Mario H. LopezA recent explosive investigative report peels back the curtain on cronyism among Trump administration officials, detailing how some cabinet members have pushed for policies based on their own political interests—and financial gain. The violations of public trust are magnified because of crucial public health issues in the balance—risking Americans’ health.
Among the details is that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has been quietly pushing federal health officials to scrub Food & Drug Administration (FDA) warnings from government websites that dealt with kratom, a supplement derived from the leaves of the same-named trees.
Mullin holds up to a million dollars in equity in Botanic Tonics, a kratom company, led by J.W. Ross, who served federal prison time after pleading guilty to stealing $10 million from a previous company he ran as CEO.
Ross funneled more than a million dollars into Secretary of Health & Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s political committees earlier this year. Following the 2024 election, Ross had boasted privately that he was going to enlist Kennedy in his efforts to change rules affecting his business.
In the fall of 2025, Kennedy asked Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to back off planned efforts to ban kratom products and instead urged DeWine to only focus on a competing product that Ross and other kratom industry insiders have been targeting.
That competitor is 7-hydroxymitragynine (commonly referred to as “7-OH”), an organic compound derived from the kratom plant itself. The use of 7-OH has been rising steadily as more Americans have been using it for pain relief as well as harm-reduction purposes, such as treating symptoms of opioid withdrawal.
The growth of 7-OH use cuts into kratom’s business, and the kratom lobby is not happy about it.
Indeed, Ross’s allies set up a company to be a lobbying front, calling it “Stop Gas Station Heroin”—of course named to make their competition sound dangerous—and paid a well-connected Trump-world lobbyist at least $600,000 to work Congress and the administration on kratom’s behalf.
Those efforts kept yielding results, as both Mullin and Kennedy continued to work against kratom’s competition.
In July of last year, Mullin showed up to a news conference with the head of the FDA and Kennedy to announce that the agency would try to ban the sale of synthetic 7-OH products, yet another competing product (although distinct from natural 7-OH).
And in December, the Justice Department suddenly dropped a case against Ross’ company, Botanic Tonics, despite the fact that the Department had previously seized 250,000 bottles of kratom supplements after an FDA inspection of the company’s warehouse. The federal government had previously stated that Botanic Tonics was illegally selling kratom products that were not proven safe.
But the FDA did manage to send a letter to an industry company accusing it of illegally marketing it products—products that compete with kratom.
Clearly, none of the machinations are about public health. It would be hard to argue against the FDA applying consistent consumer safety standards to all products derived from the kratom leaf, and indeed to any of the products in the growing supplement industry.
Instead, the backroom ploys and cronyism demonstrate how big industry players are trying to manipulate Washington into killing a competing product to protect their market share.
The schemes from Ross and kratom allies are exactly the kind of “swampy” behavior that Americans are fed up with.
An established industry does not like that competing products exist. Rather than compete on the merits, they run to the government for protection. They try to mask their efforts by using safety language. They “fund” the right people and, in this case, get their investors inside the administration to push for policy changes that benefit them. They wind up the lobbying machine to go to work.
It is the oldest play in the book, and in addition to the highly questionable ethics, it is contrary to the free-market conservatives say they believe in.
Americans lose when powerful interests use government to freeze out competition. Regulatory protection dressed up as consumer safety always lands hardest on working people, who of course cannot afford massive equity stakes for presidential cabinet members, six-figure lobbying contracts, or millions of dollars in donations to fight back.
For their part, advocates for natural 7-OH have been calling for a legal framework based on scientific testing and basic consumer protections in the face of a regulatory environment that too often does not care to examine material differences between similar products.
That outcome came a step closer to reality last week, when the Drug Enforcement Administration declared its intent to put natural 7-OH in the same legal category as Heroin, and using emergency powers to avoid a full scientific review that is required by Congress.
In addition, the accompanying request for public comments from the Department of Health and Human Services explicitly rejects scientific and safety related input related to 7-OH.
Neither announcement affects kratom products.
Mario H. Lopez is president of the Hispanic Leadership Fund, a public policy advocacy organization that promotes liberty, opportunity, and prosperity for all.
Views expressed by guest contributors to Issues & Insights are their own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the I&I Editorial Board.
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