The family of a Florida woman who died in 2021 after ingesting kratom has been awarded more than $11m from a distributor of the south-east Asian herbal extract that has an opioid-like effect on the brain.
In a ruling finalized Thursday, judge Donald Middlebrooks of the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida, told a company operating as the Kratom Distro to pay damages to the four surviving children of Krystal Talavera as well as her estate.
“There is of course no amount of money that will make up for the pain and suffering that Ms Talavera’s children are enduring because of their mother’s death,” Middlebrooks wrote in court records addressing the sanction against Kratom Distro. “The law nonetheless recognizes that the defendant must pay something, however inadequate.”
Talavera’s oldest son, Devin Filipelli, provided a statement to McClatchy News which expressed hope that his family award would highlight what he called “the dangers of kratom”.
“I am grateful for the judge’s decision, but no amount of money will bring my mom back or numb my pain,” Fileppelli’s statement said.
Kratom Distro’s owner – Sean Michael Harder – told the Guardian on Saturday that he had no comment on Middlebrooks’s judgment or whether he may seek a reversal of it. The judgment was a default one, meaning the company did not try to defend itself in the preceding litigation.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency in 2016 had imposed its strictest restrictions on kratom, which experts say is made from the leaves of an evergreen tree and is often used by people to self-treat pain, anxiety, depression and opioid addiction as well as withdrawal.
There was an intense, immediate public backlash to that approach, however, and it prompted the DEA to rescind its prohibition of kratom, which is sold in stores and online.
The US Food and Drug Administration nonetheless has warned consumers over possible safety and addiction risks associated with kratom, and it has spoken in favor of more research aimed at gaining a better understanding of “the substance and its components”.
Friends of Talavera, a resident of the Florida community of Boynton Beach, introduced her to kratom years before her death. Her family said she regarded it as a safe, natural supplement and had taken some after buying it online from the Kratom Distro when her partner and the father of her youngest child – Biagio Vultaggio – found her unconscious in the living room on 20 June 2021.
The 39-year-old Talavera was face down on the ground next to an open bag of a kratom derivative marketed as a “space dust”, her family has said. Vultaggio called paramedics, and they took Talavera to a hospital. Yet there, she was pronounced dead.
An autopsy later listed Talavera’s cause of death as acute intoxication from mitragynine, a main kratom component. The local coroner whose office performed Talavera’s autopsy wrote in a report that “at high concentrations, mitragynine produces opioid-like effects, such as respiratory failure”.
Filippelli – who had graduated from high school the day before his mother died – later sued the Kratom Distro over Talavera’s death.
According to a statement from the law firm which represented Talavera’s family, Filipelli explained at subsequent court proceedings that the grief he endured over losing his mom derailed his plans for college at the University of Florida.
An ex-husband of Talavera, Benny Flores, added that two sons whom he shared with the late woman were struggling to move on from their mother’s untimely death. One of them “kept asking when his mother was coming back,” the law firm’s news release said.
One of the attorneys for Talavera’s family, Tamara Williams, said in a statement that the judgment won by her clients “should be a wakeup call to the kratom industry”.
Williams’s firm said it had also recently won a $2.5m jury verdict against a kratom manufacturer in Washington state after a separate lawsuit alleging a wrongful death.
A colleague of Williams, Michael Cowgill, called on government officials to take steps “to protect other families from having to deal with unnecessary kratom overdose deaths”.