Banning Three Named Chemicals Won’t Close the Loophole Selling Opioids as Kratom

Walk into a gas station or smoke shop almost anywhere in Arizona and you can still legally buy something labeled “kratom” that behaves more like morphine than like tea. That was true last month, it’s true today, and nothing that’s happened in Washington or Phoenix this year has actually changed it.

Naming three chemicals is not the same as regulating the drug people are actually being sold.

Here’s the plain-language version first: kratom leaf naturally contains a compound called 7-hydroxymitragynine, in trace amounts too small to do much of anything. Concentrate or synthesize that compound — 7-OH, for short — and you get something that binds opioid receptors with a force closer to morphine than to a cup of tea, which is why Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes calls the boosted version “gas station heroin” or “legal morphine”.

The DEA moved on the federal end of that problem on August 26, placing three synthetic 7-OH derivatives — mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15 and MGM-16 — into Schedule I for two years, part of the wave of novel-emerging compounds outrunning drug law. The agency went out of its way to say natural kratom leaf is untouched. Fine, as far as it goes. But the actual dividing line — how concentrated 7-OH has to get before it’s a controlled substance rather than a supplement — is still just a proposed threshold open for public comment. Regulators granted a scientist’s request to extend that comment period, then gave 15 days instead of the customary 60, after more than 30,000 comments and a 65,000-signature petition had already piled up. Enforcement in the meantime runs on the agency’s “discretion,” not a hard number. That gap is the loophole.

This is familiar territory for Arizona Watch: the state tried to draw a sharper line than the feds have managed, years ago. Its Kratom Consumer Protection Act caps 7-OH at 2% of a product’s alkaloid content, bans synthetic derivatives outright, and forbids sales to anyone under 18. Mayes’ office says that’s still not enough — she’s heard directly from parents whose kids became addicted to gas-station product, and her investigators keep finding it sold to minors anyway. The law doesn’t bite because proving adulteration requires lab testing and expert testimony expensive enough that prosecutors save it for felonies, not the class 2 misdemeanor kratom violations actually carry.

Mayes asked lawmakers to fix that this session. They tried, in HB2415 — and then, according to state Sen. Shawnna Bolick, the bill’s own sponsor let the American Kratom Association’s lobbyist gut it, stripping her amendments for school buffers, behind-the-counter sales, and civil penalties before the whole thing died on the Senate floor in June. The legislature’s other kratom-adjacent vehicle, the sober-living oversight committee created by SB1814, has a broader mandate and a report due at the end of 2027 — useful groundwork, not a kratom fix. If you’ve ever grabbed an energy shot off a gas-station counter without reading past “all natural,” this is the gap you were standing in.

Every level of government drawing the line between kratom leaf and kratom-derived opioid has let the industry that profits from the blur help draw it. Until that changes, what’s legal on that shelf is exactly as strong as the last lobbyist left it.