New Jersey Already Tried Recalling 'Gas Station Heroin' Once. Now the DEA Is Running the Same Play on Kratom.

This January, New Jersey made tianeptine — the drug sold in small pink bottles next to the energy drinks under names like “ZaZa Red” and “Neptune’s Fix” — a Schedule II controlled substance, the same legal category as oxycodone. It was the state’s second attempt to shut it down. The first didn’t work.

In January 2024, the manufacturer Neptune Resources voluntarily recalled every lot of its tianeptine elixirs after the FDA warned the products could cause seizures, coma, and death. It should have been the end of the story. It wasn’t. In the eight months after that recall, New Jersey’s poison control center logged 17 more tianeptine poisoning cases and the state’s own overdose-surveillance system identified six tianeptine-involved deaths going back to mid-2023 — the most recent just two months before the recall took effect, and the last poisoning case on record reported that August. The bottles kept moving. Pulling a product off a shelf doesn’t mean it leaves the store.

A recall didn’t stop it. A schedule is the next thing New Jersey is trying, and nobody yet knows if that works either.

Which is worth sitting with, because the federal government just started the same experiment on a different drug.

On August 5, the DEA’s order temporarily placing concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine — 7-OH, a potent kratom extract sold in the same gas-station coolers — into Schedule I became eligible to take effect. Schedule I is the strictest federal shelf: no accepted medical use, a flat ban on making, selling, or possessing it. The order, published in the Federal Register on July 6, sets a threshold — 0.05% 7-OH by dry weight — narrow enough to leave ordinary kratom leaf, where the compound occurs at a fraction of that concentration, untouched. That precision is a lesson learned the hard way: in 2016 the DEA tried scheduling kratom itself, the whole plant, and abandoned it after backlash big enough to kill the effort in Congress.

This time the target is a concentrated product built to mimic what a prescription opioid does. As Vanderbilt pain physician Dr. Shravani Durbhakula told Spectrum News, it binds the same mu-opioid receptors in the brain that heroin and oxycodone do — “morphine is not available in a gas station or a smoke shop, and I think we should have the same standard for any drug that works that way on those receptors.” Michigan state Rep. Cam Cavitt, pushing a parallel state ban, put the marketing plainer: “They market it towards young people… They put it in flavors like cotton candy. They’ll put it in gummies that look like teddy bears.”

None of that makes scheduling 7-OH the wrong call. A concentrated opioid-like extract sold next to energy drinks belongs under some kind of control, and a narrow, product-specific target beats the blunt instrument that failed in 2016. But New Jersey’s tianeptine numbers are the honest asterisk on any of this: a recall — a legal, enforceable, nationwide order to stop selling the product — didn’t stop 17 more people from calling poison control. A law on paper doesn’t restock a shelf or reach a clerk who never checks. If you’re buying a bottle at 2 a.m. because it’s legal and the pharmacy is closed, a schedule changing doesn’t tell you what’s in the bottle in front of you tonight — only a lab test does, and almost nobody selling these products offers one.

New Jersey is running its second experiment on tianeptine. The federal government just started its first on 7-OH. Everyone finds out together whether attempt two works better than attempt one did.