Musician Brian Setzer of The Stray Cats and Brian Setzer Orchestra told Guitar Player that his comeback to the music business was hampered by a kratom dependency.
“It started innocently enough,” says Setzer… “They advertise it as a safe tonic to give you energy, and it’s not. So that just aggravated the whole thing. I just stopped everything and went away and cleaned out and came back fresh and clean.
The dependency and subsequent recovery at an inpatient clinic came after Setzer was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that temporarily rendered him unable to play guitar.
Both Setzer and the author of the article describe kratom as a “tonic”, suggesting Setzer developed the dependency by ingesting a popular drink available in convenience stores that is a blend of both kratom and kava, two different botanicals from two different cultures that do not have a long history of being co-ingested.
As we’ve stated multiple times on the pages of Kratom Science, there is a risk of dependency with kratom in any form. Dependency has been recorded in countries like Thailand and Malaysia, where kratom has been consumed for centuries in the same form (fresh leaves are chewed or brewed into tea). Dependency is not the same as addiction, which is defined by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) as “characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use despite adverse consequences.” Dependency can occur absent of adverse consequences, for example, in daily coffee drinkers or in diabetics who depend on insulin.
However, the risk of dependency and addiction is heightened when people who have never consumed kratom are initially exposed to kratom via strong, highly-concentrated alkaloid products. The most popular of these products are liquid extract shots and tonics sold in small bottles at convenience stores alongside caffeine shots and other ‘wellness’ products. Many of these tiny, seemingly single-dose bottles contain 3 times the suggested dose.
Due to this aggressive marketing, it’s become commonplace to use the term “kratom” to describe strong liquid shots and tonics, rather than the tree leaf traditionally used for centuries. Since 2023, 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) based products have been marketed in the same manner. 7-OH may carry a greater risk of dependency than strong kratom products, but the science is still preliminary.
Following the 2025 recommendation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that products containing elevated amounts of 7-OH be classified as Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act, certain members of media and lawmakers seemed to be confused by this, and conflated kratom with 7-OH. Some 7-OH vendors have also contributed to the confusion by selling these products as “kratom” and aggressively marketing them to naive consumers similarly to vendors of liquid kratom alkaloid shots and tonics, and selling multiple doses in a single pill.
As a result of years of irresponsible marketing to uneducated consumers of both kratom extracts and 7-OH products, as well as the pursuit of a Schedule I classification, more laws prohibiting the sale and possession of kratom and 7-OH have occurred in 2026 than any other year, both locally and at the state level.
Debates on regulation have been ongoing for years. Some states have required that kratom products be kept behind locked cases, available for purchase only to adults. Many have been advocating for a dispensary and education model, especially for stronger products like liquid shots, tonics, and 7-OH. Groups funded by injury attorneys are advocating for a ban on all kratom. 7-OH Prohibitionists in the kratom community are advocating to criminalize only 7-OH users. These prohibitionists include major kratom lobbying groups that critics argue have financial ties to companies selling popular liquid extract shots and tonics.
Director of NIDA Nora Volkow was once criticized as a drug warrior. In recent years, she has been vocal about the fact that incarceration as a punishment for drug addiction only exacerbates drug problems. “Punitive policies around drugs mark people who use them as criminals,” she wrote in STAT in 2021, “and so contribute to the overwhelming stigma against people contending with an often debilitating and sometimes fatal disorder.”
For his part, Brian Setzer doesn’t attach stigma to his former dependency on kratom alkaloid tonics. With a new Stray Cats album and tour coming up this year, he told Guitar Player:
“I had to go get everything out of my system, really. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about; if anyone has a problem you go and they take care of you. And thank God you can come back.”