Meet Dr. Kirsten Smith. She’s a behavioral health scientist at Johns Hopkins, and right now, she’s tackling one of the most polarizing questions in public health: Is kratom dangerous or beneficial?
The herbal product used by millions of Americans is caught in a tug-of-war. Advocates call it a natural remedy, while regulators claim it’s addictive and understudied. Dr. Smith and her team at Johns Hopkins’ Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit are among the first to document kratom’s properties, risks, and potential user dependency.
But before we dive into Smith’s groundbreaking research on kratom, let’s learn a bit about her.
Dr. Kirsten Smith’s expertise on kratom and addiction isn’t just academic—it’s deeply personal. Long before she joined Johns Hopkins as a researcher, she battled addiction. By 23, it escalated to legal trouble and time in federal prison, where she detoxed without support.
That experience drives her work today. Kirsten says, “Because of my past, I might be more interested in and more sympathetic to why people would want to take something to feel better, especially if they’re not getting the care they need or want.” But the turning point was yet to come.
In 2015, while working at a Kentucky addiction clinic, a client confessed that he was using kratom to feel better. “He said it made him feel good but not high,” she remembers. But when the clinic found out the client was using kratom, they expelled him.
The loss shattered Smith. Frustrated by a judgmental and punishment-driven system, she left clinical work. “I didn’t want to spend my life putting Band-Aids on gunshot wounds. I wanted to take the gun apart and figure out how it works,” she says.
Dr. Kirsten Smith’s path to becoming a leading kratom researcher was complex. After earning a master’s in clinical social work from the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. from the University of Louisville, she spent four years at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), studying how opioid medications affect people.
By 2024, she’d shifted focus to kratom’s real-world impact. Leading a major NIDA-funded study, she surveyed hundreds of users and uncovered a paradox. While many relied on kratom for their wellness, hard data on its safety and effectiveness remained scarce. In a review paper, Smith and colleagues tackled the murky process of diagnosing kratom use disorder (KUD), proposing a step-by-step guide for clinicians.
Today, at Johns Hopkins, she runs the Kratom Research Unit—a first-of-its-kind lab dedicated to studying kratom’s effects in humans. Using everything from brain scans to population surveys, her team is peeling back layers on the mystery that surrounds kratom.
“It’s understandable to think that if you can get high from it, it must be bad,” she says. “But do we want to have a moral panic freakout about it? Or do we want to approach it in a sensible manner?”
She obviously vouched for the latter. The following are some of the most significant revelations from Dr. Kirsten Smith’s years of kratom research:
“What we see are people rebuilding their lives,” Smith says.
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