Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin continues to retain an investment in a company that manufactures an energy drink containing an opioid-like drug.
And, according to Tom Latchem and Will Neal of PunchUp, the founder of the company is a convicted felon who has admitted that the main ingredient is easy for unsuspecting consumers to abuse.
According to the report, founder J.W. Ross built Botanic Tonics into one of America's fastest-growing wellness brands by marketing a message of natural recovery from addiction. His flagship product, Feel Free, combines kratom and kava—plant-based compounds that "act on the brain’s opioid receptors to produce pain relief and, depending on the dose, either a stimulant-like lift or sedation." The result is a product designed to exploit the same neurological pathways that make opioids addictive.
Products containing synthetic kratom have earned the street name "gas station heroin" because of its habit-forming properties and ease of availability. Representatives of Feel Free claim the drink uses natural kratom leaf, and so the nickname doesn't apply to their product.
Ross has himself described deliberately testing abusive dosages on himself before launching the product. "I purposely did abusive levels of them for a period of like three or four months and checked my blood chemistry," he boasted on a podcast, "because I knew that some people would abuse it."
Nonetheless, Mullin invested up to $1 million in this operation—and then championed a federal crackdown in early July that spared Feel Free while targeting its competitors that use the synthetic version of the product.
According to the report, although there are no overt ties between the two men, both Mullin and Ross are Oklahoma businessmen. Mullin's family built their fortune on a plumbing company in Broken Arrow—the same town where Botanic Tonics operates its manufacturing plant.
"In February 2010, Cash pleaded guilty to a federal charge of falsely certifying the company’s financial controls. That November, U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot sentenced him to nine years in federal prison and ordered him to repay $5 million, rebuking him, according to the FBI’s own account of the hearing, for the 'sheer arrogance' of his conduct. The SEC permanently barred him from serving as an officer or director of any public company," PunchUp is reporting.
The DHS declined to answer questions about whether Mullin and Ross have ever met or communicated. Botanic Tonics similarly refused to respond.
