Banning Kratom Will Do More Harm Than Good

By Christina Dent

What in the world is Kratom and why is it in the news?

The answers to these questions and how we respond to them will either increase public safety in Mississippi or undermine it.

First, what is Kratom?

It is the dried and ground leaves of a tree found in parts of Southeast Asia. It has been used for hundreds of years for a variety of health reasons, and has become popular in the US recently, often sold as a dietary supplement.  In low doses people who use it report mild pain-relieving qualities and more energy.  In large doses it can act as a sedative. Some people also find that Kratom halts the body’s opioid withdrawal symptoms, helping them discontinue opioid use.

So, why is Kratom in the news?  Last April, a number of media outlets covered a report by the Centers for Disease Control that had analyzed over 27,000 overdose deaths in 2016-2017 and indicated 91 of them could be linked to Kratom.  What the CDC report mentioned, but was rarely included in the media reports, is that virtually all of those 91 people had other drugs in their system.

Kratom is not illegal under federal or state law, but several Mississippi counties have recently made it a crime to use or possess Kratom, with more considering it under pressure from law enforcement and some concerned citizens.

While I sympathize with their concern for public safety, turning a person who uses Kratom into a criminal and putting that person in jail is the wrong approach. Just like any other substance, legal or illegal, Kratom can be misused and we need to treat that misuse as a public health issue and not as a criminal matter.

If we treat it as criminal, we will undermine public safety.  Here’s why.

First, banning a popular substance does not make it disappear.  It simply transfers the substance from a legal market, where we have the option to regulate it, to the black market where we have zero regulation.  This market transfer increases crime by providing a revenue stream that entices people to break the law to get a share of the profits. This decreases public safety.

Second, criminalizing a substance makes it more available to our children. In a regulated market, we can set age limits for purchasing. Certainly some youth find their way around that, but most legal retailers are checking IDs.  On the street corner, no one is.  A 13-year-old and a 33-year-old have the same access to prohibited substances, and those substances are available on the streets of every town in America today. This decreases our children’s safety.

Lt. Eddie Hawkins, with the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, was recently quoted in The Daily Times Leader stating his concern over the way Kratom is currently sold. “There’s no quality control, no dosage limits, no age limits.” He’s right, but criminalizing it ensures that those things continue.

Third, the black market sells any concoction they want, with a strong profit incentive to pack the biggest punch in the smallest package to avoid detection while smuggling. This lack of regulation over purity and potency is how we got fentanyl-laced substances on the street.

In a recent interview published by the Hattiesburg American, alerting the public to fentanyl-laced meth in the Pine Belt, John Dowdy, Director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, said, “People need to understand – if you’re buying any kind of narcotics on the street – whether you think it is a legal prescription or not – you’re basically playing Russian Roulette.”

While we may categorically disagree on the best path forward, I wholeheartedly agree with him that using unregulated substances is like playing Russian Roulette. This reality should make us take a long pause and ask ourselves why on earth we want our loved ones playing Russian Roulette with yet another substance, when we’re losing so many people to overdoses already from unregulated drugs they bought on the street.

It is human nature to want a quick and simple solution to every problem.  But the quickest path to making Kratom dangerous is to send it into the free-for-all of the black market. If we want to reduce harm and increase public safety, we have to keep Kratom legal.  Let’s age-restrict it behind a counter, not send it to the street corner.

Christina Dent is Founder of End It For Good, a conservative nonprofit advocating for an end to our criminal approach to drugs. She hosts the End It For Good weekly podcast and lives with her family in Mississippi. 

Expand treatment, not jail, for opioid use

By Bradley Wellborn, Esq.

There are 121,000 Mississippians currently in need of treatment for substance use disorders, according to Dr. Mary Currier, the State Medical Officer. But in all of Mississippi there are a total of 501 beds, certified by the Department of Mental Health, to treat such disorders. Mississippi, like the rest of the nation, is in the midst of an opioid epidemic. Large numbers of our citizens have become addicted to legal drugs, prescribed to them by medical professionals.  Our response has been to answer this epidemic with abrupt prescription crack-downs, thereby encouraging a migration to illegal drugs as a replacement.  The result has been a doubling of fatal overdoses in Mississippi, which plainly reveals the ineffectiveness of our current strategy.  Treating addiction as a criminal matter is wrong and does nothing to solve the underlying problems faced by these Mississippians.

For us, this epidemic is still in its early stages, but the coming crisis is so clear that major public figures, such as Marshall Fisher, head of Mississippi’s Department of Public Safety, and Dr. Currier, have spoken out on the limitations of law enforcement and the state’s health system to either stop, mitigate, or manage the damage that is being done to our communities and our broader society.

Not only do we have far too few beds available for treatment, there is no tracking or coordinating technology to effectively match patients to beds. There are scarce resources to manage patients awaiting beds, and predictably some patients who desire treatment become more firmly addicted after waiting overlong for those beds.

Historically, Mississippi has relied upon law enforcement and the courts to deal with substance use issues. Unfortunately, neither were designed as regulatory or preemptive agencies. Still, 20% of Mississippi’s inmates, 38% of our probationers, and 48% of our parolees are there on drug charges. At the cost of $18,615 per year (plus medical expenses) to house a single prisoner at Parchman Penitentiary, we are using a vast amount of resources on an ill-fitting solution.  Incarceration does little to rehabilitate, isolates individuals from family and other positive allies and resources, and ultimately creates the need for the taxpayers to expend more resources after imprisonment on welfare and recovery systems.  The criminal justice system is not the right tool for a public health crisis.

We have 121,000 Mississippians currently outside the prison system that struggle with substance use disorders.  Many of these have underlying mental health issues.  Yet statewide, we have the ability to treat only 501 at a time.

Mississippians must recognize the coming threats and reexamine our ultimate objectives in order to develop better, cheaper, and more effective responses to substance use.

Clearly, we must increase capacity to effectively treat substance use disorders.  The Department of Health has unequivocally stated the need for more beds and better technology to coordinate the use of those beds for maximum effect.  We should develop these capacities now, before our health systems are completely overwhelmed.

We must also find new tools to prevent substance use disorder and help people who are struggling with it.  At every opportunity, we should divert them away from the criminal justice system.

We should also develop support and counseling networks at the community level.  Imagine churches and community organizations throughout the state offering their facilities and a few volunteers to host a weekly telehealth counseling session for those in their local community.  Matching the substance use and mental health resources available in Jackson’s premier medical community with local social networks would enable coverage to every corner of the state at very low cost, and would alleviate many problems related to our backlog of treatment needs.

It is time to treat substance use and mental illness as health issues.  The criminal justice system is the wrong tool for the task.

Bradley Wellborn, B.A. & J.D. from Ole Miss, is a former Navy officer, former Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, Eagle Scout, and maintains a general practice law firm in Jackson.

Good Samaritan who saved my son from overdose should be protected

By Christi Berrong

It was Christmas time when I got the call.  My son, who was addicted to drugs, had been missing for a few weeks. I slept with scrubs laid out and my phone in my hand. Then the ringing in the middle of the night. He was in the ER.  “Is he alive?” was the only thing I could say. The nurse on the line responded, “For now.”  When I got there, I was told it was a heroin overdose. A car had pulled into the hospital parking lot, his limp body was pushed out, and they drove off. The doctors and nurses worked on my son right there in the parking lot. They did everything that heroes do, and they saved his life. But the person driving that car also saved his life, and should be protected from prosecution.

Mississippi has a Good Samaritan law, and its intention is to make sure that people who call emergency services seeking to prevent an overdose death don’t get charged with a crime themselves. However, the law is limited and only applies in certain circumstances. For instance, if the individual overdosing has 3 grams of a controlled substance, they would be protected, but if they had 4 grams, they could be prosecuted. Expanding the provision to apply to all situations where an individual is overdosing and emergency services are called in good faith will help save lives.

It wasn’t until I saw my beautiful blue-eyed boy alive in that hospital bed that my head cleared enough to understand why people were asking about the car and who was driving. Some of them assumed I would want the driver to answer for his overdose, to be punished if they were using drugs too. I don’t. I see the person driving that car as a hero, just like I see the doctors and nurses who brought my boy back to me.  That driver could have dropped him off anywhere. It would have been safer for them, to avoid being seen, to leave him somewhere deserted. I might never have known what happened to my son. His life could have ended that night as a nameless and faceless addict. But addicted people are our children, our siblings, our family.  They are all loved by someone.  And someone else’s child chose to take him to the doctors and nurses who could save him, even if it cost them their own freedom.

We intuitively understand that Good Samaritans at car accidents should be protected. They tried to help, they did the right things. This is common sense. And even if the accident ends tragically in death, would the Good Samaritan be at fault? No. But we still have a gap in protection for the tragedy of drug overdose.

For the scared young lady who sees her friend passed out, not breathing, we should encourage her to seek help. Right now she isn’t just afraid for her friend possibly dying in front of her, she’s also afraid of prosecution. If she picks up the phone and calls for help anyway, is she any less of a Good Samaritan?  No, she is a hero to her friend’s mother. Trust me.

We need to expand our Good Samaritan law because life doesn’t always go as planned. The law should protect people who try to do the right thing and save a life. Calling for help should always be safe.

Christi Berrong is a Health Care Clinical Coordinator and life-long resident of central Mississippi.  She can be reached at cberrong313@gmail.com

The right way to respond to drug addiction

Today in Mississippi, taxpayers are funding two contradictory approaches to people struggling with drug addiction.  One approach results in an arrest and possibly jail time.  The other approach offers people health-based treatment.  Both are paid for by taxpayer dollars, and they’re both used with the same people struggling with the same problem. But one uses fear, trauma, and isolation. The other uses safety, therapy, and community. The disparity is striking, but this is what our drug criminalization laws have given us. We will continue the troubling response of prison sentences for people struggling with a health crisis until we change our laws and end our criminal approach to drugs.

Mississippi was recently awarded a $3.6 million federal grant to respond to the opioid crisis, and 100% of it is being used on health-based initiatives. This is great news because it meets the health issue of drug use with an appropriate response. Eighty percent of the grant is paying for in-patient treatment for people without private insurance. Fifteen percent is providing expanded access to naloxone, an overdose reversal medication. The remaining 5 percent funds community outreach such as the “Stand Up, Mississippi” campaign.

It ought to give us pause that millions of our own taxpayer dollars are being spent responding to the same issue with prison sentences.  When people with a health issue are labeled criminals and forcibly separated from their families and communities, that’s harmful. When we saddle them with a criminal record for life, making them virtually unemployable and unable to provide for their families, that’s harmful. Drug use and addiction can be devastating to individuals and their families. Our response should focus on reducing that harm, not escalating it by labeling their medical crisis as a criminal offense.

Ending our criminal approach doesn’t mean that people who use drugs can do whatever they want to. If a parent is abusing their children, they will be arrested for breaking laws against child abuse. That’s true right now whether you’re high, drunk, or sober. It will still be true after we lay down our criminal approach to drugs. The same is true of laws against other aggressive acts like theft, rape, and murder. We can end criminalization of drugs and retain all of our laws against harming people. This is how we treat alcohol, and it’s how we should treat other drugs as well.

Ending our criminal approach to drugs would free up millions of dollars that could be redirected to address these health issues in ways that are grounded in research and science. It would reduce stigma so that people could admit their need for help without the shame of being labeled a criminal. Moms and Dads wouldn’t be locked away for years of their children’s lives for making some unwise choices. Sons and daughters wouldn’t be crippled with a lifetime criminal record before they even graduate high school.

We can help people regain their sobriety and give them tools for a new life with this grant money, but as long as we’re also pouring resources into destabilizing the same people with the same health problems by criminalizing them, we’re undercutting our potential and crippling our prosperity.

Conservative people like me want strong families and productive citizens, and this grant is helping us towards that. But we’re simultaneously supporting laws that destroy families and cripple employment. We need to be courageous enough to chart a new course towards more people flourishing by ending our criminal approach to drugs.

When trauma drives drug addiction, jail makes it worse

By Guitta Hogue

We are spending millions of dollars keeping people addicted to drugs in the criminal justice system. We could be using that money to restore them to their families and communities through evidence-based treatment. As a therapist, I’ve counseled many people struggling to overcome addiction. Thrill-seeking is not the driving factor for anyone – even teens – with addiction.  I’ve found that addicted people often have a history of trauma such as grief, relational loss, chronic pain, childhood neglect, or abuse.  Even worse, they sometimes face the resulting emotional or physical pain without healthy family or friends supporting them in their journey towards healing.

Many of us have a tendency to escape physical and emotional pain using shopping, carbs, screen time, sleeping, chocolate, exercise, or smoking.  Obviously, our vices are forgiven more often than hard drugs in our society.  Yet, our forgivable vices activate the same chemicals in our brains as heroin and opioids, so why should drug use be criminalized?  For some people struggling with addiction, painful memories of being violated as a child will not fade until they get their next hit.  For others, facing a lifetime of back pain, inhibiting work and sleep, a person may try to escape the pain with more pills than prescribed. The research on Adverse Childhood Experiences shows that unprocessed emotions from past trauma can result in relational isolation and even life-changing physical ailments. Their pain can snowball to more pain. The experience of immensely painful memories and emotions can drive them to numb through drug use.  As we navigate the issue of the failed ‘war on drugs’ we must seek to better understand people with addictions. Understanding leads to empathy, and empathy is always the beginning of positive change.

Right now, people are imprisoned solely for using drugs. Incarcerating them is not curing them. It is not true that cleaning their system of the chemicals while incarcerated cures their addiction, as once thought. It is easy to relapse when changes in their resources, circumstances, and support are not made. Since incarceration is expensive and does not help end our addiction crisis, we could use those resources to help addicted people get their life back.

As a mother, if one of my three boys had an issue with addiction, I would want to ensure that he was receiving the care I knew would help him recover. This means I would be looking for treatment programs, accountability, support groups, mentors, and the like. As a therapist, I know that sending him into the criminal justice system would not address the reason for his addiction but may well make it worse. Criminalizing addiction is not the solution; treating it is.

Guitta Hogue is a wife and homeschooling mom, as well as a therapist in Madison. She can be reached at guitta@lifeworksms.com. 

Everyone benefits by ending our criminal approach to drug use

Opioid Overdoes.  Drug Addictions.  Lives Torn Apart.  Those are the headlines today.  These are terrible problems in our society and I think they have been caused in part because we don’t treat drug use and drug addiction as public health crises.  Whenever we hear the word drug, our first response is, “let’s get law enforcement on this.”   Instead, I think we should be calling public health officials.

For decades we’ve taken this public health issue and attached a criminal justice label to it.  And it just hasn’t worked.  In fact, the problems have gotten worse, not better.  Millions of lives have been destroyed by our criminal approach, on top of the lives destroyed by drug use itself. Yet our reaction to the destruction has largely been to enforce our criminal approach more zealously. We’ve ramped up policing and given harsher sentences, but the destruction only gets worse. This is predictable. Doubling the trauma will never produce flourishing. It leaves people crushed and families torn apart.

The criminal justice system certainly has its place. It is the right tool for acts of aggression such as theft, rape, and murder. There are victims in aggressive crimes, and they deserve justice. Policing those acts makes our communities safer. Drug use, though, isn’t aggressive. It has no victim. Yet we are treating it as a crime, which not only fails to address why a person is using drugs, it fails to offer a solution to actually help them.

I’m a politically conservative Christian wife and mother of three young sons. I value strong families and productive citizens. But criminalizing people for drug use is producing broken families and unemployable citizens through the crippling effect of a criminal record. If we really want flourishing people, we will lay down the wrong tools and focus all of our efforts and taxpayer dollars on the right tools – research-based prevention, treatment for addiction, and community support for people in recovery.

Recently I saw a young man in a local court who had been arrested for possession of an illegal drug and been in jail for several months. He had never been in trouble with the law before, and had a wife and young daughter at home. Who are we helping by imprisoning this young man? We’ve traumatized him with jail, destabilized his family, spent thousands of taxpayer dollars, potentially wrecked his employment opportunities for life, and haven’t addressed the health issue of his drug use. We’re losing on every front. Yet this scenario is playing out for thousands of Mississippians every year. Everyone can agree that this man shouldn’t have been using an illegal drug. But if our response to his bad decision only makes life worse for him, for his family, and for the rest of us, that’s the definition of a failed policy.

We should set aside the criminal threats and address the actual issue and offer people treatment, employment, and connection to the community. This won’t fix everything, but it will give more people the chance to get the help they need and live productive lives with their families. We don’t have to crush people who are broken. We can work towards giving every person the best opportunity to thrive. But we can only move towards that when we stop trying to scare people into the behavior we want and traumatizing them when they don’t comply. I supported a criminal approach to drug use for most of my life because I thought it was advancing my conservative values. I realize now that it’s working directly against them. Drug use and addiction are complex issues that demand our engagement, but they’re not criminal ones.

Do you think drugs should be legalized?

That question was first directed at me 6 years ago. My response was typical for my demographic as a politically conservative Christian woman.  Have you lost your mind not to mention your faith? Drugs tear at the fabric of families and society. Why would we legalize them? I knew drugs were dangerous and could really harm you – I still believe that. And I never questioned the message that was culturally drilled into me – that prohibition by law is the answer.

But the presence of danger and harm doesn’t mean that prohibition is the right weapon. What about adultery or pornography? Those are dangerous and harmful. They tear at the fabric of families and society. But if we criminalized both of those in the same way we have drugs, we would be prosecuting as criminals over half the adult population in America. Alcohol can ruin lives too. But we tried alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and it was a colossal disaster. Death, disease, and crime skyrocketed during the 13 years it was in place until it was finally repealed.

I’ve changed my mind about illegal drugs.  And I’m not setting aside my faith to support legalization, but rather acting in response to my faith by seeking the welfare of the world around me and the people in it. The drug war is not working.  Countless lives – including law enforcement officers – are being lost or ruined.

Drug prohibition can’t deliver the health, safety, and control that we want. It delivers the exact opposite. When we prohibited drugs, we gave up control of every important factor related to them: control of potency or purity; control of who’s selling them; and control of who’s buying them.  We have learned from alcohol and tobacco that the only solution is legalize, regulate, tax, and restrict.  Drug legalization would certainly not fix all the problems of drug use and addiction. But it would dramatically decrease the crime, disease, death, and mass incarceration that prohibition has caused, and allow us to address the actual issue – drug use as a public health crisis.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions recently announced a new crackdown on drugs. This is bad news for those who want peace, freedom, and order in our communities. Cracking down means the risk to transport and sell drugs will go up, which will increase prices. That will increase the violent lengths to which dealers will go in defending their more lucrative turf. An increase in price will also mean some users will commit more crime to come up with the money to support their more expensive habit. Manufacturing will also get more inventive in packing the biggest punch in the smallest size. With every crack down the profits increase.  Sessions’ new war would incentivize more crime, more death, more disease, and more corruption.

Today I’m still a conservative Christian woman. I have three young sons at home. My husband and I will teach them that drugs are dangerous and can be highly addictive. They can destroy your life and your family. I will plead with my sons not to use them. Legalization is not about endorsing use. It’s about treating a national health crisis for what it is. It’s about lowering death and disease. It’s about bringing law and order back to our communities and neighborhoods where the war on drugs is literally playing out on the streets.  Justice is not always done by enforcing the current laws. In the case of drugs, justice is done by admitting when laws are not just, and demanding change.

Pregnant moms using drugs need help, not jail

When we became a foster family three years ago, I was certain of at least one thing: mothers who used drugs while they were pregnant should have their babies taken away. I had never met any of these moms before but I couldn’t conceive how anyone who loved their child could expose them to drugs. Certainly our home would be a better place for their baby, I thought. Ironically, it was fostering a baby exposed to drugs and meeting his mom that made me question our punitive approach to pregnant women struggling with addiction. I’m convinced now that arresting these moms, or categorically putting their babies in foster care without further investigation, is not reducing harm. It’s making things worse for these children.

In November, Nikki Cox-Musgrove from Pearl was sentenced to 15 years in prison for obtaining a controlled substance by fraud and exposing her unborn child to opioids. Her addiction, which led to doctor shopping and using while pregnant, was treated by our laws as criminal activity instead of the serious health crisis it was. And that difference just took a child’s mother away for 15 years.

The best case scenario for babies is that their moms aren’t using drugs. But if they are using, even while pregnant, then our best approach for reducing harm to the child is to help them and get them into treatment immediately. Instead, we use threats of criminal punishment, which only pushes moms AWAY from prenatal care that could reduce harm. How can we expect these moms to seek help when they’re seeing mugshots of moms just like them, on statewide news stories, being imprisoned? That’s terrifying. We can’t terrify and traumatize people out of addiction. We’ve tried that for decades, and it has failed spectacularly while leaving millions of destroyed lives in its wake.

Sometimes when pregnant mothers use drugs, their babies are born dependent on those drugs. The New York Times reported in July that hospitals in Kentucky and New Hampshire are trying a new approach with these newborns, with promising results. Instead of taking dependent babies away from their moms at birth, they’re keeping them together in low-stimulation private rooms and teaching moms how to comfort, nurture, and bond with their babies. They’ve found that surrounding moms and babies with this kind of compassionate support has significantly reduced the number of newborns who need any drugs after they’re born to taper their dependence. We may be separating these babies from the medicine they need most, their mom.

I’ll never forget bringing one of our newborn foster sons to his first visit with his mom and watching her sprint across the parking lot to my van and cover him with kisses. Over time I saw that she was a mom just like me, whose love for her son was as deep as my love for my own sons, even though she couldn’t beat her addiction while she was pregnant. Drug addiction does not equal a lack of love. It is a complex health crisis, and should be handled by doctors and therapists, not the criminal justice system.

Our goal should be reducing harm to babies and reducing harm to parents. Who benefits from Nikki in prison for 15 years? She doesn’t. Her child doesn’t. The taxpayers don’t. Moms like her are driven further from help. And when our policies destabilize families that are already vulnerable, the broader community suffers too. If this was justice by law, then our laws are unjust and we must demand change.