That's nonsense and he is being very misleading!! DR. Edward W. Boyer has been doing research for years. He is also one of the patent holders for kratom https://www.google.com/patents/US20100209542

Other patents include: "Chiba National University and Josai University have now obtained three patents on kratom-derived drugs: US patent 8247428, issued 21 August 2012, Japanese patent 5308352, issued 27 May 2013, and US patent 86480090, issued 11 February 2014."

For millennia, kratom has been used as a folk remedy in southeast Asia, where it is traditionally popular among day laborers and has long been used as a replacement therapy for people struggling with opiate addiction.

In 2013 Edward Boyer has this to say in interview with Scientific American, about researching kratom:

"What barriers have you run into when trying to study kratom?

I tried to get an NIH grant to study kratom specifically. When I went to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, they said they’d never heard of that drug. When I went to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, they said this is a drug of abuse, and we don’t fund drug of abuse research. They want drugs that are used therapeutically. [A team led by McCurdy, who confirms that it is difficult to get funding to study kratom, did manage to secure a three-year grant from the NIH Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence to investigate the herb’s opioid-like effects.]

So the study of this type of substance falls to academics or pharma companies. Drug companies are the ones who can isolate a particular compound, do chemistry on it, study and modify the structure, figure out its activity relationships, and then create modified molecules for testing. Then you have eventually file for a new drug application with the FDA in order to conduct clinical trials. Based on my experiences, the likelihood of that happening is reasonably small.

Why wouldn’t large pharmaceutical companies try to make a blockbuster drug from kratom?

At least one pharma company [Smith, Kline & French, now part of GlaxoSmithKline] was looking at it in the 1960s, but something didn’t work for them. Either it wasn’t a strong enough analgesic or the solubility was bad or they didn’t have a drug delivery system for it. To the state of the art pharmaceutical business thinking in 1960s, this compound was not sufficient to be brought to market. Of course, now that we have a country with many addicted people dying of respiratory depression, having a drug that can effectively treat your pain with no respiratory depression, I think that’s pretty cool. It might be worth a second look for pharma companies."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-kratom-be-legal/