The Drug Enforcement Administration plans to order emergency placements of 7-OH, cychlorphine and multiple substances related to each in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The actions reflect the agency’s escalating use of emergency scheduling powers, and how in the aftermath of its class-wide fentanyl bans it’s not facing too much pressure to distinguish one synthetic opioid from another.
On July 1 the DEA announced that it had filed one notice of intent to temporarily schedule the synthetic opioid 7-hydroxymitragynine, commonly known as 7-OH, above a certain threshold, as well as another to temporarily schedule three 7-OH derivatives: mitragynine pseudoindoxyl (MP), dihydro-7-OH (MGM-15) and the 9-fluoro derivative of 7-OH (MGM-16). The order for 7-OH itself would apply to any kratom plant material that contains more than 0.05 percent 7-OH by dry weight, or contains a volume greater than 1 milligram. Both are expected to go into effect the first week of August.
In a quieter move, on July 1 the Federal Register published the DEA’s notice of intent to schedule cychlorphine and three other orphine analogs. The agency plans to issue the temporary order for the four orphines July 31, “to avoid an imminent hazard to public safety.” Two of the four orphines have only been identified twice each, and one of them has never been linked to overdose.
Orphines are the latest class of synthetic opioid to be identified in the unregulated drug supply, following nitazenes and fentanyl analogs. Until now the lone orphine in the CSA has been brorphine, which the DEA temporarily scheduled in 2021 and permanently scheduled in 2023. N-propionitrile chlorphine, better known as cychlorphine, entered the news cycle earlier in 2026 and isn’t leaving anytime soon, as there is nothing media outlets love more than something they can call 10 times stronger than fentanyl. Since it was first identified in 2022, cychlorphine has been detected approximately 230 times, either in drugs seized by law enforcement or in post-mortem toxicology testing.
Spirochlorphine has been detected about 36 times in the United States. 5,6-dichloro desmethylchlorphine has been detected twice, and is characterized as much less potent than fentanyl. 5,6-dichloro brorphine has also only been detected twice, and unlike the other three orphines has never been detected in an overdose.
“These four synthetic opioids are pharmacologically similar to other synthetic opioids controlled under the CSA, such as brorphine, fentanyl, morphine, and other mu-opioid receptor agonists,” the DEA stated in its notice for orphine analogs. “Due to these pharmacological similarities, the use of these four synthetic opioids presents a high risk of abuse and may negatively affect users and their communities.”
Morphine is a plant-based opioid, but who cares. No amount of Department of Justice funding appropriated for fentanyl awareness campaigns can keep the DEA from throwing its own propaganda out the window whenever the situation calls for something else. Sure, fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction and a threat like nothing the nation has ever faced before, so unprecedented in its lethality that the brave men and women of the DEA put their lives on the line just by handling it through a HazMat suit, but also all opioids are the same. (Except kratom.)
7-OH refers to a synthetically concentrated form of the active compound in the kratom plant. The Trump administration has recently been signaling that kratom is on its way to being regulated, and accordingly the DEA notice makes clear that it’s only concerned with concentrated 7-OH.
The DEA stated that “the significance of 7-hydroxymitragynine abuse is demonstrated by an increasing volume of calls to poison control centers,” and that 165 exposure cases were reported in 2025. About one-third of the reports involving 7-OH and no other substances “resulted in serious health problems,” and about two-thirds were treated at a health care facility.
This kind of thing is so annoying. The volume of poison control calls about 7-OH increased in 2025 because that spring the substance got its own data codes in the National Poison Data System, which makes that data easier to track, and because that July the FDA made a huge deal about recommending 7-OH for Schedule I, so more people had heard of it who hadn’t before. Poison control data is self-reported. There is no confirmatory testing. Being treated at a health care facility means people panicked and went to the emergency room as a precaution. The “serious health problems” are nausea, sweating, rapid heart rate and a handful of other symptoms that would be consistent with, say, a panic attack.
This isn’t to say that none of the data reflect people who really were exposed to 7-OH and really did have physical symptoms as a result. But it does strongly recall a phenomenon seen with law enforcement and corrections officers across the country when they think they touched fentanyl or synthetic cannabinoids—they panic, Narcan themselves and go to an emergency room as a precaution, and the department they work for puts out a statement about how they had to be hospitalized and nearly died.
The DEA essentially used the same argument for 7-OH as it did for orphines. “To date, the safety profile of these concentrated products in humans remains unknown because no controlled clinical trials have been conducted to establish safe consumption limits or standardized dosing,” the agency wrote in its 7-OH notice. “Preclinical data indicates that 7-hydroxymitragynine carries a high abuse potential with safety risks, including tolerance, dependence, and respiratory depression, which are comparable to those of classic opioid analgesics.”
Temporary scheduling orders are good for up to three years, but their expiration dates are functionally meaningless because they can simply be extended again and again, if that suits DEA interests more than permanent scheduling.
For the DEA to permanently schedule anything, there’s a long process of reviewing the medical and scientific evidence in the context of eight different rulemaking criteria, plus there’s some disagreement as to whether the agency can still put a substance in Schedule I if the Food and Drug Administration finds that isn’t warranted. Congress also has the power to schedule drugs via passing legislation, but this tends to move slowly, too.
Temporary scheduling, on the other hand, is something the agency can do without anyone else’s input, and using just three of the eight criteria: “history and current pattern of abuse”; “scope, duration and significance of abuse”; and “[w]hat, if any, risk there is to the public health.” As soon as a given substance is in the CSA, people caught with it can be prosecuted accordingly.
There is no mechanism to temporarily ban a substance under schedules II through V; all temporary scheduling is automatically Schedule I. Though Schedule I is often portrayed as the category for the drugs we know are the most dangerous, in reality it’s the category for the drugs we know nothing about.
All these novel synthetic drugs keep getting emergency-banned not because each new analog is deadlier than the last, but because the easiest way for the DEA to get more substances into Schedule I—and subject to all the criminal penalties that come with that—is to grab whatever’s just come through the door. 7-OH has taken a little longer, but most synthetic opioids aren’t complicated by the fact that President Donald Trump has embraced lobbyists who want to regulate a different opioid that’s closely related.
A substance doesn’t have to meet Schedule I criteria—“high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision”—for the DEA to put it there temporarily. But the agency always emphasizes how substances like 7-OH and cychlorphine fit the Schedule I criteria; it’s such an easy way to legitimize what it’s doing.
There is no actual definition of “potential for abuse.” So as long as the DEA can show that a substance exists, and is an opioid, then it has potential for abuse. Emergency scheduling orders always describe how the agency painstakingly asked around and learned that, as it turns out, there is no currently accepted medical use and no one is currently engaged in research to explore whether this emerging substance has medical potential.
“The absence of clinical evidence to support vendor health claims is deeply concerning,” the DEA wrote in its 7-OH notice. “Consequently, 7-hydroxymitragynine products sold as unregulated dietary supplements pose significant health risks, as essential information regarding their purity, identity, quantity and long-term safety remain unknown.”
And DEA has made sure it’ll stay that way. Once a substance is in Schedule I, it’s almost impossible for most researchers to access. There are never any FDA-approved uses for a substance that just emerged.
Top image via National Institute on Drug Abuse. First inset image (cropped) via San Diego County. Second inset image (cropped) via Ohio Board of Pharmacy.