▲ 84 points
back
187 comments
Actually reasonable decision from the DEA under RFK. Scheduling concentrated/semi-synthetic kratom products while leaving the weaker leaf-based products alone is a good compromise to reduce harm without criminalizing kratom (which has beneficial uses for opioid recovery and maintenance therapy) in general.
Raw leaf Kratom seems to be helpful for some with what I would consider a manageable and acceptable addiction danger. You can get hooked on it, realize there is an issues and cut back or come off it without it destroying your life. I see no reason to make it illegal. I've even seen is used by people to get off "harder" Kratom concentrates. Sorta like how we regulate beer and wine a bit differently than whiskey... same drug, same abuse potential in theory but massive abuse difference in practice.
I agree this is a fine compromise. Sadly the zealots in my state won’t end there. They’re going after plain leaf powders too.
If it actually has beneficial uses let a doctor prescribe it. Kratom is extremely addictive and should be illegal yesterday.
Kratom is such an interesting drug.
About 10 years ago, when it was less well-known, you could find better raw leaf powder and it was helping people get off actual opiates.
IIRC there's an effect where the actual chemicals get stronger for older leaves. The bigger market has caused the harvest period to shorten, making the powder worse quality, and creating room for the concentrated extracts and stuff like 7-Oh.
Tragedy of the commons I guess. I knew people who started taking way too much, but also people who were able to use it responsibly. People say "let doctors prescribe", but that ignores how in order for that to happen, a pharma company will need something they can patent, pay for the years of testing, get sole control over it for a period, and years later a generic can come about. All when you can dry a leaf and use it as-is. There should be room for plants to be consumed. Screw it, enjoy poppy, cannabis, kratom, tobacco, etc.
It probably shouldn't be sold in gas stations but it probably also shouldn't be outright banned, as we'll just get new, more dangerous analogues.
> People say "let doctors prescribe", but that ignores how in order for that to happen, a pharma company will need something they can patent, pay for the years of testing, get sole control over it for a period, and years later a generic can come about.
Is there not universies that could just do this research on the leaf itself?
>All when you can dry a leaf and use it as-is.
With no evidence of efficacy that the aforementioned expensive years of testing/trials provide.
Theres a guy Grant Harding on YT etc. who sends gas station pills for testing and some of the things he finds are scary. Seriously addictive drugs being sold OTC with no meaningful consumer warning or guardrails
This was happening during the early 2000s, though in more "reputable" places (like nutrition and supplement stores; different "drugs" and chemicals, though). Not really surprised it is still going on in the weird little label producers.
>Seriously addictive drugs being sold OTC
Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances in existence and it is sold everywhere. If governments actually cared about addiction risk, a whole lot of things would have to disappear from normal stores.
Ah yeah surely banning more substances will be the end of the problem this time! It definitely won't just push anyone who got hooked on this non-lethal opioid towards unregulated black markets filled with lethal fentanyl...
Fun fact, this is one of two """temporary""" opioid schedulings happening right now. The DEA is also banning 5,6-Dichloro Desmethylchlorphine (SR-17018), which has minimal to no recreational value and is the current most promising breakthrough therapy for opioid withdrawals. It is hard for me to read the combination of these two bans as anything but active malice.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/01/2026-13...
> It is hard for me to read the combination of these two bans as anything but active malice.
Reading the document...
> In recent years, online forum users have begun to discuss recreational use of these four synthetic opioids and commonly compared these four synthetic opioids to other traditionally abused opioids, such as morphine and fentanyl (schedule II substances). However, unlike these two drugs that have FDA-approval for use in specific medical treatments, the four synthetic opioids have no currently approved medical use and, based on positive identifications of these four substances in forensic drug exhibits and toxicology samples, are likely to be trafficked and abused similarly to other synthetic opioids, such as brorphine (schedule I).
I don't usually agree with prohibition, but 7OH is the kind of drug that spirals into a self destructive addiction VERY quickly. Most opioids require using for a number of weeks before you start to develop enough physical dependence to bring about withdrawal. 7OH has this weird withdrawal-like crash after even a single use that makes the user immediately feel terrible and often they seek more to make it go away. It's like the crack of the opioid world. On top of that, tolerance builds extremely quickly. Glad to see it go.
Our country loves to let unregulated & addictive drugs flood into the market, let people become dependent on them, pull the rug by making them illegal, and then arrest them for trying to comply with their addiction. Destroy their lives, cripple their families, send them to prison, get cheap labor. The American way.
It's the lack of the precautionary principle and regulation. Not only that, it lets things be legal and then requires victims to prove their harm was specifically linked to that substance or product. It's Russian roulette beta testing without informed consent.
It's kind of amazing that this took so long. On the other hand, this is just chapter 3025223 of the failed war on drugs and we can be confident that people will find something worse as an alternative.
Kratom has been beneficial for me. Extracts can go but the leaf should stay.
My opinion is that long term daily kratom use is terrible for your health, but it doesn't carry an overdose risk so it should stay legal and the decision to use or not should be up to the user.
They did this same dance about 10 years ago, and last minute caved to American Kratom Association and did not ban.
This time AKA is lobbying FOR this ban, as 7oh gives kratom a really bad name.
It is insane that the people responsible for policing drugs get to decide what drugs are illegal. That's like letting the police decide if something is a crime or not. It's completely antithetical to democracy and the rule-of-law.
aka "gas station heroin"
Gas stations have the best drugs
One of the big dangers I've heard of with 7-Oh is it seems like treatment centers don't really know how to treat withdrawal from it, which I've heard is extremely rough.
You can't treat it with opioid agonist therapy (buprenorphine, methadone, ...) to suppress the withdrawals like you would with most other cases of opioid dependency?
A few years ago, I ordered a large tome that had a lot of interesting information in it, and one section was on Kratom, its varieties, its benefits, and its effects.
So I felt a little adventurous and I headed down to the "head shop" on the corner, and I picked up a pocket scale, and a bag of the Kratom variety that was touted as alleviating pain. The Kratom itself was powdered and unmeasured, so I also picked up a batch of "dime bags" and I carefully weighed out the Kratom in 500mg packets, so that each dose would be precise.
So I started taking it, and sadly my pain was never mitigated or alleviated. In fact, I began suffering some really unwholesome adverse effects, but I continued taking the Kratom, in a spirit of experimentation, and surely it would eventually hit me, the way my body was trained to react to smoking cannabis.
But that never happened. So I discontinued it. Looking more deeply into the Kratom section of my new book, I discovered that I had probably got the wrong variety of Kratom, the one that had only adverse and undesirable effects. Even though I had been careful to discern what type was being sold.
So, I suspect that it was mislabeled. And I suspect that that was not an accident. And I did not churn through the other varieties, hoping to find the one that would "work on me" because I suspect that it was all a trap, for naïve student types. They probably didn't carry "the good kind" at all.
So I left a bad review for the "head shop" and I've never returned. The pocket scale worked pretty good for weighing letters and other small mailpieces, though!
Anyone got a quick primer on what 7-Oh is? That's a new term for me and the web search doesn't seem reliable.
I first learned of kratom in the last year from Elijah Lemard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5ixJIqbGY&t=267s
He's an odd guy who likes to investigate some really dodgy stuff. And I suspect many here on HN would appreciate him.
That led to 7-OH showing up in my feed at some point. In a nutshell, it's the strongest of the active compounds in the kratom plant, that binds to opioid receptors. 7-OH is the marketing name for the alkaloid 7-hydroxymitragynine that is being refined from kratom. It's not clear to me if it's simply extracted, or as some quick research suggests, it might also be a chemical alteration of the more commonly occurring compound in kratom mitragynine.
Anyway, this stuff looks super habit forming, and, of course, the refined version is that much more addictive.
Kratom is a leaf that is primarily farmed in Asia which contains the active ingredient Mitragynine, which has some very mild partial-agonist opioid effects. When kratom is consumed, your liver converts a very small amount to a MUCH more potent molecule called 7-hydroxymitragynine. As with all natural drugs, some asshats in a lab decided to figure out how to create the latter molecule semi-synthetically and in bulk. They pressed them into pills and sell them in head shops and some gas stations. It's pretty addictive, nasty stuff.
Synthetic opioids sold at gas stations.
recent jon oliver last week tonight segment on kratom and the wider 7-oh stuff.
Gas Station Drugs: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRZqHzDG_c8
> John Oliver discusses the sprawling industry of “gas station drugs” – a world of questionable supplements and boner pills – which is posing a risk to the public by putting underregulated substances over the counter, and, more importantly, could prevent people from saving up for a Honda Civic.
I'll just say this: If your understanding of Kratom is via Youtube videos by "an odd guy who likes to investigate some really dodgy stuff", or other rando YT influencers, or even the ...great John Oliver, then perhaps your understanding of Kratom is incomplete.
I am forever indebted to Luc Besson for directing Léon: The Professional, the most sympathetic and realistic portrayal of DEA agents, headed by none other than Gary Oldman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on:_The_Professional
I mean, considering that drugs and the war on drugs was only tangential to the storyline of this film, Besson succeeded in catching all viewers in a morally conflicted web. Can anyone identify the "good side" or innocents in this story?
Good, Kratom (as sold in products like Feel Free) is fucking awful.
Feel Free (and similar) extracts like this are especially onerous. It's no longer Kratom powder that takes a lot of effort to get into trouble with.
These extracts are not very well studied, and may be stronger than many Schedule II opioids. Especially for certain brain chemistries.
In no world should Feel Free execs not be in prison at this point. They know precisely what they are doing, and their marketing is especially nasty since they market it towards addicts as a safe alchohol alternative.
Kratom powders of 15 years ago can be defended in many ways. These extracts have absolutely no leg to stand on. They are an end-around opioid scheduling.
Free Free is celebrating this DEA rule because they say they're exempt due to their use of natural kratom leaf, not synthetic: https://botanictonics.com/pages/consumer-education
I am skeptical though since I presume their capsules are much stronger than natural kratom powder. The linked YouTube video seems to say that Feel Free intentionally includes higher concentrations of 7-OH. So a bit confused.
I hope the Feel Free does experience the crack down. Seems like someone just needs to test the Feel Free product's 7-OH concentration level, and if it exceeds 0.05%, as it likely does, the ban will apply.
Last year, the FDA had already said that if kratom is added to food, it is considered adulteration of food. It also cannot be a dietary supplement.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/fda-and-...
I’m not fully cognizant of the interaction between FDA and DEA, but I would’ve thought that following FDA’s announcement last year, kratom had already been outlawed.
Fuck the DEA -- they need to be abolished today.
Then, fuck all the kratom vendors that absolutely irresponsibly market their products.
I've used kratom for 10 years for pain management and it was my best option at the time.
Drugs should not be illegal -- they should be regulated, for purity and for truth in advertising (in the case of kratom making it crystal clear that addiction is inevitable with regular constant use.
See, where you went wrong was… you started taking something called ‘Kratom’… from a local gas station.
more war on drugs slop / drivel as if no lessons were learned from alcohol Prohibition
"temporarily"
Downvoters must not know that when the DEA says they're temporarily banning something they mean permanently
Good. That kratom crap can go.
John Oliver has a good segment about this