DEA's 7-OH Ban Gets the Target Right. Kratom Users Are Still in the Blast Radius.

On August 26, 2026, three chemical names most people have never heard of — mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15, MGM-16 — became as illegal as heroin. The DEA placed them into Schedule I on a two-year order, the latest move in a scheduling push the agency opened July 1 against concentrated, synthetic 7-hydroxymitragynine, the compound at the center of the kratom fight. Ten days ago, the harder half of that fight — how much of that compound occurring naturally is too much — hit its extended comment deadline of September 10, after more than 32,000 public comments — and still no final rule.

In plain terms: kratom is a Southeast Asian tree leaf people brew as tea or take in capsules; its main chemical is mitragynine. 7-OH is a minor byproduct in that leaf, present in trace amounts, but it locks onto opioid receptors harder than morphine. Chemists learned to extract and concentrate it, selling it as gummies and vape “ice cream cones” at gas stations — products the FDA calls an opioid hiding in plain sight. Scheduling sorts a chemical into a legal tier; Schedule I means no accepted medical use, high abuse potential — heroin’s shelf.

The DEA is targeting the right product and still threatening the wrong people.

The August order got the synthetic derivatives right — MGPI, MGM-15, and MGM-16 don’t occur outside a lab in any meaningful quantity, and closing that loophole was overdue given how long the FDA has been flagging gas-station 7-OH products marketed to teenagers. But the order also concedes the mess underneath it: the DEA said it would exercise “enforcement discretion” when only trace, naturally occurring MGPI shows up in an otherwise-ordinary botanical kratom product — while stating outright that discretion “does not create a legal exemption.” That’s not a safe harbor. That’s a promise not to prosecute today, revocable tomorrow, hanging over every kratom vendor and every person buying a bag of leaf powder.

That distinction isn’t academic for the people actually using kratom. Survey work, including a Johns Hopkins study of thousands of users, has repeatedly found people reaching for kratom leaf specifically to get off opioids or manage withdrawal on their own, without a doctor, a prescription, or a treatment bed — self-directed harm reduction, done because the formal system was too expensive, too far away, or something they’d already tried and left. Stack a state patchwork on top of that — kratom flatly banned in roughly ten states, regulated under Kratom Consumer Protection Acts in twenty-plus others, unregulated or murky at the county level almost everywhere else — and a person’s withdrawal-management tool becomes a felony or a supplement aisle item depending on which side of a state line they live on.

The 7-OH threshold proceeding, the one that decides where “trace amount in a leaf” ends and “concentrated opioid product” begins, is the one that matters most to that population, and it’s the one still sitting at HHS with a closed comment window and no announced timeline for a final rule. That agency should finalize a threshold now and write botanical leaf into the rule itself as exempt, not leave it to a discretionary promise a future administrator can revoke without notice. Ban the gummies sold at the gas station counter. Leave the tea alone — on paper, not just in a press statement.