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A kratom plant, which is native to Southeast Asia. (Photo by Wikimedia user ThorPorre via Courthouse News)
BALTIMORE (CN) \u2014 Kratom industry insiders were simultaneously scrambling and celebrating Wednesday as the federal government banned three related opioid derivatives while signaling to the industry\u2019s powerful lobbyists it would not enforce the ban against some of them.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Justice Department is acting before these dangerous compounds become a broader threat,\u201d Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a press release announcing the temporary prohibition of mitragynine pseudoindoxyl (also known as MGPI), MGM-15, and MGM-16, three powerful kratom plant derivatives.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis action is directed at deliberately manufactured and concentrated opioid products, not traditional botanical kratom,\u201d Blanche continued. \u201cThe published scientific literature has not established MGPI as a naturally occurring kratom alkaloid. However, scientific and analytical questions remain about whether MGPI may be reported at incidental trace levels in some botanical products as a result of processing, storage or analytical conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blanche said the Department of Justice will use its enforcement discretion only when incidental trace amounts of MGPI are found in a product otherwise considered botanical kratom. The new policy doesn\u2019t change MGPI\u2019s status as a controlled substance.<\/p>\n
Kratom is a tree that grows in Southeast Asia. Its leaves, when eaten or crushed and brewed into tea, have a mild psychoactive effect. Proponents say it helps with pain relief and to stave off withdrawal symptoms when trying to quit opioids.<\/p>\n
But the lightly-regulated botanical also causes addiction in some cases, and heavy use, can result in seizures and death. The industry, which claims to serve more than 15 million users, has faced a multitude of wrongful death lawsuits in recent years while researchers have studied the plant to see what makes it do what it does.<\/p>\n
MGPI, for example, has been found to be as much as 20 times stronger than morphine.<\/p>\n
Kratom has been banned for importation since 2017, but once smuggled inside the border it\u2019s legal to sell and use in most states. The industry\u2019s lobbyists have spent the past decade trying to persuade the Food and Drug Administration to regulate it as a food, but lately the industry has split into two factions. A traditional faction favors \u201cpure leaf\u201d products, including liquid tinctures they say are natural and thus safe, and a newer group pushing more chemically refined or altered products that are stronger and often better tasting, typically containing at least one of the three newly scheduled substances and\/or 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), a powerful analogue which occurs naturally in kratom at low concentrations.<\/p>\n
Those groups have advocated for the more potent alkaloids to remain legal. The 7-HOPE Alliance, which favors 7-hydroxymitragynine, held an online meeting on Aug. 26 to rally its followers to again flood the FDA with testimony in favor of 7-OH before the agency schedules that compound as well.<\/p>\n
Kratom leaf lobbyists such as Mac Haddow of the American Kratom Association have painted these upstarts as bad actors in the kratom world. His organization celebrated the Justice Department\u2019s scheduling announcement, pointing to its pledge to leave \u201cnatural leaf\u201d kratom products alone:<\/p>\n