Kratom's Civil War Just Reached a Cabinet Secretary's Investment Portfolio

Behind the counter of a gas station is a small glass shelf of two-ounce shot bottles with names like Boost, Krave, and OPMS Black — three, five, sometimes eight dollars, no ID beyond “you look eighteen.” Some are leaf extract. Some are something else: a chemically concentrated dose of 7-hydroxymitragynine, the compound in kratom that acts the most like an opioid, boosted to levels the plant doesn’t produce on its own. Until this week, the shelf didn’t distinguish between them. As of Monday, federal law does.

A federal agency just drew a hard line through a plant millions of Americans use to avoid opioids — and the fight over exactly where that line falls has now reached the personal investment portfolio of a sitting cabinet secretary.

On August 24, the Drug Enforcement Administration issued a temporary order placing concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine — 7-OH for short — and three of its synthetic cousins into Schedule I, the same legal category as heroin. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the compounds “dangerous opioids that fuel addiction and put American lives at risk,” and DEA Administrator Terrance Cole said the action targets products that “pose a growing threat to public safety and health.” The order does not touch the kratom leaf itself, or teas and capsules made from it — only concentrated extracts and synthetic derivatives that push 7-OH above a set potency threshold, more than 0.050% by weight or more than 1.0 milligram per dose.

That distinction — leaf good, concentrate bad — sounds like careful regulatory craftsmanship. It also happens to be exactly the line that benefits one part of the kratom industry at the direct expense of another. And on August 5, Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden opened an inquiry into whether that line was drawn with help from someone who had a financial stake in which side of it won. This is the latest entry in a long run of federal drug policy decisions made faster than the underlying science — and it’s playing out in a corner of the novel and emerging substances landscape that most people have never heard of until it shows up on a gas-station shelf.

The compound the DEA banned isn’t kratom leaf. Here’s what it actually is.

Kratom comes from Mitragyna speciosa, a tree in the coffee family native to Southeast Asia, chewed and brewed into tea there for generations to manage fatigue and pain. The leaf contains dozens of alkaloids, chiefly mitragynine, in modest concentrations. 7-hydroxymitragynine is one of those alkaloids too, but only in trace amounts — the leaf itself is not what worries toxicologists.

What worries them is what industrial chemistry can do to it. Lab processes can concentrate 7-OH to levels the plant never reaches on its own, or synthesize it directly, producing a compound that binds opioid receptors far more potently than the leaf and behaves, pharmacologically, much closer to a prescription opioid than to a cup of tea. That’s the plain-English version of what the DEA’s order targets: not “kratom,” in the sense of the leaf, tea, or capsule products millions of people already use, but a manufactured extract sold in gas-station shot bottles engineered to hit harder. The American Kratom Association — the industry’s own advocacy group — agrees with that framing entirely. “Chemically manipulated 7-OH opioids are not kratom,” said Mac Haddow, the AKA’s senior fellow on public policy. “Do not ban kratom because of 7-OH. Ban 7-OH because it is not kratom.”

That’s a remarkable thing for a drug-industry trade group to say about its own product category, and it points to something the DEA’s press release doesn’t mention: the domestic kratom industry has split into two camps that increasingly hate each other, and one side just got the government to outlaw the other.

The line items they killed happened to be the ones a rival funds

Here is where the story stops being a straightforward regulatory action and starts being a story about money. On August 5, Sen. Wyden sent letters to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and to Jerry Ross, CEO of the botanical-kratom beverage company Botanic Tonics, asking both men to account for a set of financial relationships that, laid out end to end, look like this: Mullin holds a reported stake of up to $1 million in Botanic Tonics, a company that sells traditional leaf-based kratom drinks and has publicly lobbied for restrictions on its concentrated 7-OH competitors — the exact restriction the DEA just imposed. Separately, Ross personally donated $162,000 to RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign months after that campaign had already ended, and Botanic Tonics contributed $1 million to the MAHA PAC, accounting for roughly 44% of everything the PAC raised in its first year.

Here is where the story stops being a straightforward regulatory action and starts being a story about money.

None of that proves the scheduling decision was bought. Wyden’s letters don’t allege that either — they ask for documentation, with a response deadline of August 31. Mac Haddow’s response, when asked about the funding question, was disarming in its bluntness: this is, he said, “the political game… every day in Washington,” and pointed out that money flows from the 7-OH side of the industry too. He isn’t wrong that both camps spend on influence. But “everybody does it” is not evidence that the specific rule written this month wasn’t shaped by who was in the room, and Wyden’s own line to Ross cuts at something more basic than campaign finance: “in the decade since [kratom entered the U.S. market],” he wrote, “we have not seen a body of peer-reviewed” science establishing kratom’s safety at all — botanical or synthetic. In other words: before you argue about which kratom product should be legal, we still don’t have solid data on whether either one is.

History already ran this experiment once

We have watched the DEA try to draw a line through kratom before, and watched politics erase it. In 2016, the agency issued a notice of intent to place mitragynine and 7-OH into Schedule I — not just the concentrates, the whole plant. The backlash was immediate and came from a coalition nobody expected to align: pain patients who’d found kratom after opioids stopped being an option, veterans’ groups, and dozens of members of Congress from both parties, who flooded the DEA with objections faster than the agency could process them. Within two months, the DEA withdrew the notice entirely. Kratom has operated in a state-by-state patchwork ever since — legal federally, banned in six states, restricted in several more — precisely because that 2016 fight proved a blanket ban couldn’t survive contact with the people who actually used the product to stay off something worse.

This week’s action is narrower by design, and that’s not an accident. Whoever drafted it learned the 2016 lesson: don’t touch the leaf, and the coalition that killed the last attempt has much less reason to show up this time. But the underlying tension hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just been relocated to a smaller, more concentrated fight — and this time, the industry itself is picking sides, which is a genuinely new dynamic the 2016 fight didn’t have.

The people who showed up in 2016 weren’t lobbyists. They were pain patients tapering off oxycodone with kratom tea because their prescriber had cut them off cold, veterans managing service-connected injuries who’d already watched opioids take friends, people in recovery who’d found something that quieted withdrawal without putting them back in a cycle they knew was killing people around them. Nobody in this week’s coverage — not the DEA, not HHS, not the trade press — is telling their story about a 7-OH shot bottle instead of a tea bag. That’s the gap in this week’s data, and it’s the reason the loudest voices in this fight keep being the ones with something to gain financially either way.

If you use kratom to stay off something harder, here’s where you actually stand

If you’re one of the estimated millions of Americans who use kratom — leaf, tea, capsules — to manage chronic pain, opioid withdrawal, or to stay off a substance that scared you more, this week’s order does not touch what you’re using. That’s true today and, per the DEA’s own language, that stays true regardless of how the Wyden inquiry lands. What changed is narrower and, if you’ve ever bought a shot bottle off a gas-station counter without knowing exactly what was in it, worth taking seriously: the products this order targets are the ones deliberately engineered to hit like an opioid, sold next to the products that don’t, with nothing on the label to tell you which is which. That gap — the one where a consumer can’t tell leaf kratom from a spiked concentrate by looking at it — is the actual public-health problem here, and it existed long before this week’s order and will keep existing after it, banned or not, because Schedule I doesn’t make a compound disappear. It makes it move to a supply chain with even less accountability, the same pattern fentanyl-adjacent scheduling has produced for a decade.

It makes it move to a supply chain with even less accountability, the same pattern fentanyl-adjacent scheduling has produced for a decade.

For treatment providers and case managers fielding intake calls this week: ask specifically about 7-OH shot products and gas-station “extract” bottles, not just “kratom,” since patients using leaf tea and patients using concentrated extracts have meaningfully different withdrawal and dependence profiles — and don’t assume a patient who says “I only use kratom” has ruled out the more potent product; many don’t know the distinction exists.

The shelf still has both bottles on it

The DEA’s order takes the concentrated 7-OH bottles off that gas-station shelf, eventually, store by store, as enforcement catches up to a Schedule I designation that took effect days ago. The leaf-based bottles next to them are staying, legally, for now — and so is the fact that nothing about how they’re displayed, priced, or marketed will help anyone standing at that counter tell the difference on sight. Sen. Wyden’s questions land August 31. Whatever the answers say about who benefited from where this line got drawn, they won’t change the more basic problem this story keeps circling back to: the government spent a decade deciding what to ban before it spent any real money finding out what actually works, for the people who turned to this plant because something else had already failed them.