(DCNF)—As fewer Americans overdose from fentanyl, a new drug is taking the country by storm.
Kratom is an herbal substance derived from a plant found in Southeast Asia, Yale Medicine reported. While proponents have claimed kratom can bolster user’s moods and energy levels, experts warned the Daily Caller News Foundation that some kratom-related products can potentially lead to addiction, withdrawal symptoms and even overdose.
“It [kratom] is becoming more widespread both in reports of exposures and in sales,” Dr. Chris Holstege, a medical toxicologist at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine, told the DCNF. “During the past 11 years, U.S. poison centers received a total of 14,449 kratom exposure reports; the record high 3,434 reports in 2025 represent an increase of approximately 1,200% compared with the 258 reports in 2015. The number of calls in 2026 to U.S. poison centers have already surpassed the total number of exposures in 2025. This rapid increase in exposures is consistent with U.S. record kratom import volumes.”
“Kratom is an opioid and can have central nervous system depressive effects like other opioids, causing sedation, respiratory depression and death depending on the dose taken and depending on what other substances are taken with kratom,” Holstege continued. “Like other opioids, it can cause addiction to occur in those who use it chronically and there is a potential of withdrawal symptoms if chronic use is stopped.”
Kratom is currently legal in almost all U.S. states and is not federally regulated, per the University of Utah Health. Kratom also contains psychoactive compounds that interact with opioid receptors, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The Trump administration has been cracking down on illicit opioids such as fentanyl in recent months. In 2025, there were 69,973 estimated drug overdose deaths in the U.S., marking a decrease of nearly 14% from the 81,313 deaths estimated in 2024, the CDC reported in May.
Meanwhile, total overdose deaths involving opioids dropped from 55,296 in 2024 to 44,564 in 2025, according to the CDC’s estimates.
“There is concern for the emergence of new products with even greater concentration or greater potency than the active ingredients found naturally within the kratom plant,” Holstege explained. “These products place the public at growing risk of overdose, addiction and death. There are also products emerging in drink form and being marketed to youth as an alcohol alternative, [and] these products are being found with increasing frequency in convenience stores and vape shops around our university campus.”
Moreover, 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) is an opioid-like chemical found in the kratom plant that can cause major health issues at high concentrations, per the Texas Department of State Health Services. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has previously referred to 7-OH as an “emerging opioid threat.”
Still, the FDA notably suggested in an Aug. 20, 2025 X post that 7-OH products may drive “the fourth wave of the opioid epidemic” in the U.S.
“The next potential phase of the opioid crisis may be defined by the emergence of novel synthetic opioids like 7-OH, combined with an increasing [prevalence] of concurrent use of opioids and other controlled substances,” according to the FDA.
Phone calls to U.S. poison centers related to kratom rose more than 1,200% between 2015 and 2025, alongside a corresponding increase in hospitalizations, according to a UVA Health analysis published in March. There were also a record-high 3,434 kratom-related deaths reported to poison centers in 2025 alone, marking a significant jump from just 258 in 2015, the research shows.
“In [a kratom-related] overdose, patients may develop opioid toxicity including slow or arrested breathing and may become comatose,” Washington Poison Center chief clinical officer Jimmy Leonard told the DCNF. “There are some cases of people with severe liver injury as well.”
“We have seen significant increases in the number of calls to poison centers about kratom since early 2025,” Leonard added. “Increased calls may be related to increasing use, media coverage, worsening toxicity, or some other unknown reason. We have had cases of young children [requiring] naloxone after exploratory ingestion of 7-OH. We’ve seen a global increase in the number of cases due to withdrawal, but the proportion is relatively steady.”
Various kratom and 7-OH products have become widely available in smoke shops, vape shops, gas stations and convenience stores across the nation in recent years, according to Michigan Medicine. Kratom products are available in a spate of forms, including teas, powders, capsules and gummies, according to Ventura County Public Health.
In December 2025, the FDA announced that the U.S. Marshals Service had seized 73,000 units of 7-OH products — worth about $1 million — from three Missouri-based firms as part of a broader effort to “protect American consumers.”
The U.S. Marshals Service did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Some lawmakers have recently issued public warnings about the potential dangers of using kratom products. Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey issued an emergency order in August restricting the sale of kratom across her state in an attempt to “get dangerous products off store shelves.”
Moreover, Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds claimed in a Tuesday statement that kratom “is not a supplement, it is not a medicine, and it is not safe.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.