Massachusetts Banned Kratom Overnight. The People Using It to Stay Off Opioids Got a Withdrawal and No Plan.

At Living in Recovery, a peer-support center in downtown Pittsfield, program director Julie MacDonald has spent the weeks since Massachusetts outlawed kratom doing something no order from Boston told her to do: worrying about what her members do next. “That was actually a very huge harm reduction tool for some people,” she told WAMC on October 2.

Massachusetts wrote a ban and, according to the people working the front line, no withdrawal plan to go with it.

The ban came by emergency order. On August 13, the state’s public health commissioner signed an order temporarily designating kratom, and compounds including mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, as Schedule I controlled substances, the same federal tier as heroin. It took effect in late August and can run through August 2027. The state’s case is not frivolous. WBUR reported that officials cite more than 100 kratom-associated deaths since 2020 (associated, not shown to be caused, a distinction the order’s critics will make) and about 130 calls to the regional poison center between January 2021 and July 29, 2026, with this year’s volume already close to all of 2025. Four smoke-shop owners have sued in Suffolk Superior Court, arguing the commissioner lacked the authority and that the order sweeps in plain leaf as well as concentrated synthetic derivatives.

None of that touches what MacDonald is describing, which is a plain, ordinary pattern of dependence. Some people leave opioids, find that kratom takes the edge off, and slowly find themselves dependent on it instead. She doesn’t romanticize it. “It’s an addictive substance, right?” she told WAMC. The trouble is the speed. When every shop and gas station stops carrying it at once, “there isn’t something set up for, one, immediate treatment for withdrawal from that.” Then, in her words: “A lot of us that work in the field are very concerned that people are going to return to opiates… if that was something that was substituting, and they go into withdrawal, then they move toward what they know.”

That last clause is the whole psychology of relapse in a single sentence. A body in withdrawal doesn’t reason from public health data. It reaches for what it already knows works.

If kratom is something you’ve leaned on, you are not the problem the order was written about, and you don’t have to white-knuckle the withdrawal alone. Tell a prescriber what you’ve been taking, because buprenorphine and other approved treatments for opioid dependence are still on the table, and SAMHSA’s National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) is free, confidential and open all night.

A ban can be right or wrong. But when a state closes a door that was holding people up, it owes them the stairs.