A previous article on The Kratom Herald discussed how the American Kratom Association (AKA) spokesperson Mac Haddow owns a lobbying firm called Upstream Consulting, and Upstream Consulting has been doing lobbying work for the AKA while simultaneously lobbying for anti-Kratom organizations including Big Pharma companies and the Natural Products Association (NPA). Literally, the firm that Haddow owns has received $380,000 in the past 4 years from the NPA, which is an aggressively anti-Kratom organization that almost got Kratom banned in 2016.
The story goes deeper than that however. Apparently, Haddow played a major role in passing the Dietary Supplement Health And Education Act (DSHEA), which is the same law that the FDA is leveraging to seize tremendous amount of Kratom at the borders via an import alert, and also the same law that the FDA uses to justify U.S. Marshall raids on Kratom vendors, such as the seizure of 34,000 kilos of Kratom from a vendor in May.
Indeed, in the below screenshot you can see a picture of Mac receiving a Lifetime Achievement award for his efforts in helping to pass the DSHEA, and right under that you can see Mac personally verifying the situation. This screenshot is from a Kratom group that Haddow frequents.
Even worse, in the picture Haddow is receiving the reward from Doctor Fabricant, the aggressively anti-Kratom leader of the NPA. Indeed, when Kratom was almost banned in 2016, the NPA said that banning Kratom was not enough, and that any Kratom users and vendors needed to be heavily attacked by law enforcement.
Further verification of Haddow’s and Doctor Fabricant’s close relationship is the below tweet, where Fabricant is bestowing a reward upon Haddow for helping out the NPA so much.
This topic will be covered more in-depth in another article.
Back to the point of this article, there is no doubt that Haddow played a big role in getting the DSHEA passed, a law which is being used as precedent for the FDA to declare Kratom illegal.
Essentially, due to the DSHEA, Kratom is considered a new dietary ingredient (NDI), and all NDIs are illegal until they get approved by the FDA. And since the FDA will never approve Kratom, this puts Kratom in a permanent state of being illegal.
Indeed, the FDA used the DSHEA to establish the import alert, which causes tremendous amounts of Kratom to be seized by Customs at the border. The import alert references the DSHEA, saying “When marketed as a dietary ingredient, FDA also considers kratom to be a new dietary ingredient under section 413(d) of the Act [21 U.S.C. 350b(d)] because, to the best of the agency’s knowledge, there is no information demonstrating that this substance was marketed as a dietary ingredient in the United States before October 15, 1994… kratom and kratom-containing dietary supplements and bulk dietary ingredients are adulterated under section 402(f)(1)(B) of the Act [21 U.S.C. 342(f)(1)(B)], because they contain a new dietary ingredient for which there is inadequate information to provide reasonable assurance that such ingredient does not present a significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury”.
Furthermore, in the recent U.S. Marshalls raid on a Kratom vendor, which resulted in the seizure of 34,000 Kilos of Kratom, the FDA used the same DSHEA-based justification.
Thus, Haddow played a major role in passing the DSHEA, the same law which is being used to attack the Kratom industry. In-part due to Haddow’s efforts on the DSHEA, untold millions of dollars of Kratom have been seized by the FDA, and these seizures are intensifying as of this writing.
All things considered, it is absurd that the American Kratom Association’s spokesperson is the same guy who played a big role in passing a law which is terrorizing the Kratom industry. To make an analogy, Haddow being the spokesperson for a pro-Kratom organization is like putting a Big Tobacco CEO in charge of an anti-smoking advocacy group.
Further, adding up everything that Haddow has done, Haddow has done far more damage to Kratom’s legality than he has helped.
Stay tuned to The Kratom Herald, the rabbit hole goes even deeper than this, and more articles are coming.
Share on Facebook
Tweet
Copyright The Kratom Herald© All rights reserved. | Newsphere by AF themes.
