KRATOM: IS IT FLORIDA'S NEXT BIG DRUG CRAZE? AND HOW DANGEROUS IS IT

The busty clerk at Grateful J's head shop in Boca Raton holds out a small brown vial. The label reads "Lucky," and she promises the stuff packs a punch. "You'll want to throw it to the back of your throat," she suggests. "I'd say drink the whole thing. Maybe drink half, wait a little bit, and see how you feel."

The potion is kratom, and it's taking center stage in America's next big drug scare. In recent months, MSNBC reported that kratom has sent users to the ER, the Daily called it a "hallucinogenic drug" with "potentially fatal side effects," Forbes asked if it was the next bath salts, and ABC Action News in Tampaclaimed that "it can be more difficult to get off than heroin." Kratom is legal and supported by a vocal community touting its health benefits, but in the wake of bath salts and synthetic pot — drugs tied to scores of gruesome crimes this year, including (probably erroneously) the "Miami Zombie" attack — lawmakers are eager to ban the next big thing.

"It's not a safe high by any means," Frank LoVecchio, director of Phoenix's Banner Good Samaritan Poison and Drug Information Center, says. "If you take enough of it, it has opiate-like activities. It makes people high kind of the same way morphine or heroin would make them high."

But is kratom actually a youth-menacing brain-destroyer or merely another victim of Reefer Madness-like hysteria? That question has become important as the drug finds its way to South Florida and lawmakers debate whether to prohibit it. New bans, after all, cost taxpayers, prosecutors, and cops thousands of dollars and countless hours.

To figure out whether kratom is a dangerous threat, a medical miracle, or just a fun way to get stoned, I forked over $45 for one vial of "Lucky" liquid kratom and one packet of capsules called "Floories Exotics Jackacock" and prepared to experiment.

Before ingesting the stuff, though, I researched its background. Kratom products are made from the leaves of Mitragyna speciosa, a tree that grows in Southeast Asia. Until a few decades ago, it was used mostly in remote places such as rural Malaysia and Thailand, where locals prescribed it for pain relief, sometimes substituting it for opium. 

In the end, my own anecdotal evidence makes it easy to understand why so many people have embraced this plant, whether to treat pain, escape day-to-day anxieties, or simply get a body-tingling buzz. It's clear the effects will vary from person to person, dose to dose, and nobody should go around ingesting 50 grams of this stuff.

It's anyone's guess how long kratom will remain legal in Florida, but it seems certain this plant isn't worth the hysteria likely to follow it.