UT Austin Handed Out Drink With 'Opioid-like' Ingredient As Poison Calls Climbed [View all]

“This is the viral gas station drink that landed me in rehab,” McKenzie Wisdom announced, pointing to a little blue bottle labelled Feel Free. Wisdom is a wellness influencer, a Bali-trained yoga instructor, and Founder and CEO of Wise & Well. Her small business curates “luxury wellness experiences to restore your body, mind, and spirit,” according to their website. Today, she is the picture of health.

Three years ago, that was not the case. She says she was heavily addicted to Feel Free, taking anywhere from 6 to 7 bottles a day. She was spending a large portion of her income on the drink, and described how her “life began to literally revolve around this substance, it was all I could think about.” Like many addicts, she describes how she could not get out of bed without her drug of choice, and chose to enter rehab after hitting a breaking point: “I was miserable while I was using, and I was miserable when I was going into acute withdrawals.”

Wisdom is one of many health-conscious young people who say they developed an addiction after encountering Feel Free through wellness marketing. In her case, a favorite podcast promoted the drink as a “social lubricant” and “alcohol alternative”—with no mention of its active ingredients: a mixture of kava and kratom. Kratom contains 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), a compound the Texas Department of State Health Services recently classified as “opioid-like,” noting it can be up to 13 times more potent than morphine. Despite these warnings, Feel Free gained mainstream traction across Texas—including on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, where the drink was distributed at student events under official sponsorship.

Botanic Tonics, the makers of Feel Free, began sponsoring Texas Athletics in January of 2022 via a deal brokered by Longhorn Sports Properties. On April 1st, 2023, a Feel Free booth was erected at the Longhorn Run, an annual tradition since 2010. Sana Haider, a student and runner that day, had the foresight to Google the active ingredients after taking a free sample that had been marketed as a “study aid.”

Read more: https://texassignal.com/ut-austin-handed-out-drink-with-opioid-like-ingredient-as-poison-calls-climbed/