Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin owns up to $1 million in shares of the maker of a drink containing the supplement dubbed “gas station heroin,” a PunchUp investigation has found. Mullin, 48, spent last summer campaigning alongside Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 72, for a federal crackdown on kratom—a herbal substance the National Institute on Drug Abuse warns can cause seizures, addiction, and death. The CDC has linked it to at least 91 confirmed overdose deaths in a single 18-month analysis. “It’s an addiction that is ruining lives,” Mullin told reporters in July, branding kratom firms an “illegal industry.” Yet Mullin’s U.S. Office of Government Ethics filing, obtained by PunchUp, the Daily Beast’s sister investigations Substack outlet, shows he holds between $500,000 and $1 million in Botanic Tonics LLC—the Oklahoma firm behind Feel Free, a kratom-and-kava tonic stocked in over 23,000 retail outlets that settled an $8.75 million class-action addiction lawsuit in October 2025. Patti Wheeler, whose 27-year-old son died of a kratom-induced seizure in 2022, told PunchUp: “How can someone objectively serve the public while personally profiting from a product that remains at the center of such serious controversy?” A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Mullin “acts to ensure full compliance with all ethics and conflict of interest rules.”
*Read the full in-depth investigation, and many more exclusive scoops, over on PunchUp
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