Mike Lee

On a Sunday night in August 2020, my son Joe sat down in his recliner to watch TV, fell asleep and never woke up. He was 38. He was my only child, and he left behind three boys who still ask about their dad.

The medical examiner found one thing in his body: mitragynine, the main substance in kratom. Joe had been buying it at convenience stores for three years because someone told him it was natural and safe. It is sold next to the energy drinks. Nothing on the package told him it works on the same receptors in the brain as heroin and morphine, or that people who try to quit go through opioid withdrawal.

I have spent six years since then trying to get someone in Washington to take that seriously. Last week, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, did.

He joined Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, in a letter to the DEA and FDA urging them to finish the emergency scheduling of a kratom compound called 7-OH and to begin permanently scheduling the whole kratom plant and the semi-synthetic compounds now being sold under its name. They gave the agencies a deadline to respond in writing.

The letter put into plain words what families like mine have been saying at city councils and statehouses for years. The senators wrote that they “worry the availability of these products is providing consumers with a false sense of security because they are readily available and marketed as ‘natural.’” They could have been describing my son.

They backed it with numbers. Poison control centers took 3,434 kratom calls in 2025, a record and roughly 1,200% more than a decade ago. Emergency crews recorded 3,672 suspected nonfatal kratom overdoses across 38 states in just over three years. The FDA has told consumers not to use kratom at all. And the DEA has found that some semi-synthetic compounds now being sold in kratom-labeled products are more potent than morphine.

Utah has been ahead of the country on this for a long time. It was the first state to pass a Kratom Consumer Protection Act, back in 2019, and this year the Legislature tightened it again, limiting what can be sold and where. Still, the Utah Poison Control Center says its kratom calls have doubled, and Utah families have buried sons and daughters just like I did. State lines don’t stop a product that ships nationwide.

That is why Lee’s letter matters. He is taking the lead Utah built at home and asking the federal government to finish the job. The kratom industry has an incredibly powerful lobbying operation, and it fights hard against anyone who stands up to it. Lee signed anyway.

Lee sees kratom for what it is: a drug marketed as a wellness product, sold to young men who want a little more energy for work, and taking fathers away from their children.

I hope Utahns will thank him. And I hope they will keep an eye on what the DEA and FDA do next. A letter is a start. The agencies still have to act, and that will take pressure from families, from the bishops and Relief Society presidents who are counseling the ones left behind, and from anyone who believes a store should not be able to sell a gas station opioid as a health drink.

While Washington works, there is something you can do today. I started a petition on Change.org asking 7-Eleven, one of the largest convenience chains in the country, to pull kratom and 7-OH products from its shelves before a law makes it. A store can do the right thing without waiting.

I can’t bring Joe back. His boys will grow up without him. But for the first time in a long time, I feel like someone in Washington is standing with me.