A bill that would regulate the psychoactive herb known as kratom vetoed last year by Gov. Dan McKee returned to the Rhode Island State House Tuesday night.
And things are different this time around, the lawmakers sponsoring the kratom legislation in the Rhode Island House and Senate assured colleagues in a pair of concurrent committee meetings. Last year’s version went six pages. The new iteration is 25 pages.
“The governor did not love it,” Senate President Pro Tempore Hanna Gallo, a Cranston Democrat, said of the 2024 bill she sponsored and McKee later vetoed. “So we have worked for a whole year. The Rhode Island Kratom Act is the result of a year-long compromise developed in collaboration with the administration to replace prohibition with sensible regulations.”
Gallo returned as lead sponsor on this year’s bill, The Rhode Island Kratom Act, which was heard by the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services Tuesday. The House companion is sponsored by Rep. Brian Patrick Kennedy, a Westerly Democrat, and was heard by the House Committee on Corporations.
Kratom is a plant-derived drug with dose-dependent effects that can range from stimulating to sedating to euphoric. Thanks to its activity at the brain’s opioid receptors, people who are attempting to stop using or recovering from opioids sometimes use kratom as a replacement therapy.
As of February 2024, Rhode Island is one of six states plus the District of Columbia that officially ban kratom. But it remains in legal limbo in many other states that don’t regulate it at all, allowing gray markets to dominate consumer supply — one reason why advocates want strict regulations in place.
Regulation advocates argue the danger of the kratom market lies in wildly potent formulations that are synthesized beyond naturally occurring limits in kratom-containing plants. Although the plant contains at least 45 alkaloids, or nitrogen-based chemical compounds, responsible for its psychoactive effects, most legislation aims to control two active ingredients in kratom products, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH).
Last year, a last-minute advocacy push generated enough support in both the Rhode Island House and Senate for bills posed as consumer protection legislation and based on similar, successful legislation passed in multiple states. Both the House and Senate bills passed on the final night of the legislative session in June, but McKee vetoed the bills about a week later.
Both the House and Senate sponsors pointed to the collaboration that led to this year’s version of the bill.
“I had the opportunity to sit with the governor and some of his staff, and he said, ‘Let’s work on this and try to create a piece of legislation that will work for the state of Rhode Island,’” Kennedy told his fellow state representatives on the House Committee on Corporations.
Kennedy said, adding that multiple state departments, including taxation and health officials, had also offered input on the bill. McKee wrote in his veto letter last year that one of his reasons he defeated the bill was that several state agencies requested a veto because of the bill’s lack of clarity on regulatory power. Which departments would be responsible for what?
Olivia DaRocha, a spokesperson for McKee’s office, offered a more neutral assessment when asked for comment Tuesday ahead of the bill hearings.
“The Governor will review the bill in its final form if it reaches his desk,” DaRocha wrote.
Mac Haddow, who spoke on behalf of the American Kratom Association, offered senators yet another interpretation: “The governor has indicated that the bill that’s before you today is acceptable to him, and if it passes the legislature, he will sign it.”
Haddow is not one of the two lobbyists listed in the Secretary of State’s portal who are paid $4,500 an hour to rally on behalf of the kratom association. Instead, Haddow serves as the organization’s senior fellow on public policy, and his name appears on testimony documents from legislatures across the country, like Kansas, North Dakota and Pennsylvania.
But kratom advocacy exceeds U.S. borders — Matthew Lowe, the executive director of the Global Kratom Coalition, is based in South Africa, for instance.
“I will say that the bill is complicated. It goes really far, 22 pages,” Lowe said in a phone interview ahead of Tuesday’s hearings.
Lowe didn’t attend the hearings, but previewed many of the arguments made by proponents in committee hearings, including a 2024 Food and Drug Administration preliminary study of 40 people that found kratom to be tolerated well at most doses, though mild nausea was observed around 12 grams, a very high dose. With new research reinforcing the relative safety of the drug, Lowe argued, now’s the time to legalize and regulate, rather than leave kratom confined to black or gray markets where consumers buy products of questionable purity.
That’s why the Kratom Consumer Protection Act has passed in multiple state legislatures, Lowe said: “I think it’s even less about the advocacy and more about the science. I think the science is developing,” Lowe added.
What about kratom cocktails?
Representing the Global Kratom Coalition’s interests at Tuesday’s hearings was Legislative Director Walker Gallman, who relayed that the revised bill is good, but still needs tweaking. Bill sponsor Kennedy, however, didn’t want to humor one of Gallman’s suggestions that would enable the sale of products that mix kratom with other substances.
Kennedy asked Gallman if the industry sought to enable beverages that mix kratom with kava, another plant-based drug used as a mild tranquilizer.
“That would be one of the products, yes. There are others,” Gallman said, noting that one of the coalition’s manufacturers makes a kratom-kava drink that has “safety studies.”
Kennedy said his bill was crafted with the state health department, and he’d prefer to keep its suggested language intact. Kratom cocktails would have to wait for future legislation, Kennedy said.
Both bills were held for further study. Both bills also received testimony from Kirsten Smith, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, who testified in support of the bill.
“I have no life,” Smith told the House committee of her kratom research. “All I do is study this”
Smith agreed with Kennedy on one count. “I don’t think we should be mixing psychoactive products,” she said.
But, she also told the House committee, “There are real humans who use this very responsibly and depend on it for their longterm recovery.”
The limits of willow bark
Smith encountered more resistance in the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services. Four of the committee’s members voted against the old version of the bill on the Senate floor last June. One was Sen. Pam Lauria, a Barrington Democrat and primary care nurse practitioner who grilled Smith about pharmacology — specifically, about kratom’s binding affinity, which describes how strongly substances interact with receptors in the body.
“It does connect to the opioid receptor sites. Aside from how you theorize how it reacts there, it does,” Lauria said, adding that this needs to inform attempts about kratom’s interactions with other drugs.
“It’s not an opioid. There are at least five mechanisms that are not opioid-related, that you can’t just put it in the opioid bucket,” Smith argued. “That’s not to say that the binding affinity isn’t there. It is. But that doesn’t mean it’s as a whole an opioid.”
But Smith conceded that people are going to mix drugs regardless: “If they’re going to do some polysubstance use, which is beyond our control, I would much prefer them to be informed consumers, as opposed to taking some random thing.”
Lauria had more questions for Jeffrey Bratberg, a clinical professor of pharmacy at the University of Rhode Island who spoke on behalf of the Rhode Island Pharmacists Association. Alluding to proponents’ arguments that kratom is natural, Lauria nudged Bratberg to list some other substances that come from plants. Cocaine and opium, Bratberg replied.
“We don’t use willow bark to treat pain. That’s what aspirin is derived from,” Bratberg noted.
Existing medications like buprenorphine work as opioid replacements because they have been synthesized expressly for that purpose, Bratberg said. He concluded with an anecdote about artemisinin, an antimalarial drug that existed in raw plant form for thousands of years in Chinese medicine. It didn’t reach its true potential until being chemically extracted in 1972.
“Purification matters,” Bratberg said.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
