This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 23rd, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown. The DEA is working

to quickly and if they can quietly ban a plant called Cratum. There haven't been any clinical

studies of the plant plant but it has shown

promise at helping people with opioid and other addictions. Andrew Turner is a veteran who

suffers from post-traumatic stress, is a former guard at Guantanamo Bay, and a current user of

Cratum. He'd like to see it stay legal. We spoke last week.

Cratum is a tree. It's the way you get it here in the US is a crushed leaf powdered form, but it

starts out on a tree in Southeast Asia. There's farmers in Indonesia and Malaysia and Vietnam that

picked the leaves, dried them out, break them down into their natural form of, you know, as just a powdered or crushed leaf form so you can make it into a tea and ship it over here to the U.S.

It's in the, the trees in the same family as the coffee tree, but it's not exactly the same.

It's a similar tree to that.

So in traditional medicine, it's been used for some time, but it's people just chewing the leaves.

Thousands of years. Like a coca leaf. Yes, sir.

So what's the difference between you take that and turn it into a powder?

Well, so because it's got to be imported here to the U.S.

the natural form typically seems to break down to where it doesn't over time like when they ship it over here

It just doesn't have the advantage of being able to pick it off the tree and chew it like you could if you were in Indonesia or Malaysia and so they have to dry it.

They found they've had to dry it and break it down into this form so people can actually consume it.

All right, so what has the DEA done with respect to this drug and why do you believe they've done what they've done?

So at the beginning of September, the DEA put out a proposal for a ban to make, create

them from completely legal to a Schedule I

substance along with heroin marijuana, LSD and said it time most of us didn't even realize how big of a movement of people out here in America are consuming

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