MAHA's Gas Station Heroin

A couple years ago I put out a video called “Exotic Plants, Deadly Consequences” about a kava-and-kratom elixir called Feel Free, and the trail of addiction, lawsuits, and at least one death that followed it out of gas stations and head shops across the country. I’m re-releasing that investigation this week, because the story took a turn I didn’t see coming.

The short version: Feel Free is made by Botanic Tonics, founded by a man calling himself Jerry Cash — real name JW Ross, a convicted fraudster who served nine years for a money-laundering scheme before launching a “wellness” empire. People recovering from alcoholism, drawn in by marketing that promised “all the buzz without the booze,” ended up with ten-bottle-a-day habits. One Reddit post I traced back to a real family describes a daughter who died of cardiac arrest after a seizure, 40 pounds underweight, hooked on a product she thought was a harmless kava drink.

Here’s the new part. Secretary of Homeland Security Markway Mullen stood at a press conference warning that this $9 billion industry is “ruining lives” and “truly killing people.” What he didn’t mention: his own financial disclosure shows a $500,000 to $1 million stake in Botanic Tonics.

Around the time my original report came out, the DOJ raided a Botanic Tonics warehouse and seized 250,000 bottles. Then, in December 2025, the DOJ quietly dropped its lawsuit against the company. A few months later, Botanic Tonics gave RFK Jr.’s super-PAC $500,000 — on top of the $300,000 Jerry Ross had already donated during the 2024–2025 campaign. Kennedy, who founded MAHA on the premise of breaking up cozy ties between industry and health policy, has himself called these products “a sinister, sinister industry” — while the company funding his political operation keeps selling them.

I spent over a hundred hours on this: interviews with the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, a clinical addiction psychiatrist, Ben Greenfield (who walked back his early endorsement), and dozens of messages with Ross himself, who at one point claimed he was in witness protection and threatened to have me jailed for reporting his criminal history. The Marshals Service told me flatly: anyone in protection who goes public, as he repeatedly has, forfeits that protection.

I don’t think Feel Free should be illegal — banning things tends to just create black markets. But I do think people deserve to know what’s actually in the bottle, and who’s profiting from keeping that information vague. Right now, that list includes a fraudster turned wellness founder, a sitting cabinet official, and the man who built his political brand on fighting exactly this kind of grift.

Full video and sourcing are up now for paid subscribers.