Grief-stricken parents warn others their kids died from common ‘all-natural’ substance

As the U.S. Food & Drug Administration acted to restrict certain kratom products, grieving mothers addressed the real consequences the “all-natural” substances had after losing their sons.

While the distrust in the medical industry was undoubtedly enhanced as a result of the positions taken in response to COVID, resistance to pharmacological intervention had long existed to some varying extents. After their own sons had perished in seeking holistic alternatives to treat personal ailments, mothers Pam Mauldin and Jennifer Young spoke with the New York Post to increase awareness about the dangers of addictive versions of kratom.

“I have to go to the cemetery, and I hate going to the cemetery. He shouldn’t be there,” Mauldin told the newspaper, having recounted the loss of her 37-year-old son, Jordan McKibban, who wouldn’t take ibuprofen but instead used kratom to ease the pain of his arthritis because it was “all-natural.”

In April 2022, she had been the one to break down the door to her son’s bathroom and desperately attempt CPR on him after finding him unresponsive. The autopsy later revealed the compound mitragynine in the kratom he’d consumed with lemonade earlier in the day had led to McKibban’s death.

“I’ve lost my son. I’ve lost my grandchildren that I could have had, I’ve lost watching him walk down that aisle, watching him have a life that I get to watch with my other kids,” said Mauldin, who recounted that her son’s “one big desire” to have a family was becoming more of a reality as a relationship he was in had gotten serious. “I’ve lost enjoying these years with him.”

In the wake of McKibban’s death, Mauldin had filed a wrongful death lawsuit alleging kratom is 63 times deadlier than other “natural” products, a point that left her troubled by government inaction on the substance.

“I find it so frustrating when I get a recall from Costco over lettuce or they have a recall over some potato chip … and they pull it all off the market,” she told the Post. “There have been hundreds of people killed from this, and they don’t pull it. The government doesn’t step in.”

As it happened, last week, alongside FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R), Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the concentrated variety of synthetic kratom, 7-hydroxymitragynine, also known as 7-OH or “gas station heroin,” would be recommended to be treated as a Schedule I controlled substance.

We’re taking action on 7-OH as a critical step in the fight against opioid addiction. We will protect our youth and restore the health of our nation. This is how we Make America Healthy Again. Thank you @DrMakaryFDA and @SenMullin for championing this issue. pic.twitter.com/wGLp57RUOi

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) July 30, 2025

“7-OH is an opioid that can be more potent than morphine. We need regulation and public education to prevent another wave of the opioid epidemic,” Makary said in the press release while Kennedy had asserted, “We will protect the health of our nation’s youth as we advance our mission to Make America Healthy Again.”

Further outlining the danger, University of Minnesota associate professor Dr. Robert Levy explained to the Post that 7-OH “is much more addictive and much more problematic.”

“There’s always been concern around kratom because if you take enough of it, kratom does act like an opioid, and people can become addicted to it and have withdrawal from it and overdose on it and ruin their lives on it, like anybody else that has a substance use disorder.”

“The level of kratom shocked me. It overwhelmed me. It made my gut sick,” Young said after finding 20 packs of kratom in her 27-year-old son Johnny Loring’s room after he’d died with deadly levels of mitragynine and gabapentin in his system on a family trip.

“I didn’t realize it was so addicting,” she said, having detailed the internet research she’d done when first learning her son was using the product. “I saw it’s this ‘all-natural, safe alternative,’ and then people are like, ‘It’s wonderful, it saved my life, helps with my anxiety, helps with my pain, it’s a cure-all. So I didn’t really think it was that bad.”

While she also pursued a wrongful death lawsuit two years after a Florida family was awarded $11 million over the 2021 death of a mother of four who’d taken kratom, Florida emergency medicine Dr. Michael Greco told the Post poison control centers have been experiencing increased calls of kratom exposure after more than 1,800 calls had been documented between 2011 and 2017

“You get sweating, you get dizziness, you get very high blood pressure or elevated heart rate,” he explained, while some experience “agitation, sometimes even psychosis,” while others “might be totally unresponsive or just extremely drowsy and out of it.”

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn’t researching current events and their impacts, you’ll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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