With the strict regulations on life saving (yes, life saving. chronic pain patients have started committing suicide du to lack of pain relief, aka TORTURE) opioids, many have turned to kratom to avoid having to resort to street drugs like fentanyl or heroin. If you want to increase overdose deaths by illegal drugs then go ahead and take away the last remaining legal options for people with severe, intractable chronic pain. the number of people suffering from chronic pain has increased drastically since covid, I myself had mild hypermobile disorder related pain, until I got covid in 2021 (I was fully vaccinated). I now have severe HSD related pain, and sometimes the only way I can sleep is to take kratom. It is well documented that over-regulation of drug use and drug-users results in more deaths and more addiction from people who could otherwise use RX or OTC drugs to help their issues. I'm all for regulating kratom purity and getting rid of adulterants, but illegal using it entirely will continue to waste taxpayer money on mass incarceration and will continue to make it so that people buying drugs can never truly know what is in them, resulting in higher rates of accidental overdose.  higher rates of avoidable hospitalization of people who can't afford it (again, wasting taxpayer money) and higher rates of addiction in people who intend to take one drug (such as kratom or marijuana) and end up with something laced with fentanyl, meth, or any number of highly addictive and dangerous substances that the user never intended to ingest. This is just the follow up to anti-marijuana laws, and if passed will follow the same pattern of useless incarceration, unsafe and adulterated/laced drugs, and little to no reduction of actual usage. We as a society can be better than this. We know that harm reduction works in ways that banning never does. and taking a drug that is already being used in a harm reducing way and banning it will have very poor results.