From the outside, Amber Friese’s marriage seemed unshakable: two decades together, children, a home in Maricopa and the quiet rhythm of a family finding its way.

Over the last four years, a $10 blue bottle from a Circle K was dismantling it. 

It started with a casual recommendation from a life coach to her husband: Skip prescription painkillers, avoid opioids and instead try a “natural” mood enhancer made from kava and kratom. Kratom, a plant whose compounds bind to the brain’s opioid receptors, can bring mild relaxation for some. For Friese’s husband, it brought relentless addiction. 

“He’d wake up in the middle of the night shaking, take a drink, and go back to bed,” Friese said. “By the end, he wasn’t even getting high. He just needed it to feel normal.” 

Within months, his use ballooned to more than $100 a day. Bank accounts quickly emptied. Family memorabilia was pawned to make up the deficit, to buy more kratom. Friese pulled credit cards from her husband’s wallet and monitored bank accounts daily. His addiction found workarounds, she said.   

The evidence was everywhere: hundreds of empty blue bottles tucked behind TVs, in drawers, in boxes in the garage.

When he tried to quit, the withdrawals hit hard: restless legs, vomiting, shaking, and what he described as “crawling out of my skin.” Twice, Friese sent him to rehab, once in-state and once in Wisconsin, where kratom is illegal. He’s now in a 90-day program in California. 

Friese is speaking publicly about her family’s experience for the first time.  

“This isn’t just about my family,” she told InMaricopa in an interview this week. “It’s about the next kid who picks this up at a gas station thinking it’s like an energy drink. They have no idea what it can do to them.”

Arizona’s Kratom Consumer Protection Act makes it illegal to sell kratom to anyone under 18 and limits how much of a powerful chemical called 7-OH can be in it. By Arizona law, 7-OH, a much stronger version of kratom, can make up no more than 2% of the product.

InMaricopa went shopping at four city vape shops. Reporters purchased three containers of concentrated 7-OH products, whose labels appear to exceed that legal limit. 

“Do you get take this stuff?” asked a secret shopper.  

“No, I stay away from it,” replied a clerk at one of the vape stores in Maricopa as he rang up the transaction. “People get addicted to it.” 

The American Kratom Association says the distinction between natural kratom and 7-OH products is crucial.  

“7-OH products are highly concentrated, chemically altered isolates of a minor metabolite found only in trace amounts in natural kratom,” said Mac Haddow, the AKA’s senior policy fellow. “They do not occur in meaningful concentrations in nature. These are created through chemical conversion processes that result in a substance with a potency and risk profile far exceeding that of natural kratom.” 

The group supports the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ recommendation for the Drug Enforcement Administration to classify 7-OH as a Schedule I controlled substance. It opposes any ban on natural kratom. 

“Pure kratom, when manufactured properly, has a naturally balanced alkaloid profile that significantly limits potency,” Haddow said. “Consumers are being misled by retailers claiming these chemically altered products are kratom. They are not.” 

Regulating and enforcing 7-OH limits in Arizona falls to the state Department of Health Services, with possible involvement from the Attorney General’s Office. Like other local police departments, Maricopa police does not conduct targeted enforcement unless tasked by the state or responding to a specific threat. 

The Arizona DHS did not return repeat requests for comment on their enforcement, or lack thereof.

Friese says she’s prepared to take her fight to lawmakers or even corporate headquarters of retailers selling the drinks.  

“If something good can come out of what my family has been through,” she said, “it’s making sure someone else doesn’t lose their family over a drink you can buy with your gas.”