Potent, mislabeled and easy to buy: Inside Georgia’s kratom market

On a chilly night this past February, Andrew Wood died alone in his bed after consuming a kratom product purchased legally at a Brunswick vape shop. He was 24.

According to his mother and girlfriend, who found his body, the former Brunswick High School student had been consuming the psychoactive substance for months and thought it was safe.

Derived from a tree native to Southeast Asia, kratom products are sold widely across Georgia as tablets, powders, drinks and concentrated extracts. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved kratom for human consumption, yet supporters of the $1 billion industry tout such products as a natural alternative for pain relief or opioid recovery. “Some use it as a substitute for coffee,” said Jack Kingston, the former U.S. congressman from Savannah who testified before Georgia state lawmakers in 2025 on behalf of the American Kratom Association.

Yet an investigation by The Current GA suggests a more complicated reality. 

Producers have flooded Georgia with synthetic, highly concentrated products derived from kratom that pose more danger than the plant’s natural form. Additionally, labels for dozens of kratom products post misleading information about the potency of the ingredients, and in some cases, conceal the presence of addictive and potentially lethal compounds, according to lab tests analyzed by The Current. 

Despite documenting misleading labeling as far back as 2018, Georgia has not created a regulatory body or funding mechanism for law enforcement agencies to test whether kratom products violate the law — a situation that public health officials and some industry supporters say endangers hundreds of consumers. 

Between 2019 and 2025, Georgia medical examiners detected kratom in the systems of more than 740 victims of accidental overdoses, according to state and federal data. However, public health officials say the actual number is likely much higher because only a handful of Georgia’s 159 counties test for kratom alkaloids in standard toxicology screenings. What’s more, they say, many medical examiners across the state are unfamiliar with the synthetically boosted substances in kratom products that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says are contributing to a third wave of the opioid crisis, let alone with how those substances might interact with common medications such as antihistamines, antidepressants, or alcohol.

“Kratom is an emerging issue that people really don’t know about,” said Heather Trela, the head of operations at The Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government. “It’s really the Wild West out there.”

St. Simons state Rep. Rick Townsend, the main sponsor of Georgia’s current kratom laws, believes that the industry has gotten too big too quickly, but he’s not convinced that all kratom products are harmful. He says he would back tougher regulations that would remove kratom from store shelves and place it behind pharmacy counters. 

Law enforcement officers contacted in Georgia’s six coastal counties confirmed that they are not proactively enforcing existing kratom laws.

Carrie Boswell, the mother of Wood, says she is confident that the bottle of MIT 45 Super K found next to her son’s body played a role in his demise. She does not yet have conclusive answers, however. 

The initial Glynn County coroner report lists his cause of death as “pending.” Although Glynn County police took the kratom bottle as evidence and listed a previous medical emergency involving kratom, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation did not test Wood’s body for kratom when conducting his autopsy. 

Boswell also believes that her son wasn’t trying to harm himself when he drank the product. But that underscores the danger, she said. 

“It’s killing people,” Boswell said. “I don’t think it should be sold at all. Period.”

C.M. “Mac” Haddow, the senior fellow on public policy for the American Kratom Association, says that view is misguided. His organization says there is no credible evidence linking natural kratom to any death. Yet he concedes that the synthetically boosted kratom products, which he says dominate about 50% of the market, do pose a threat to consumers. “Those are products that should be banned,” said Haddow, “I think that those products pose a real risk. They are, in fact, opioids, and they have the same addiction profile.”  

The Current has spent three months attempting by email and phone to reach each company mentioned in this story, as well as the association that represents the synthetic kratom industry, but received no responses by the date of publication. 

Previously, the association that supports the synthetic kratom industry has pushed back on assertions that these products are dangerous. “This isn’t about public health, it’s about power, money, and market control,” said Jeff Smith, National Policy Director for HART. “We are seeing political influence and industry pressure converge around a single narrative: make 7-OH the scapegoat.” 

Changing kratom market challenges state regulators

Kratom has been used as an energy supplement and pain remedy in Southeast Asia for hundreds of years, but its use in America illustrates both the complexity and the gray areas of federal and state regulations. 

Kratom is illegal to import for human consumption to the U.S., yet products derived from the natural kratom leaf started to become widely available in many states when the opioid epidemic was at its peak. Federal survey data from 2019, the most recent statistics available, estimate that about 1.7 million Americans ages 12 and older used kratom that year, and the most common consumers were males aged 26 to 49.

That’s despite the fact that the FDA classifies synthetic kratom products, which since 2023 have started taking up market share, as the next wave of the opioid epidemic.  

The flood of kratom products has prompted states to step into a regulatory vacuum to assert some control of the growing marketplace. 

In Georgia, kratom products, both natural and synthetic, are legal to purchase, up to a certain potency, for adults 21 and older. That compares to Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee, which have banned all kratom due to perceived dangers. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has banned service members from consuming any kratom product.

Georgia’s first kratom laws date to 2019, when state lawmakers passed industry-approved legislation that banned sales to minors and mandated basic labeling. 

Still, the market for kratom soared — along with kratom-related poisonings and deaths in Georgia, according to state data.

How does it work?

Kratom’s two main psychoactive compounds are mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, commonly known as 7-OH. These exist in small amounts in the natural plant but are synthetically boosted in many products sold legally in Georgia. These alkaloids act on the same opioid receptors in the brain as morphine and fentanyl. At low doses, these substances can produce stimulant-like effects, such as increased energy and alertness. At higher doses, they can cause euphoria, slowed breathing, loss of consciousness and in some cases, seizures. The FDA says 7-OH is engineered to be addictive. 

By 2022, more products were being sold with concentrated 7-OH extracts, according to industry and public health officials. Federal health officials say 7-OH can be 46 times stronger than standard kratom and can be more potent than morphine.

That was the year, according to Rep. Townsend, that Glynn County experienced its first known kratom-related death: Wes Rogers, the 42-year-old former president of the Frederica Yacht Club and member of St. Simons Island United Methodist Church.

Rogers first encountered kratom after a friend suggested the product to help ease the anxiety Rogers had struggled with since his days at Glynn Academy, his mother Anne said.

At first, the family said the substance seemed to help. But the natural plant products were causing signs of addiction, Rogers told his family. He started drinking heavily. At times, his family said, he acted erratically and violently. In late 2021, he checked himself into rehab for kratom addiction.

“Those were horrible times,” Anne Rogers said. “He was never like that before kratom. He was the sweetest boy.”

In January 2022, Rogers returned home to St. Simons, began attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and stayed clean for two months, according to his mother. In March, he told his family he was going back to kratom to cope with his anxiety.

Four months later, his father found Rogers’ dead body in his shower. More than 40 kratom pills were recovered nearby, his mother said. Those pills contained the natural kratom powder that industry supporters say is safe.

The GBI medical examiner did not perform an autopsy on Rogers or a toxicology test, according to documents obtained by The Current, so kratom was never identified officially as a contributing factor in his death. The GBI did not respond to requests for comment.

Around the same time, Georgia officials and addiction specialists started chronicling higher rates of kratom-related medical emergencies and deaths across the state, causing them to sound an alarm.

“It causes a dependence, just like opioids,” Patrick Filkins, clinical toxicologist at the Georgia Poison Center, said about kratom. “Patients who become daily users are either trying to get off fentanyl, or they start using it for some other purported health care reason. They become dependent on it, and the withdrawal is particularly severe,” he said.

Townsend, meanwhile, began advocating for stronger kratom laws. 

In 2023, he sponsored legislation to ban all kratom products, both the natural leaf and the synthetic concentrated products, a move opposed by the American Kratom Association. The effort ultimately failed, as state lawmakers adopted industry-generated draft legislation that kept all products legal while adding another new layer of oversight. 

In 2025, the legal age to buy kratom rose to 21, up from 18. Kratom products were moved behind counters or sold from locked cases. Kratom vaping products were banned, and for the first time the state set limits for how much mitragynine and 7-OH could be sold per serving size. 

That was considered a compromise between Townsend’s position, which was to ban these synthetic products, and the industry pushback. 

By the time the new law took effect, kratom manufacturers and distributors started falling out over the perceived dangers of their products, with the American Kratom Association removing synthetic kratom companies from its membership. 

Across Georgia, synthetic kratom products were surging, and those companies evolved marketing strategies to build consumer habit, according to Filkins, while taking advantage of the weakness of Georgia law: a lack of regulation and enforcement.

Packaging and marketing to promote the dizzying array of synthetic kratom products made it difficult for consumers to determine whether they were buying a natural substance or a highly addictive extract, he said. 

Lab results raise questions about kratom labels

At the state legislature, a 2018 state House study came to a similar conclusion. The report by lawmakers found that many kratom products did not accurately list their ingredients and that labeling often omitted risky substances. 

Still, legislators did not take action to punish such risky behavior, even as they toughened other parts of kratom laws, according to Eli Cohen, a U.S. Army intelligence officer and former police officer who now works in Atlanta as a plaintiffs’ lawyer. 

Cohen spent much of 2025 and 2026 examining whether these kratom industry business tactics endanger consumers. His research has included purchasing a variety of synthetic kratom products in multiple stores in multiple Georgia counties. He then sent them for testing at the University of Florida’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, the same lab that the American Kratom Association has used for similar work.

The lab results of those products bought across the state, including Coastal Georgia, suggest that most “violate either the content requirements, the content limitations, or the labeling requirements” mandated by Georgia law, Cohen said. 

At the same time, those lab tests show that packaging left off substances that the FDA says are dangerous, leaving consumers in the dark about what they might be ingesting, Cohen said.

Separately, The Current’s own research of kratom products sold in Coastal Georgia suggests marketing language can be inconsistent with state law. Georgia requires servings not to exceed 1 milligram per serving of 7-OH. Several products, however, showed levels higher than that.  

Filkins said mislabeling of kratom products in Georgia is driving many of the accidental overdoses. Few people, whether doctors, first responders or consumers, understand how the active ingredients in kratom products interact with other common substances. “What we’re finding is a lot of the deaths involve other substances. So, you know, kratom plus alcohol or kratom plus something else,” Filkins said.

An ongoing lawsuit against a Georgia manufacturer of a synthetic kratom product called Black Liquid Kratom seeks to test liability for misleading packaging. In that multiyear legal battle, a Floyd County family is seeking damages from the company for what it claims was a dangerous product sold without adequate warnings about its potency and risks. Their son, 24-year-old Ethan Pope, died of mitragynine poisoning after consuming kratom, according to court documents.

OPMS, the company that makes Black Liquid, did not respond to requests to comment. The company is a member of the American Kratom Association, and the organization prominently features its brands.

Haddow, the association executive, says that safety concerns are limited to kratom products with higher levels of 7-OH, the compound that the FDA has flagged as a drug of concern. 

Some national data indicates that Georgia deaths linked to kratom, as well as a growing number of medical emergencies, have included products that the association classifies as natural, as well as the synthetically boosted products. Last year, the Georgia Poison Center handled 108 cases involving kratom-related products. About 80 of those calls came from health care facilities seeking assistance for patients requiring urgent care.

About 10% of the cases involved children under 5, including a 2-year-old who in August 2025 had to be revived with Narcan after swallowing a 7-OH tablet belonging to a daycare worker in Cobb County. Five Walker County eighth-graders were hospitalized in October 2025 after ingesting concentrated 7-OH gummies.

The trend exists across the nation as well. According to the Centers for Disease Control, poison control centers nationwide have reported a 1,200% increase in kratom-related incidents between 2015 and 2025.

“It’s not all about people dying,” Filkins said. “Some of the outcomes we’re seeing are patients having to get intubated, having to go to the ICU, patients seizing because kratom can cause seizures, especially in patients with any sort of pre-existing epileptic condition or who are on other medications that lower the seizure threshold.”

Meanwhile, Savannah vape shop manager MaCailee Koernig said that kratom products that critics say are more addictive are top sellers at the southside shop where she works. 

Most of the people buying such products, she said, are people seeking to treat chronic pain or recovering from opioid addiction. “I don’t think I’ve had a single person that I’ve ended up having a conversation with that wasn’t in opioid recovery,” she said about her customers. “Whether it was someone who did heroin and is struggling now, or veterans who have a lot of pain and the VA is not helping them in the ways that they need.”

Koernig said she and her staff scrutinize products before putting them on the shelves, knowing dangerous products are on the market. 

But other vape stores, she said, are actively marketing more addictive products to customers without adequate warning. 

A Savannah-area construction company owner in his mid-30s and recovering addict confirmed that assertion. The man, who spoke to The Current on condition of anonymity so as to not endanger his business relationships, said a different Savannah vape shop offered him a synthetic 7-OH tablet as a free sample. He took it gladly, happy to have a pain reliever he believed would be nonaddictive. 

He quit using the tablets, however, after he recognized symptoms of opioid dependence, as he didn’t want to endanger his 15 years of sobriety.

In February, lawyer Eli Cohen visited five stores in Chatham County, randomly purchased eight kratom-derived products and sent them to the University of Florida’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute for testing. Lab results analyzed by The Current suggest that six of the eight products violated at least one of the state’s potency laws.

The Current attempted to reach the companies listed on the packaging for comment, but no company responded. Contact numbers for some were not functional.  

Back in Brunswick, those who loved Wood, the 24-year-old Goodwill worker, had little information about how dangerous kratom products could be, according to Lindsey Ortiz, his girlfriend of three years.

Ortiz described Wood as a sweet person who was kind to everyone in his life. The two bonded as Ortiz helped Wood recover from a broken jaw in the fall of 2025 that sidelined him from work and forced him onto a liquid-only diet.

Ortiz said her boyfriend received prescription opioids during that recovery. “That really humbled him,” Ortiz said. “He was just very irritable all the time. I think that kind of led to a bad place for him.”

Around the end of 2025, a friend offered Wood a synthetic kratom pill. Wood then researched different kratom products, his mother said, and claimed to know which were safe. Wood began taking the synthetic product to help with pain and at night to help him sleep.

“He said it’s safer than anything else you can get, you can buy it at a gas station,” his mother recalled.

One night in January, after drinking, Wood consumed a new synthetic kratom product, a compound that is even more potent than 7-OH called “pseudo” mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, his girlfriend said. “Pseudo” started appearing in Georgia in late 2025.

Ortiz watched in horror as Wood began slurring his words and suddenly lost consciousness.

“He was struggling to breathe, like he was about to throw up,” she said. ‘I started shaking him and screaming, ‘Andrew, wake up,’ but he wouldn’t respond.”

Ortiz called 911 and followed the dispatcher’s instructions to help him lie flat before attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Wood’s fingertips had turned blue. Then, as the ambulance arrived at his apartment, he woke up.

Wood told Ortiz he would never take any kratom product again. “I believed him,” Ortiz said. “He was equally as scared as I was.” 

A month later, the couple exchanged good-night texts, Ortiz recalled. Wood told her he had to be up early for work. Nothing in his messages suggested anything was wrong, she said.

On Feb. 9, Ortiz received a message from Wood’s store manager saying he had not shown up for work. She went to his house in Calebs Crossing, ran to his bedroom and found his cold body.

Three months later, Wood’s mother is still searching for answers about how her son lost his life. 

The police officer who responded to his January medical emergency also was the responding officer at the scene of his death. His mother recalled that the officer said he had no doubt kratom was a contributing factor to Wood’s death. In the incident report, the officer cited an empty kratom bottle, as well as the earlier medical emergency.

The Glynn County Police Department declined requests for comment. 

The deputy coroner of Glynn County, Justin Thornton, told The Current that he had not been told about the kratom bottle or any past kratom-related use when he ordered Wood’s autopsy.

After learning about that information from The Current, Thornton ordered a new toxicology test.

Four days before Wood’s death, Cohen was visiting Coastal Georgia as part of his kratom industry research. He allowed The Current to accompany him as he bought several kratom products for sale in Chatham County. One of these was MIT 45 Super K — the same product found near Wood’s body. 

Cohen sent the bottle to the University of Florida lab for independent analysis of the ingredients. The one-ounce bottle matched the one mentioned in the police evidence log recovered at Wood’s apartment. 

Lab testing of Cohen’s Super K bottle showed that it contained 399 milligrams of mitragynine. Georgia law says that the maximum amount per serving is 150 milligrams of mitragynine. While the product label said the liquid was equivalent to 15 servings, normal consumer behavior would be to drink the entire bottle in one swallow, Cohen said, given that its size is roughly half that of popular immunity shots.

Quickly consuming 399 milligrams of that substance could cause seizures, convulsions and respiratory depression, if not cardiac arrest, according to Dr. Andrew Kolodny, who testified before the Georgia House of Representatives study committee about kratom in June.

“What would likely happen in one very large acute dose would be either seizures or a heart attack from sudden cardiac death,” said Kolodny, the medical director at the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative Institute for Behavioral Health at Brandeis University.

Rep. Townsend, whose district includes the neighborhoods where Wood and Rogers both died, led a new House study committee this summer about whether Georgia should further crack down on the kratom industry. 

Haddow, the representative of the kratom association, says his group backs the creation of a statewide regulator under Georgia’s Department of Agriculture as a way to rein in bad actors.

For Boswell, the policy debate feels disconnected from her sense of loss.

“This kid was my whole world,” she said. “He’s basically all I had.”

The Current GA used data from the GBI for overdose-related deaths involving kratom in 2019, 2025 and 2026.  Other years come from the CDC’s SUDORS database.