DEA to Temporarily Schedule 7-Oh and Related Substances to Protect Public Safety
dea.gov
dea.gov
Not saying people can't or won't get addicted to the drugs prescribed by doctors, but there's a lot more checks and oversight to it (these days) than there is for kratom right now.
[†] At least in my mother's case, their EHR system will also flag opioid prescriptions for review by a board.
It may be a lifesaving/life-changing drug for many but it is also potent enough for a single dose to put a non-tolerant user in the dirt and is abusable for non-tolerant users just as any other opiod. It has been popular as a street drug in Europe for example for decades.
Checking on Quick.md, a Telemedicine service that prescribed Suboxone it is indicated for folks who are addicted to fentanyl, heroin, opiod pharmaceuticals and kratom/7OH. If you are not opiod tolerant you can put yourself in a coma today for $100 + pharmacy fees. No need to prove dependancy with a positive drug test, no therapy, nothing.
But how likely are you to become addicted to it? How common are long term negative life outcomes when it is involved?
There are any number of easily available chemicals that can put you in a coma, permanently injure, or kill you. That was never the concern.
I have been using kratom almost daily for about a decade, and it has been one of the most useful substances for managing my physiology in response to my environment. It's great for stress reduction, but my most common use is actually ADHD treatment (which I doubt would be "on-label" if it went through the healthcare clusterf*dge)
The ability to self-titrate is one of **the most important parts**. I know how much I need, and when I need it. With doctors or psychiatrists, you gotta schedule appointments and then try out a dosage for a while, then schedule a recheck and refine the dosage, etc etc etc. I have not had much success with prescription drugs, and I have tried many
My brother in law has a horrible kratom addiction. He now lives in a car with no insurance.
> I have been using kratom almost daily for about a decade
Hmm...
Glad it's working out for you. My partner's brother had been trying to do the same and it has completely changed him for the worse. Blown up his job, marriage, relationship with his young children, and he's damned fortunate that his siblings were raised better than me 'cause if it were my brother we'd be done already.
Adderall had always worked fine for him but we're living in a world where it's exceedingly difficult to keep a Schedule II drug prescription active and fulfilled.
I don't experience any significant negative side effects from my usage. And BTW I also don't have a problem going cold turkey whenever I go on vacations.
Do I hear myself?! No, but I can read what I wrote.
Your comment string did remind me a bit about a video that popped up on my YouTube feed like half a year ago from someone I don't watch terribly often.
1. The quantity of alcohol consumed per occasion is most strongly associated with harms.
and
2. "The more alcohol was drunk per occasion, the higher the proportion of it which was drunk in the form of spirits"
The choice of beverage and how much was drunk was more dependent on cultural, social, and other factors.
My intuition tells me it's physically more difficult to consume more alcohol from a lower-strength beverage.
This effect has been demonstrated with rat studies using cocaine:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2005...
I don't think its so much that it's absorbed faster than it's just physically possible to drink 200 ml of liquor faster than it is to drink 1600ml of beer.
Alice gets ∞ of the Champagne of Beers. Bob gets one bottle of EverClear.
Ready. Set. Go
I think Bob wins.
One could also be obnoxious and argue that liquor is more easily concealed, transported, etc, therefore facilitating alcoholism more effectively by allowing a larger landscape.
But HN.
Coca : cocaine :: kratom : the stuff that just got listed, right?
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.
Is there not universies that could just do this research on the leaf itself?
Pharma companies have to apply for official blessings, just the same as universities would have to.
However, taxpayers do not want to spend money on expensive trials to prove efficacy.
With no evidence of efficacy that the aforementioned expensive years of testing/trials provide.
I'm not going "science isn't always right!" but it can absolutely be a racket with major blindspots and regulatory capture that ensures cures and treatments can only reach patients if it makes sufficient profit.
Kratom didn't just sprout up one day in 2014. It's been used as a form of traditional medicine in its home regions longer than there's been an FDA.
It's one thing to say "I think chemical compounds marketed as medicine should be given rigorous study", but a whole other thing to declare classes of unrefined plants illegal because not enough fingers are in the pie yet.
I'm convinced half the reason we don't have realistic cannabis regulation in this country is because it grows like a weed and cannot be controlled to the extent it would need to be in order for companies to build up full control.
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.
1. Purity, strength, and disclosure of ingredients.
2. Responsible advertising/promotion/distribution.
I'm pro kratom but I find it abhorrent the way it's marketed and sold without any warnings or acknowledgements of addiction.
To compare them is to respond to a discussion on the threat of guns with some point about people weaponizing their cars and running people over because both can cause bodily harm. I think we can both agree that comparison strips all context and nuance from most conversations about guns OR cars and makes it difficult to talk about either in productive ways outside of the narrow/niche discussions.
TL;DR: this comparison spikes the conversation. Sugar and kratom do not present enough analogous health issues or enough of the same types risks to those around you to warrant lumping them together like that.
And it's true, you can die from water toxicity.
Water and air are ubiquitous, so we've naturally evolved defenses against overdosing.
Sugar has always been rare and valuable as a food source. In fact most organisms existence revolves around collecting enough chemical energy. It's only in the last 100 years that sugar has become cheap enough for many humans that overdosing is now a problem, and we have little in the way of evolved defenses that keep us from overconsumption.
Sugar addiction is real.
The health implications of sugar consumption have no relationship to it being addictive (or not).
Aside from the headaches what addictive effects are you referencing?
Generally i felt fine. I'll keep it in mind, thanks
"There is a wealth of accumulating biological, epidemiological and clinical evidence to support the further investigation of selective adenosine A2A antagonists, as well as caffeine, as promising candidate therapeutics to fill the unmet need for disease modification of PD."
1: https://www.mdpi.com/2218-273X/13/6/967 2: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33349580/
Same for alcohol. Restrictions on who can buy, who can sell, and how you can advertise and market.
These are not the same as some random pill from a gas station sold to anyone with cash with zero regulations, safety, restrictions, or even any requirement to tell you what's actually in it.
I am not that old.
Better regulation, better enforcement, anti-smoking advertising campaigns, banning public smoking, and drastically reduced amongst youth and the general public.
Cigarette regulation to reduce smoking starting in the mid/late 90s is the poster child for public policy done well.
The regulations on selling tobacco in person AFAIK are only for cigarette and cigeratte labeled type rolling tobacco. You can still order perfectly cigarette smokable "pipe" tobacco online straight from an internet "vending machine" and probably a real one. Very few people know this though because it turns out to not actually be a much of a problem.
In practice I think most young people who want to drink will just get it from a "cool older brother" or steal it, whether from parents or corner stores. At least that is what I saw in semi-rural America.
People will do what they want to do, with or without vending machines and online ordering.
I remember traveling to mexico and being surprised.
Giant "Marlboro Man" billboards.
Television advertisements for hard alcohol.
but what was also funny was Coca-Cola ads always had something like "Siempre come frutas y verduras" (Always eat fruits and vegetables)
(nowadays mexican food labeling is even more specific, saying stuff like "excess calories" or "excess sugars" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_labeling_in_Mexico )
Voters tend to get what they want, and a sizeable fraction of voters smoke or drink.
I wish that was true. In the case of tobacco and alcohol, there's enough monied interests to ensure it would never be illegal.
So this defines the classic simple argument about the issue: alcohol and tobacco are dangerous and other than a weird House episode, have no medical value, and yet society has decided that some dangerous drugs are ok, because the right people are making money from it.
Propaganda has effectively sold the War on Drugs as "protecting people", but it's never been about that -- it's about enabling tools of oppression.
And we're not 'oppressing' fent addicts by arresting them when they pass out on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. They are causing a problem for the rest of society that we now have to deal with. That's why we do the war on drugs.
Prohibition was that generation's war on drugs, and it's not pretty.
The government went to obscene lengths to "discourage drinking": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/government-poison-10000-am...
And the "voting" was the money'd class, not "the people": https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/prohibition-centennial
Let's not forget how well it funded organized crime, but not nearly to the extent that the current WoD has literally created the drug cartels south of the border.
Moving on to your "observations" of failure. The fact that we literally have a fent crisis nationally shows that the war not only was an abject failure but literally created the fent crisis (cheaper and easier than heroin and easier to smuggle).
As far as the oppression angle, there's plenty of documented history on this issue. For starters there's this: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/race...
I've lost friends to drugs, my brother died of a heroin overdose and my mother died from complications of alcoholism and smoking. Your simple-minded dismissal of the problem is insulting to their memories and millions of others.
Nobody should be doing fent recreationally, let alone passing out on the street. But if your answer to that problem is "Give the DEA billions of dollars more, and fill our prisons with those moral degnerates" then you are sadly mistaken.
All the cannabinoid analogs are a good example too, people just want to get high.
I do miss salvia extracts though. Being able to pick that up in a head shop was nice before it got banned.
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...
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 would strongly recommend doing your own research, because I cannot even begin to tell you how many distinct accounts I have read of people _finally_ getting through opioid withdrawals using SR-17018 for decidedly non-recreational purposes
https://www.reddit.com/r/recoverywithoutAA/comments/1t5yzoe/... https://www.reddit.com/r/recoverywithoutAA/comments/1t5yzoe/... https://www.reddit.com/r/SR17018/comments/1unksbn/my_experie... https://www.reddit.com/r/withdrawl/comments/1rk2ohi/sr17018_... ...
I mean, they did specifically say it was their opinion.
My post started with "My opinion is", and it was not edited or changed at any time.
Kratom does have a severe negative effect on memory, BTW.
This time AKA is lobbying FOR this ban, as 7oh gives kratom a really bad name.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
It’s certainly not ground up leaf put into a water bottle as implied.
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.
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.
The FDA can say you can't sell it as a supplement or food. But they can't stop you from possessing it or selling it as a chemical.
When the DEA schedules it, it is illegal to possess or sell in any capacity.
The DEA is a law enforcement agency that aims to fight illegal drug trafficking. the FDA is regulatory agency that aims to ensure the food and medicine legally sold in the US is safe.
If you are out there using e.g some experimental cancer drug that hasn't been FDA approved yet, the DEA isn't going to stop you. Their mission is to stop recreational use of drugs that get you high.
They are not going to give a shit about most experimental cancer drugs because they're not controlled substances.
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.
Any weird side effects. My girlfriend and I tend to use Kratom for the mild stimulant effect.
The worst is ever done for me is make me nauseous enough to vomit, but I live in a state trying to ban all kratom now and the discourse around it is full of anecdotes of people claiming withdrawals as bad as heroin.
Now I’m not a big heroin user, but I’ve been mildly addicted to certain substances (nicotine, weed). I don’t think I’ve ever had withdrawals from Kratom or really felt any craving for it.
I’m really just hoping the busy-bodies don’t get their eyes on Kava.
And Yeah, I experimented with Kratom for stress/anxiety/sleep problems. It sucks. Your tolerance increases rapidly, and at the rate I was taking it, withdrawals weren't that bad, but it wasn't fun either.
Downvoters must not know that when the DEA says they're temporarily banning something they mean permanently
> This temporary scheduling action does not apply to botanical kratom products that contain naturally occurring 7-OH below the specified threshold. Instead, it targets synthesized products and those containing elevated concentrations of 7-OH as outlined in the temporary scheduling order. DEA believes these substances pose an imminent threat to public safety given their effects are highly unpredictable.
Indeed, thanks for catching that. No maximum for an actual kratom leaf but leafs cannot be too potent, right?
PS: Is that a Mr. Show reference?