TOLEDO, Ohio (WTVG) — Toledo City Council voted Wednesday to ban sales of synthetic kratom while allowing the natural leaf to continue to be sold.

The decision comes weeks after the Toledo-Lucas County Health Department issued a public health notice about kratom. The department warned that, although kratom is often marketed as a natural remedy for pain, anxiety or fatigue, it carries significant health risks and can act like an opioid. Products that include kratom may claim to produce a “natural high” or be marketed as an “energy booster,” but those claims are misleading, the health department said.

Health experts have cautioned against kratom, linking it to serious health concerns. “It behaves an awful lot like an opioid. You can become addicted to it; it can create detrimental side effects, seizures, liver damage. People do become addicted. We have neonatal outcomes from this too; babies are born addicted to it,” Amy Brown, a Registered Environmental Health Specialist with the Toledo-Lucas County Health Department, previously told 13 Action News.

Council member Sam Melden also voiced concern about how easily accessible kratom products are. “Most concerning, in my opinion, though, is not just what kratom can do to a user, but it is that it’s so easily available. These vape shops that are all over the community for it to have the word ‘kratom’ in the window advertising it, I don’t know what kind of safeguards are there. Who can go in and just buy that?” Melden previously told 13 Action News.

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