How Kratom, Formerly Known as Gas Station Heroin, Went Mainstream
They’d found their own beach, by way of the café’s kratom “kocktails” served in tiki mugs, with names like Cinnamon Toast Punch, the Leo Szn 4ever, or Koolada. “I’m intrigued by anything vaguely psychoactive if it’s being delivered to me with a very Bushwick ornamentation, like vanilla oat or pineapple açai accoutrements,” says café regular and musician Asher White.
White and others begged me not to name the kratom café in GQ; since 2022, the New York City health department has been imposing a “quiet crackdown” on these types of establishments. Seven states have banned the sale of kratom, but there’s no federal regulation pertaining to the drug, meaning that, in many places you can go to a smoke shop and walk right out with an opioid extract, sometimes without even showing ID. For now, White explained, kratom “is a social activity in a special environment [with] a slightly forbidden fruit quality at play.”
I ordered a lavender lemonade brewed with gold maeng da leaves, which the menu claimed would feel “stimulating yet relaxing, euphoric.” Everyone around me—a group sharing a Levain cookie, a woman with a face full of piercings and Starface patches—seemed to be having a fairly kicked-back afternoon. But personally, I was just feeling a bit warm and, like any other time I’ve experimented with drugs, way too in my head.
To understand how kratom went from a DIY withdrawal hack to a countercultural lifestyle—while simultaneously becoming the enemy of our alternative-wellness-friendly Health and Human Services secretary—it helped to listen to old podcast appearances by J. W. Ross, the founder of Botanic Tonics: the blue-glass-bottled kratom brand that’s arguably the most successful gentrified version. (Ross, who has since stepped away from the day-to-day business, did not respond to requests to be interviewed.)
On podcasts, Ross seemed to be the archetypal kratom early adopter. He had battled alcohol addiction, got sober after spending three years in jail for white-collar crime, but still believed there had to be another substance out there that would work as a social lubricant without ruining his life.
Ross sought refuge and reinvention in Southeast Asia, where he learned about the plant used for pain relief and energy. He then spent the next two years tinkering with his take on a kratom tonic in his kitchen. The resulting Feel Free beverage, launched in 2020, is a mix of natural whole-leaf kratom and other plant-derived ingredients popular in the world of functional beverages: kava, kola nut, lion’s mane, and rhodiola.
By 2022, Feel Free Classic Tonic was sold at Erewhon and 7/11 alike. (As of 2024, Botanic Tonics was sold in over 30,000 storefronts—including my Manhattan bodega, where the cashier assures me it flies off the shelves.) Kratom products had already been in smoke shops and gas stations for more than a decade, and the industry had grown to gross roughly $1 billion per year in the US. But Botanic Tonics seemed to have brought kratom to a new market by paying influencers to post videos of themselves drinking the beverage and referring to it as a an effective way to quit drinking or stay sober and by running ads on the epicenter of the womansphere, The Skinny Confidential podcast. The company also partnered with sports teams at Florida State and USC, hiring hundreds of students to give away the drinks at frat and sorority parties during finals week, claiming they could “fix stress.”
