When Charles Bryan stopped drinking alcohol, he wished for an alternative beverage suited to events like weddings or birthday parties. “I didn’t have a desire to get wasted, but to have a mood boost or a social lubricant,” Bryan, a personal trainer in his 40s based in New York, said.

In early 2023, he started seeing sponsored Instagram posts for Feel Free, a drink made by Botanic Tonics that contains kava and kratom. The ads depicted small azure bottles with white cursive script and depictions of a glamorous alcohol-free life.

Kratom is a tree found in south-east Asia, where people have long been consuming its leaves in dried or tea form for pain relief and stimulating effects. It’s also sold in the United States as an unregulated supplement. Of late, it has also appeared in several beverages that have wide appeal in the wellness market.

Bryan didn’t like non-alcoholic beers, but he had tried kava, a plant derivative often used for relaxation. He bought his first Feel Free, currently only available in the US, in March that year at his favorite health food store, the same place he purchases other supplements, like magnesium or ashwagandha.

At first, Bryan drank Feel Free at special occasions. Then, over several months, he started to consume it more often. Eventually, he was drinking it every day. The suggested dose is half a bottle, or 1oz, in 24 hours. Bryan was drinking the full bottle, then two, then three a day. A nagging feeling grew about how many he was drinking.

“At night I would pray and meditate, and be like, ‘Tomorrow, I’m not going to get one,’” he said. “By noon, my nose would start running and I would get a crazy headache. I would get extremely lethargic and start feeling flu-like symptoms. That’s when I knew something was really up.”

In early June, Jasmine Adeoye, a 29-year-old who lives in Austin, posted a video on TikTok. “Hi guys, I finally feel comfortable enough opening up about an addiction I’ve been struggling with,” she began. Just a few months earlier, she had been drinking several bottles of Feel Free a day, and found it very difficult to stop. In the Quittingfeelfree subreddit, which has more than 2,000 members, people share similar stories.

A class action lawsuit is under way, claiming that Botanic Tonics had advertised the product “as a safe, sober and healthy alternative to alcohol” while not being clear about kratom’s side effects. Earlier this year, the Carolina News and Reporter reported Feel Free had changed its minimum age for consumption to 21 two days after the publication revealed the beverage was popular with college students. Feel Free has also changed its labeling, Aaron Henninger, a spokesperson for Botanic Tonics, said over email.

“Leaf kratom is clearly listed as a key botanical ingredient in ‘feel free CLASSIC’ on the current product label and various pages on our website,” he said. Kratom appears on the back ingredient panel but is not listed on the front of the bottle. One current variant of the drink, the Feel Free tonic, does not contain kratom.

As Zoë Bernard wrote recently in Punch, Feel Free hit the market during the rise of the “sober curious” movement, and an explosion of so-called “functional” beverages; sales of such items increased 54% to $9.2bn between March 2020 and March 2024. Such drinks purport to improve your wellbeing: for instance, claiming to help your gut, calm your anxiety, wake you up, boost your mood and improve your focus, thanks to a wide spectrum of added ingredients like prebiotic fiber, probiotics, vitamins, caffeine, “adaptogens”, CBD, THC, kava and now kratom.

People often believe that anything “natural” is automatically safer and healthier. When a beverage containing kratom is marketed as a wellness tonic, consumers can be unaware of what they’re really consuming.

“It felt safe,” Bryan said. “Where I first purchased it was an environment that I trusted. This is where I come to buy health-related stuff, not stuff that’s risky.”

Adeoye heard about Feel Free on Lauryn Bosstick’s lifestyle podcast, The Skinny Confidential. Adeoye had recently stopped drinking alcohol, and “was really into making mocktails”, she told me.

In the summer of 2022, she bought Feel Free at a CBD store in Austin. She had previously seen the little blue bottles at a “wholesome organic food spot that has smoothie bowls and things like that”, Adeoye said. Her first one made her dizzy and nauseous. “I didn’t even know what kratom was.” But she kept hearing about Feel Free on podcasts and social media, and in the fall, decided to try it again. This time, she liked how it made her feel.

“It was not an instant addiction by any means,” she said – more of a “super slow snowball effect”. She drank it before going out to dinner with friends, to bars or going out dancing. Over the course of a year, she began to drink it before or at work. Thinking the two beverages were similar, she “started substituting it for coffee”, she said.

Around November 2023, Adeoye noticed that she would feel sad if she didn’t drink Feel Free. Physical symptoms followed in February this year. When she woke up, she would have headaches, fatigue or feel sick unless she had a Feel Free. Soon, she was drinking upwards of eight bottles a day. “I couldn’t not have it in my system at any point because I would just start to physically feel ill,” she said.

The active chemical ingredient in kratom is mitragynine, explained Oliver Grundmann, a clinical professor at the College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida, who has co-authored surveys of kratom use in the US. Online, kratom is often referred to as an opioid – mitragynine does interact with opioid receptors, but not in exactly the same way as drugs like heroin or fentanyl. It’s what is called a partial agonist, which means while it binds to opioid receptors, it doesn’t produce the full opioid effect.

Mitragynine activates pathways that lead to reduction of pain, like opioids do. But it doesn’t appear to engage pathways associated with respiratory depression, which in drugs like morphine and fentanyl can lead to adverse effects. “You don’t get the full effect, even once you increase the dose,” Grundmann said.

While the Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning about kratom, it isn’t scheduled by the Drug Enforcement Administration, because there’s not enough scientific data on it to do so, said Kirsten Smith, a kratom researcher and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University who has collaborated with Grundmann. However, existing studies show that it does have a risk for physical dependence, and there is little disagreement among experts that it can lead to physical dependence.

“At this point, there should be a warning that consuming kratom-containing products can cause physical dependence when consumed regularly,” Smith said.

Studies indicate that ingesting it more than three times a day increases the risk of developing dependence. “It’s not necessarily how much you take at one time, but how often you take it in a given day,” Grundmann said.

There has been minimal research on kratom; more is under way. But surveys about kratom use have revealed that some people take it to help with opioid withdrawal. Harm reductionists have warned that banning it would obstruct access to a safer alternative to opioid drugs.

It is harder to assess kratom’s effects when mixed with another substance like kava or caffeine, especially in a consumer product, Grundmann said. Dosages of mitragynine also vary in different products. The dried leaf usually contains 2% of mitragynine, but extracts can contain up to 40%. In 2022, Feel Free started listing its mitragynine content: 20mg for a half bottle.

“We make a powerful product,” said Henninger, the Botanic Tonics spokesperson. “That product works for a lot of people, but it doesn’t work for everyone.” He said there had been an “important evolution” in communications about the product since its launch, including updated information about serving sizes, active ingredients and age restrictions.

JW Ross, the creator of Feel Free, has previously commented on the physical dependence risk of his product. In a 2023 interview, he said: “Anything that makes you feel good can be habit-forming: sugar, sex, whatever. And some people are going to overindulge. That’s not really the question you should ask. The question you should ask is, if I consume this on a regular basis is it going to hurt me?”

In January, Botanic Tonics updated Feel Free’s back label to read: “This product contains leaf kratom which, like caffeine and alcohol, can become habit-forming and harmful to your health if consumed irresponsibly. Consider avoiding any potentially habit-forming substances if you have a history of substance abuse.”

Smith said she didn’t think about substances in terms of whether they were “dangerous” or “safe”. Instead, she considers risk and uncertainty. “Risk is defined by uncertainty,” she said. “The less we know about something, the more risky it is just inherently, even if it’s not dangerous.” She is working on a supervised withdrawal study at Johns Hopkins, the first looking at how ceasing to take kratom can affect people.

“None of us actually think kratom should be prohibited,” Smith said. “We think it should be regulated. Clearly the regulatory space is a hellscape of uncertainty at this point for consumers.”

The context in which people encounter Feel Free matters, because it influences what they think the product is for, and what it might do. The Feel Free bottle looks like an energy shot, in size and shape. It’s sold in health food stores or given out at sport events.

Last year, Feel Free was distributed at the University of Texas at Austin’s annual Longhorn Run. Claire Zagorski, a PhD student in the translational science program and a paramedic who has worked in harm reduction, was copied on a concerned email about students who had felt sick after.

“There’s a fundamental premise in harm reduction that it’s not about the substance – it’s that you have to know what you’re getting,” Zagorski said. She noted that her concern was not about the beverage containing kratom, but rather with the fact that it hadn’t been easy to know kratom was an ingredient – for instance, you’d have to look at the back of the bottle to find out.

I asked Zagorski about the warning about habit-forming substances Feel Free added to its label. “Technically, they’re not wrong,” she said. “If you use any substance responsibly, whatever that means for you, with proper guidance, your ability to minimize its harm is maximized.” But people don’t know very much about kratom. “It’s a totally new substance to most people,” she said.

Drinks like Feel Free led Adeoye to reconsider what a drug is. “It is tricky navigating sobriety, because I fully thought I was sober at the beginning of taking Feel Free,” she said. In March, she got engaged, and with her mom in town and her fiance, she opened up about her dependence. They helped her through the withdrawals, and she hasn’t had a Feel Free since.

Zagorski’s colleague recently saw a patient with an alcohol use disorder. He was prescribed naltrexone for cravings and had a bad reaction. Naltrexone blocks opioids; his doctor realized he was going through the physical symptoms of withdrawal, even though he said he had never taken opioids before. Eventually, it emerged that he had been taking Feel Free as a pre-workout drink, because he saw an influencer doing that online. “He was very, very frustrated, and felt very defeated,” Zagorski said.

Feel Free is still marketed as a wellness product. On the brand’s Instagram page, the bottles sit next to beaches, pools, plants or gym equipment. Other kava and kratom drinks, like Shot of Joy, follow a similar model. The product page for Shot of Joy’s Classic beverage says: “Experience a wave of peaceful contentment that washes over you, leaving you feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and happy.”

“Some alcohol alternatives are totally benign,” Zagorski said. “But the fact that this is a huge booming industry and we don’t have any kind of regulation around supplements is now proving to be a problem. Everything that we consume is chemicals. And we’re starting to see that the line between good chemical and bad chemical is actually quite fuzzy.”

In the spring of 2024, Bryan went out of state for a funeral. He thought the trip would give him a chance to stop drinking Feel Free. But the physical symptoms overwhelmed him, and he ended up driving to a store 20 miles away to buy a bottle.

At the end of June, his fiancee was going out of town for two weeks, and Bryan resolved to make it through the physical symptoms no matter what. There are ongoing studies on kratom withdrawal but little guidance on how to quit. “I stocked up on supplements and made arrangements and made a whole plan for just going through detox,” he said. “I still wasn’t prepared.”

Bryan had flu-like symptoms, anxiety, extreme lethargy, nausea and headaches. “At night, restless leg syndrome would kick in really bad and cause insomnia,” Bryan said. “I didn’t sleep at all, not 10 minutes, for four days straight. I can deal with the physical discomfort, but I couldn’t deal with not sleeping.”

He ended up buying a Feel Free so that he could sleep. Now, he is trying to taper again using kratom capsules in gradually decreasing amounts. When we spoke, he took deep breaths and had to pause to wipe away tears. “I don’t think that it should be illegal or that people shouldn’t have access to it,” he said. “I just think people should know what they’re getting into.”