In police culture, trust is powerful, and it can do strange things to our perception of risk. Once someone has earned their way into the “in group,” they don’t just get a nickname — we tend to give their judgment more weight. This makes sense when you consider what it often takes to earn that trust. But trust shouldn’t be a substitute for understanding what you’re putting into your body.
A police officer may question a medication prescribed by a physician, then take a powder, capsule, sleep product, supplement, pain remedy or little bottle handed to them by a peer. Trust in police culture isn’t an abstract concept. It gets built under pressure. If you’ve cleared houses with someone, worked a brutal call beside them, fought with a suspect alongside them or trusted them to get you home alive, their recommendation lands differently. You learn who keeps their head when things go sideways, who tells you the truth, who will show up when you need them and who you can depend on when the stakes are life or death.
In many situations, this kind of trust keeps you safe. But when someone you trust recommends something for your health, that trust can also lead you to underestimate the potential risks.
The “Transfer of Trust” principle
In my book “WARRIOR,” I discussed a principle I call “Transfer of Trust” as it applies to collaboration between clinicians and peer supporters. If a peer trusts you and says something like, “Doc gets it,” to a fellow officer, that endorsement can allow a clinician to make a quantum leap forward in building trust. It can effectively bypass months of building deep trust between clinicians and clients. This is the essence of the “transfer of trust” — my friend says this person can help me, so I’ll open up without first testing them over several meetings.
The transfer of trust can also apply to risk-taking behaviors. For example, when a peer offers you a product intended to solve a problem, you’re extending your trust in the person who recommended it and transferring some of that trust to the thing itself.
They may tell you it helped their back. It gives them energy to get through graveyard shifts. It takes the edge off. It helped them stop taking something else. Maybe they have been using it for months and seem completely fine. All of that is meaningful information. But it is information about what happened to one person. It is not the same thing as knowing that something is safe for you.
If an unknown person handed you an unmarked pill and said, “Take this. It’ll help you sleep,” every alarm bell would go off. But what if your partner tells you about a supplement she orders online that has finally helped her sleep after nights? What if somebody on your team swears by something for chronic back pain? What if another officer tells you a product gives him energy without pounding another giant energy drink?
Now you are processing the recommendation through everything you already know about the person giving it to you. Your friend isn’t trying to put you in danger. Quite the opposite. They are trying to help. And because you trust their judgment in so many other areas, it’s easy to give more weight to their experience than you might give to the same recommendation coming from someone else.
“It worked for me” answers only one question
“This worked for me” cannot tell you exactly what is in a product, whether the dose on the label is accurate, whether it interacts with medication you take, whether you have a health condition that changes your risk, whether regular use can create tolerance or dependence, or what happens when you take it every day for six months instead of occasionally for two weeks. It also cannot tell you whether your brain and body will respond to it the same way your buddy’s did.
We understand this in other areas of life. One officer may tolerate a medication with no issues while another has significant side effects. One person can drink coffee at 9 p.m. and go straight to sleep. Another drinks it at noon and can’t fall asleep until 4 a.m.
There is great variability in how we tolerate the things we put into and on our bodies. Think about food allergies, food-related intolerances or skin reactions to certain lotions but not others. This individual variability becomes especially important when a product produces a powerful effect. If something dramatically changes your pain, energy, sleep, anxiety, mood or the symptoms you experience when stopping another drug, it is doing something significant inside your body. This doesn’t automatically mean the product is dangerous. It means it’s worth understanding what the product is, how it works and what else is known about it before you start using it regularly.
Why some products don’t trigger our normal risk signals
There are certain signals we’ve learned to associate with risk: An unmarked pill looks risky. A drug bought illegally looks risky. Taking somebody else’s prescription medication sounds risky.
But many of the products officers use to solve everyday problems don’t arrive looking like drugs at all. They come as supplements, powders, gummies, shots, drink mixes, sleep aids, energy products and “natural” remedies. Many can be bought online or picked up at a store. The packaging may look more like something designed for fitness or wellness than something capable of producing a powerful pharmacological effect. Research and regulatory scrutiny can lag behind the arrival of new or rapidly changing products, particularly when those products are widely available before their risks are fully understood.
We also use the environment around something as one of the ways we decide how dangerous it is. Put a professionally packaged product next to energy drinks or supplements, and it occupies a very different psychological category than an unknown pill handed to you in a parking lot.
The word “natural” can add another layer of reassurance. We have been conditioned to hear “natural” and think “safe.” But “natural” tells you where something came from. It tells you very little about what it can do inside the human body.
Hemlock is natural. So is tobacco. Deathcap mushrooms and belladonna, or deadly nightshade, are natural. So is kratom.
Kratom is a timely example
Kratom is a useful example here not because this problem begins or ends with kratom, but because it shows how easily our normal risk signals can become scrambled.
Kratom comes from a tree native to Southeast Asia. When ingested, its compounds interact with opioid receptors in the brain, and cases of substance use disorder involving tolerance, physical dependence and withdrawal have been documented among people using kratom. In September 2026, packaged kratom was found during investigations into the separate deaths of two Ole Miss students, prompting authorities to urge caution while toxicology testing is underway.
There is also an important distinction between traditional kratom leaf and some of the newer concentrated products being sold under the broader kratom umbrella. The FDA has raised particular concerns about products containing enhanced or concentrated levels of 7-hydroxymitragynine, or 7-OH. Although 7-OH occurs naturally in kratom in small amounts, concentrated 7-OH products can produce potent opioid effects and have been associated with addiction, withdrawal and other serious adverse effects. Both traditional kratom and concentrated 7-OH products can carry risks, but they are not interchangeable. The FDA’s recent warnings have focused particularly on concentrated or enhanced 7-OH products, which can contain far higher levels of 7-OH than occur naturally in kratom leaf.
Some concentrated 7-OH products bear little resemblance to traditional kratom leaf. They may be sold as tablets, gummies, shots and drink mixes that don’t necessarily look like something capable of producing opioid-like effects. They’re also readily available online and in smoke shops, gas stations and other stores. I recently walked into an ordinary retail store and found six different kratom products available for purchase. Whatever someone might assume about the risk of a product like this, there was nothing about the environment in which it was being sold that signaled danger.
Now imagine an officer who has been dealing with back pain for years. Maybe it started with an injury during a fight, or maybe it is simply the accumulated orthopedic wear and tear of two decades of wearing a duty belt.
Another officer tells him about something that has worked incredibly well. It’s easy to buy. He doesn’t need a prescription. His buddy has been taking it himself and seems completely fine.
From the first officer’s perspective, he’s trying to solve a problem that has been bothering him for a long time. The fact that the solution came from somebody he trusts only makes it feel more reasonable.
The Trojan Horse Effect
This is what I call the “Trojan Horse Effect.”
Something potentially dangerous gets into a person’s life because it doesn’t initially look dangerous. It may arrive as a solution to a legitimate problem: more energy for the shift, relief from chronic pain, something to take the edge off, maybe even something that appears to offer a way out of another substance problem.
Kratom and concentrated 7-OH products are one example, but the principle is much broader. The next product someone recommends to you may be perfectly safe and genuinely useful. It may also be poorly studied, mislabeled, more concentrated than you realize, capable of interacting with something else you take or associated with risks we haven’t had enough time to discern.
The answer isn’t to become suspicious of every supplement or every recommendation from another officer. It is to recognize where your confidence in the product is coming from and then get curious about what you don’t know.
Ask one more layer of questions
When somebody you trust tells you, “This worked for me,” take that seriously. Then ask another layer of questions.
What is actually in this? What does it do in the body? Is there good research behind the claims being made about it? Are there known interactions with medications or health conditions? Can regular use create tolerance or dependence? What happens when people stop taking it? Are the ingredients and dose independently verified?
If the effects are surprisingly powerful, that’s another reason to dig deeper. Check with a physician, pharmacist or other qualified healthcare professional who can help you understand what the product is, what it does and whether there are risks specific to you.
As a police officer, you spend your career developing pattern recognition. When something doesn’t look right on a traffic stop, you notice it. When a new officer-safety pattern emerges, departments study it. Tactics change. Equipment changes. Training changes. Information gets passed through the profession because recognizing a threat earlier may keep the next officer from getting hurt.
The same kind of curiosity can be applied to the things we put into our bodies. You don’t have to assume something is dangerous. On the other hand, you also don’t have to assume it’s safe because somebody you trust had a good experience with it.
Trust the person but investigate the product
None of this means we should stop listening to people we trust. Peer recommendations can lead us toward things that genuinely improve our lives, and a buddy’s experience is worth hearing.
But the recommendation and the product are two separate things.
You can completely trust the person handing you something and still ask questions about what they’re handing you. In fact, the officer recommending it may not know much more than you do. They know what happened when they took it. They may know very little about its pharmacology, long-term effects, interactions, manufacturing standards or dependence potential.
Your friend doesn’t have to be reckless or irresponsible for that to happen. In nearly all cases, a friend is genuinely trying to help you.
This is part of what makes the Trojan Horse Effect so easy to miss. Potentially dangerous things don’t always get past our defenses because someone deceived us. Sometimes they get through because they arrive in a form that doesn’t activate our normal sense of danger, recommended by someone whose judgment we’ve learned to trust.
On Oct. 27, I’ll be speaking at the Public Safety Peer Support Association’s “Wellness on the Front Line” conference in San Diego, where I’ll dig much deeper into one example of this problem: kratom, concentrated 7-OH products, dependence and what peer supporters need to recognize.
References
Pereira, I. (2026, September 24). Police investigating 2 Ole Miss students’ deaths after kratom found. Good Morning America.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2025). FDA and kratom.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2025). Products containing 7-OH can cause serious harm.
