Sophros Recovery CEO Nick Padlo said he is seeing more and more patients seeking treatment for kratom addiction.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A Jacksonville recovery center is sounding the alarm about a popular product found at gas stations and vape shops: kratom.
Nick Padlo is the CEO of Sophros Recovery in Jacksonville. He said his facility has seen an increase in people seeking treatment for kratom addiction.
“Two or three years ago we would see in or two people a month maybe come in with kratom, and it normally wasn’t their drug of choice. Now we’re seeing anywhere from five to 10 people come in citing kratom as their drug of choice,” Padlo explained.
Padlo added someone at their facility recently suffered an overdose after ingesting kratom.
“We actually had an overdose at our facility and the client was not breathing, and we had to use Narcan to bring him back as a result of something that was purchased at a local gas station,” Padlo said.
Kratom comes from a tree native to Southeast Asia. Its leaves are made into teas and powders, and are often used to treat pain, anxiety, and depression; however, Padlo said kratom is not what it used to be.
“When kratom came to America, we started to say what in the plant is actually causing the effect. Now let’s take that out and concentrate it and so a lot of the things that you see now are not the original kratom leaf, but they’re actually a compounded version of the most psychoactive component of the plant,” Padlo explained.
Padlo told First Coast News the effects of kratom in a concentrated form can act like morphine, heroin, and even fentanyl. The withdrawal symptoms are similar to those drugs, too.
It is a feeling Jonathan Arnett knows all too well. Arnett grew up in Nassau County. He followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and became a pilot. Arnett said everything changed when he became addicted to heroin.
“It almost destroyed my family, it did destroy my family. I was on the verge of divorce. I wasn’t able to see my son. I was on supervised visits to the court. I had lost flying altogether,” Arnett said.
Arnett told First Coast News he tried everything to stop using heroin, even kratom.
“I had tried to get sober a couple of different times along the way. And one time I would use kratom as like a replacement for heroin. It was basically in my mind harm reduction. If I can do this instead of that, it’s better. But what always happened was I wound right back up with my drug of choice at the end of the day,” Arnett said.
Padlo said one of the biggest problems is the fact that Kratom can be found at many gas stations and vape shops, but not all the products are properly labeled.
“It’s hard to tell the difference between something that’s just a normal kratom product or something that’s a 7-OH, which has been compared to morphine,” Padlo explained.
That 7-OH concentrate has been the subject of a warning by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier also issued an emergency rule in August 2025 which banned the commercial sale of 7-OH products and classified 7-OH a Schedule 1 drug.
The Florida Department of Agriculture recently issued a similar emergency rule requiring all products with 7-OH to be clearly labeled.
“When someone thinks they might be taking the same thing that they took yesterday, this is kratom, that’s kratom, they might not even know that what they’re taking today is 50 times stronger than what they took yesterday,” Padlo explained.
Arnett is now in recovery and working to get his pilots license back so he can get back to doing what he loves. He is currently in the Federal Aviation Administration’s Human Intervention Motivation Study (HIMS) program.
“You look at my life right now, I’m a few months away from getting my wings back. I saved a marriage that was on the verge of divorce that she was walking out of the door. She’s back. The judge just took me off supervised visits, so I’m able to be a dad. If recovery doesn’t do anything else for me, it gave me my whole life back in nine months,” Arnett said.
He cautions others struggling with addiction about the dangers of turning to kratom.
“I would call it a very sketchy road to go down to think that you can use kratom successfully because I tried doing everything, other than getting sober and fully surrendering, and it never worked whether it was prescription pills, kratom, and until I surrendered and started getting a sponsor and working through the steps, did my life change,” Arnett said.
The ban on 7-OH products is set to expire in June and the legislature failed to pass the Florida Kratom Consumer Protection Act during the 2026 legislative session. Padlo is now calling on lawmakers and federal regulators to create real change when it comes to the sale of kratom.
“How do we start to talk to the legislature, how do we start to talk to the FDA about starting to really regulate this product so that there’s clear labeling so that dosages are clear and so that some of these synthetic compounds that are the most dangerous are no longer on the shelves,” Padlo said.