On October 27, New Jersey Senator Shirley K. Turner (D) introduced a bill that would criminalize 7-hydroxymitragynine as a Schedule I drug under the state’s Controlled Dangerous Substances Act. Commonly known as 7-OH, the opioid-like compound has been increasingly targeted by state legislators since July, when the Food and Drug Administration recommended placement under Schedule I of the federal Controlled Substances Act.
For cases involving 1 ounce of 7-OH or less, Bill S4772 would impose a prison term of three to five years regardless of whether the charge was for possession, manufacturing, distribution or possession with intent to manufacture or distribute. The maximum fine would be $35,000 for possession, and $75,000 for the other charges. In cases involving more than an ounce, the prison term would be five to 10 years and the fine could be up to $150,000. The bill doesn’t specify how weight would be determined, but it’s reasonably likely that it would be the total weight of any kratom product with an alkaloid content that’s more than 2 percent 7-OH.
A naturally occurring alkaloid in the kratom plant, 7-OH is essentially what makes kratom psychoactive. It’s more potent than kratom’s primary alkaloid, but only exists in trace amounts—under 2 percent, which is why that’s the threshold being widely used in similar legislation. Any higher than that indicates that the 7-OH isn’t naturally occurring, but was synthetically engineered, as it isn’t practical to extract concentracted 7-OH from kratom.
Though the Drug Enforcement Administration’s whole thing is obviously that all drugs are bad, its investment in painting synthetic drugs as even worse has historically been convenient for anyone invested in the narrative that plant-based drugs are better. But now, efforts to legalize and regulate a plant-based drug (kratom) are bumping up against efforts to control and criminalize a synthetic drug (concentrated 7-OH) because the former contains the latter, just not as concentrated, and it’s getting a little hard to keep up.
In Michigan, a proposal to regulate the sale of kratom is on the House Regulatory Reform Committee agenda for October 30. House Bill 4969, which would take effect in 2027, would ban kratom products with an alkaloid content above 2 percent 7-OH.
In Illinois, a proposal to create the Kratom Consumer Protection Act has been with the House Rules Committee since March, but recently picked up a new cosponsor. HB 1303 would also ban kratom products that exceed the 2-percent 7-OH threshold.
Massachusetts is considering a bill that would regulate kratom sales through state licensing similar to cannabis dispensaries, the requirements for which make very clear that concentrated 7-OH products are off-limits. The state is also considering a different bill that would simply ban all kratom (and thus 7-OH) products.
New York has a bill in committee that would ban all kratom products under the state’s Schedule I. It also has another bill that would regulate kratom while banning 7-OH above the 2-percent threshold; another that would permit continued sales of any kratom products, but ban packaging that uses the words “all natural”; another that would ban sales to people under 21; and another that would sale of any food or beverages containing kratom or 7-OH, which the FDA has already declared federally illegal.
Similar to how fentanyl is incessantly described as being 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine, 7-OH comes with a tagline, too.
Similar to how fentanyl is incessantly described as being 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine, 7-OH comes with the tagline of being 13 times more potent than morphine. (For what it’s worth, this statistic comes from a 2002 experiment on guinea pig intestines; not humans.) And now that more and more legislators find themselves talking about 7-OH, they’re plugging in the same fentanyl rhetoric they know by heart; if it works for one synthetic drug, it must work for all of them.
In an October 28 letter about 7-OH products “and their analogues,” Kansas Senator Roger Marshall called for DEA Administrator Terrance Cole to “eliminate these dangerous synthetics”—via temporary scheduling. He went on to describe manufacturers “exploiting regulatory gaps and flooding communities with synthetic compounds” by advertising concentrated 7-OH products as kratom extracts.
“This regulatory gap blurs the distinction between a natural botanical product and a dangerous synthetic drug,” he wrote. “These products are adulterated chemical analogues engineered to deliver intense opioid-like effects that no natural Kratom product could produce.”
The recently proposed New Jersey bill does much the same thing.
“The FDA has issued a number of warnings and conducted seizures of illegally sold, unapproved or misbranded drug products,” the bill states, “containing potentially lethal doses of synthetic 7-OH.”
The phrase “potentially lethal dose” is borrowed from the DEA, which uses it in reference to fentanyl. The FDA’s 7-OH guidance does not describe the substance this way; it’s actually pretty explicit that while anecdotal reports and preclinical (non-human) trials suggest there could be risk of respiratory depression with 7-OH, the fact that it was in someone’s system at the time that they died does not mean it killed them.
Image (cropped) via County of Los Angeles Public Health