alt Hacker NewsDEA to Temporarily Schedule 7-Oh and Related Substances to Protect Public Safety
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Actually reasonable decision from the DEA under RFK. Scheduling concentrated/semi-synthetic kratom products while leaving the weaker leaf-based products alone is a good compromise to reduce harm without criminalizing kratom (which has beneficial uses for opioid recovery and maintenance therapy) in general.
Kratom is such an interesting drug.
About 10 years ago, when it was less well-known, you could find better raw leaf powder and it was helping people get off actual opiates.
IIRC there's an effect where the actual chemicals get stronger for older leaves. The bigger market has caused the harvest period to shorten, making the powder worse quality, and creating room for the concentrated extracts and stuff like 7-Oh.
Tragedy of the commons I guess. I knew people who started taking way too much, but also people who were able to use it responsibly. People say "let doctors prescribe", but that ignores how in order for that to happen, a pharma company will need something they can patent, pay for the years of testing, get sole control over it for a period, and years later a generic can come about. All when you can dry a leaf and use it as-is. There should be room for plants to be consumed. Screw it, enjoy poppy, cannabis, kratom, tobacco, etc.
It probably shouldn't be sold in gas stations but it probably also shouldn't be outright banned, as we'll just get new, more dangerous analogues.
Theres a guy Grant Harding on YT etc. who sends gas station pills for testing and some of the things he finds are scary. Seriously addictive drugs being sold OTC with no meaningful consumer warning or guardrails
Our country loves to let unregulated & addictive drugs flood into the market, let people become dependent on them, pull the rug by making them illegal, and then arrest them for trying to comply with their addiction. Destroy their lives, cripple their families, send them to prison, get cheap labor. The American way.
They did this same dance about 10 years ago, and last minute caved to American Kratom Association and did not ban.
This time AKA is lobbying FOR this ban, as 7oh gives kratom a really bad name.
It's kind of amazing that this took so long. On the other hand, this is just chapter 3025223 of the failed war on drugs and we can be confident that people will find something worse as an alternative.
Kratom has been beneficial for me. Extracts can go but the leaf should stay.
Ah yeah surely banning more substances will be the end of the problem this time! It definitely won't just push anyone who got hooked on this non-lethal opioid towards unregulated black markets filled with lethal fentanyl...
Fun fact, this is one of two """temporary""" opioid schedulings happening right now. The DEA is also banning 5,6-Dichloro Desmethylchlorphine (SR-17018), which has minimal to no recreational value and is the current most promising breakthrough therapy for opioid withdrawals. It is hard for me to read the combination of these two bans as anything but active malice.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/01/2026-13...
One of the big dangers I've heard of with 7-Oh is it seems like treatment centers don't really know how to treat withdrawal from it, which I've heard is extremely rough.
I don't usually agree with prohibition, but 7OH is the kind of drug that spirals into a self destructive addiction VERY quickly. Most opioids require using for a number of weeks before you start to develop enough physical dependence to bring about withdrawal. 7OH has this weird withdrawal-like crash after even a single use that makes the user immediately feel terrible and often they seek more to make it go away. It's like the crack of the opioid world. On top of that, tolerance builds extremely quickly. Glad to see it go.
Anyone got a quick primer on what 7-Oh is? That's a new term for me and the web search doesn't seem reliable.
Last year, the FDA had already said that if kratom is added to food, it is considered adulteration of food. It also cannot be a dietary supplement.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/fda-and-...
I’m not fully cognizant of the interaction between FDA and DEA, but I would’ve thought that following FDA’s announcement last year, kratom had already been outlawed.
Good, Kratom (as sold in products like Feel Free) is fucking awful.
more war on drugs slop / drivel as if no lessons were learned from alcohol Prohibition
See, where you went wrong was… you started taking something called ‘Kratom’… from a local gas station.
Fuck the DEA -- they need to be abolished today.
Then, fuck all the kratom vendors that absolutely irresponsibly market their products.
I've used kratom for 10 years for pain management and it was my best option at the time.
Drugs should not be illegal -- they should be regulated, for purity and for truth in advertising (in the case of kratom making it crystal clear that addiction is inevitable with regular constant use.
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John Oliver has a good segment about this
"temporarily"
Downvoters must not know that when the DEA says they're temporarily banning something they mean permanently
It is insane that the people responsible for policing drugs get to decide what drugs are illegal. That's like letting the police decide if something is a crime or not. It's completely antithetical to democracy and the rule-of-law.