Editor’s note: This week, we’re reprinting some of our best stories from the past year. This piece, originally published in September, discusses the dangerous drug sold at gas stations across the country derived from kratom.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary says his agency is working to get ahead of what could be the “fourth wave” of the deadly opioid crisis by targeting a substance derived from the kratom plant that is being sold to young people in gas stations and vape shops all across the nation.

The concentrated compound, 7-hydroxymitragynine, known as 7-OH, is up to 13 times more potent than morphine, according to Makary. Deceptive marketing and easy access are helping fuel its spread, luring in an increasing number of young Americans.

“We can’t get caught flat-footed again,” Makary recently warned. “We got burned with fentanyl, we got burned with prescription drugs. We cannot get behind the eight ball again. This may be the fourth wave of the opioid epidemic. Concentrated, synthetic, 7-OH may be the fourth wave of the opioid epidemic.”

“7-OH, people need to know, is an opioid,” he emphasized. “You can walk down the street in almost any neighborhood in America and buy an opioid.”

The kratom plant is native to Southeast Asia. In its natural state, some people find it to have healthful and medicinal qualities. The FDA has made clear that it’s not focusing on the natural kratom leaf. They’re targeting concentrated and synthetic forms of kratom, or 7-OH.

At the end of July, the FDA recommended that 7-OH be classified as a Schedule I controlled substance, making it illegal to sell or possess. The agency says it’s an opioid that comes with significant health risks, including addiction and overdose.

Some people may not have even heard of kratom before, but they’ve likely seen kratom-derived 7-OH products in gas stations, corner stores, vape shops, or even online. Kratom, overall, is a billion-dollar industry in the U.S. – and it’s growing fast. In just a few years, the industry is expected to almost double in size.

7-OH is sold in a variety of forms, including powders, vapes, drinks, pills, and products that appeal to children, such as fruit-flavored gummies and even ice cream cones.

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These products are often inaccurately labeled concerning their 7-OH content, and can be disguised or marketed as merely the kratom plant. There’s also no federal age restriction on these products, though several states now prohibit the sale of such products to minors.

As far as widespread harm, especially to young Americans, the data are mixed – or perhaps underreported, and too early to tell.

The CDC says there have been some overdose deaths associated with kratom products, but often other substances were also involved. There was also a recent report from the Tampa Bay Times that links kratom products to hundreds of deaths just in the state of Florida, over the past decade. Additionally, more and more anecdotal accounts of 7-OH-related addictions and deaths fill the web, though they remain unverified.

A toxicologist and emergency physician from Albany Medical Center, Dr. Alicia Tudor, believes kratom-related harms are being underreported, specifically regarding overdoses.

“I’ll see it in the emergency department and then probably more often in the addiction clinic that I work at as well,” Tudor told WRGB.

Toxicology tests are not always given when patients come in for an overdose, she said. “Then the results would come back, you know, weeks later, and at that point, the patient’s been discharged and doing better,” Tudor added.

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New York mother Cari Scribner wants action taken on these highly concentrated kratom products. Her 27-year-old son, Nickolas, died last year from what appears to have been a kratom-related death.

Scribner says her son started using the products to manage anxiety, depression, and insomnia, believing it was merely an “all natural herbal, energy, and health supplement.”

In a similar tragedy, Makary relayed the contents of a letter from a grieving stepfather of a young man who had finally quit addiction, only to purchase 7-OH without being aware of its contents.

“He called me on May 31 to tell me he had stopped at the vape shop to buy a vape and was offered a fruity pill, and was told that it was kratom,” Makary read the letter aloud. “He said that he took the pill and became addicted, and should have done his research. He died the night he took two 20 mg 7-OH pills. The wrapper was at his bedside. There were no other drugs or alcohol in the house.”

While kratom has been widely used in the U.S. for some time, concentrated 7-OH has only risen in popularity within the last five years. Ultimately, the FDA is moving to stop the substance from causing more widespread harm before it’s too late.

And it’s not just the FDA taking action. Florida is leading the way on the state level. Earlier this month, Florida AG James Uthmeier announced an emergency rule to classify 7-OH as a Schedule I controlled substance. GOP Gov. Mike DeWine has also urged the Ohio Board of Pharmacy to designate synthetic and natural kratom compounds as illegal drugs. Additionally, a number of other states have moved to add age restrictions for 7-OH or limitations on concentrations of the compound.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is currently reviewing the FDA’s recommendation to effectively ban 7-OH.

School choice advocate Erika Donalds said that students will be better off when parents have better access to what their kids are learning and when schools are held accountable for veering away from what should be taught.

Donalds, the wife of Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL), sat down with The Daily Wire’s Tim Rice and Mary Margaret Olohan for an interview at Turning Point USA’s 2025 AmFest, the first one held without the group’s late founder, Charlie Kirk.

Donalds began by saying that she was excited to see so many people of all ages attending breakout sessions at the conference that were devoted to reforming education — and how fixing what was wrong with education in the United States played into saving the republic as well.

“President Trump is doing exactly what he promised the American people,” Donalds said of President Donald Trump’s plan to first dismantle the Department of Education as a federal entity and then return power to the schools and the states. “He’s going to return that power not just to the states, but expand school choice and give power to the parents to make decisions on behalf of their children.”

Donalds praised Education Secretary Linda McMahon, saying that she had been instrumental in delivering on Trump’s promises.

The conversation turned to charter schools — several of which Donalds has had a hand in founding — and she said that they can serve as valuable school choice options, especially in areas where private schools are too expensive or otherwise inaccessible. She said that even with advances in school choice, she saw a major role for charter schools to partner with Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and to offer more “modular style” classes.

In her home state, Donalds noted, charter schools were already adapting to the changing educational landscape by offering “individual courses and extracurricular activities that families can access using their ESA dollars.”

Responding to a question from Olohan, who noted she was homeschooled for a time herself, Donalds said that the number of families homeschooling in the United States was higher than it had ever been — and that even more families indicated that they’d like to homeschool if they could. Donald made it clear that one of her goals was to help families remove as many of the barriers preventing potential homeschoolers from moving forward as possible.

Rice then raised the issue of artificial intelligence — and how the knee-jerk reaction is often to keep AI out of schools because students will obviously use it to cheat — but Donalds argued that she believed there was certainly room for AI in education.

There should certainly be guard rails in place, Donalds argued, but AI could be used to find gaps in education and help children to succeed who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

“We need guardrails and we need parents to have visibility into what’s going on in the AI used in their classrooms,” she said. “Once those guardrails are in place, I believe AI can absolutely help with the abysmal academic results in this country.”

She went on to explain that AI could help a child struggling with reading by identifying the particular concept that was causing the hang-up and tailoring a curriculum to the child’s needs. The same could be done with other subjects, she said, giving the example of a child having difficulty with algebra and saying that AI could identify where they were going wrong — even if it was a skill they should have picked up in elementary school.

The remainder of the interview focused on ideological and cultural issues seeping into the education system and how expanding parental rights and access to resources and curriculum were the best guard against that.

“We want to make sure that when students are graduating 12th grade that they are civically literate,” Donalds said, arguing that if America’s young people did not understand how the founders had built the country or why the government had been set up the way that it had, they would be unable to defend it in the future.