Then money is scarce, Margo Burton and her husband will go without cigarettes. Sometimes her husband has to go weeks without using his cell phone.
But the loss she feels most acutely is when she runs out of an herbal supplement called kratom. She takes two teaspoons of it every three hours to control the debilitating pain caused by endometriosis.
“I need it so I'm not hurting, so I can be a good mother,” said Burton, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mom of a toddler in southeastern Missouri.
So when she read this week's news that the Drug Enforcement Administration will outlaw kratom for two years — putting it into the same legal category as heroin and LSD — she started sobbing. She could hardly talk as she woke her husband up to be consoled.
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