off the drugs, and you tell them you're taking this, and you say, hey, let's see if we can solve this problem, you know?
Right.
It's, let's not be stupid about it.
Like I went to the doctor and I got, when I was addicted to opiates and I would drive around my car crying, I would be crying, saying, I just want help.
You know, my brother was dying from this.
I knew he was going to die from it.
I knew it.
So I was driving around.
I would cry.
I'd be like, I need rehab.
I need help.
I don't know what to do.
Every rehab I called was like $4,000, $6,000.
And I didn't have the money at the time.
I was a drug addict.
You know, I was broke.
If I had known about something like this, Back then, it would have completely changed the person I am now.
You know like what's great is I've actually become friends a lot of people in this Kratom community and it's not the kind of people that you would think like I feel like when I went to the Kratom March in Washington, D.C., I didn't know what kind of people I was going to meet, but I met mothers and grandmothers and all these people that were like my mom.
And I wasn't expecting that.
I was expecting to meet a bunch of people like, what's up, dude?