It's important to support our fellow Oklahomans when they make it to the big leagues. So next time you're checking out at QuikTrip, look between the scratchers and the Swishers for the little blue bottle of Feel Free: an all-natural kratom tonic from Botanic Tonics out of Broken Arrow, whose investors include our very own plumber-cum-senator-cum-Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin.
Mullin's stake in Botanic Tonics is worth as much as $1 million and was acquired at a date his disclosure declines to mention, according to a recent investigation published by the New York Times. But Mullin is merely an investor. The mastermind behind the little blue bottle is Jerry W. Ross, wellness entrepreneur. He used to go by a different name: Jerry D. Cash (no relation to yours truly, and yes, I double-checked).
In 2010, Ross né Cash pled guilty to “concealing diversion” (legalese for stealing and then covering up the stealing) of $10 million from Quest, the energy company where he was chief executive. Sentenced to 9 years in federal prison, Ross served less than 3 after, in his convenient telling, exposing a threat against a federal judge and entering the witness protection program. He reemerged with a new name and a kratom company.
Kratom comes from Mitragyna speciosa, a Southeast Asian tree whose leaves bind to the same brain receptors as opioids. Indigenous communities have brewed it for centuries; Americans discovered it in the 2010s, just as actual opioids got harder to acquire, and within a few years it joined vape juice and CBD to form a holy trinity of products available in every smoke shop in Oklahoma. And as with every natural drug American capitalists discover, the humble leaf soon gave way to concentrated extracts and synthetics that mimic opioids with ever-greater fidelity, dependency included.
Last July, while still a senator, Mullin appeared at an FDA press conference on stricter regulation of synthetic kratom, speaking in emotional terms on how addiction has affected his family.
Behind the scenes, he was reportedly urging HHS officials to remove warnings from the FDA website about kratom’s risks of liver toxicity, seizures and substance use disorder; the agency deleted select links but kept the side effect warnings. Mullin argued that synthetic products were exploiting a regulatory “loophole”—one so large, we'd soon learn, you could drive a Mullin Plumbing van straight through it.
Mullin’s stake was still undisclosed, but Ross was already hard at work creating a paper trail of conflicts of interest, donating nearly $150,000 to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s defunct presidential campaign weeks before Trump’s inauguration and telling friends that he was “working on a plan for Bobby.”