Washington, D.C. — April 1, 2026 — Mac Haddow, Senior Fellow on Public Policy for the American Kratom Association (AKA), today issued a strong warning to policymakers and the media following the release of a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, cautioning that misleading headlines are distorting the underlying data and threatening to drive harmful policy decisions.
“The CDC report is being widely mischaracterized in sensational headlines that suggest a growing danger from kratom,” Haddow said. “But a careful reading of the actual data shows something very different: an increase in reports that closely tracks the growing number of kratom consumers in the United States—not a new safety signal tied to natural kratom leaf products.”
The CDC analysis relies on data from the National Poison Data System, a voluntary reporting system that captures calls to poison control centers involving actual or suspected exposure to substances. However, NPDS data is not designed to establish causation and includes cases where kratom is merely mentioned—not confirmed as the cause of any adverse outcome.
“Headlines are ignoring the most critical limitation of this report,” Haddow continued. “The CDC explicitly acknowledges that these data cannot determine whether kratom actually caused the reported outcomes. Yet that hasn’t stopped some from portraying this as evidence of a kratom safety crisis.”
Haddow emphasized that the most serious outcomes identified in the report overwhelmingly involve multiple substances—not kratom alone. According to the CDC, the majority of reported deaths involved polydrug exposure, with opioids, benzodiazepines, alcohol, and stimulants frequently present.
“That is not a kratom story—that is a polydrug use story,” Haddow said. “Conflating the two is not just inaccurate—it is dangerous.”
The report also fails to distinguish between traditional, natural kratom leaf products and increasingly prevalent high-potency, chemically manipulated compounds such as 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), which are often marketed as “kratom” despite having fundamentally different pharmacological profiles.
