There’s Still Time to Fight the 7-OH Ban
/By Crystal Lindell
It’s a bizarre experience to know that something you take on a daily basis is probably about to become an illegal Schedule 1 controlled substance.
If I take a tablet of the concentrated kratom alkaloid 7-OH on July 31, I’ll just be taking an OTC supplement.
But assuming the proposed ban goes through, simply possessing the same tablet in August will technically mean I am committing a felony.
The Drug Enforcement Administration says the 7-OH that I take to manage my chronic pain is so dangerous and medically worthless that it belongs in the same category as LSD and heroin. But they also think it’s fine to leave it legal for one last month.
None of it makes any sense.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m eternally grateful that 7-OH was not instantly made illegal. It gives tens of thousands of people like me time to taper off it.
But nothing will change about 7-OH in August to suddenly make it more dangerous, other than the way the Trump administration has decided to classify it.
It’s difficult to manage life during such an abrupt transition. I will have to basically teach my brain that one of my supplements is now the kind of thing that could trigger a police raid on my home and get me fired from my job.
Yes, I have been tapering myself off 7-OH. Of course I have been tapering. Anything less would be irresponsible.
I have successfully tapered from about 80 mg a day down to 25 mg a day. It was not very difficult to drop down my dose that much. I did a little more each day and had almost no withdrawal symptoms. There were a couple days when I was a little more anxious, but that was it.
When I was still living under the impression that 7-OH would remain widely available and legal, I took it whenever I had pain. But now, since I know that it will likely be illegal soon, I only take it when the pain is so severe that I cannot function without it.
Unfortunately, that presents a pretty big problem: What am I going to do when it’s illegal and my pain is so severe that I cannot function without it?
Despite the fact that I have lowered my dose so much – it’s the next 10 days that I’m really scared of. Because that’s when I have to figure out how to live with zero 7-OH.
I still need it to get through a shift at work, even when using it in combination with opioid medication and OTC pain relievers. In fact, I still need 7-OH to get through the physical strain of taking a shower.
One thing I love most about 7-OH is that it works immediately whenever I take it. And it’s a chewable tablet, which means I don’t even need a drink of water to swallow a pill.
That makes it an amazing pain reliever for when I’m working. And it makes it super helpful for when I’m on a strict time schedule. Needing to wait 30-40 minutes for a medication to kick in steals so much time out of my day.
There just is no alternative that helps me as much as 7-OH. As such, writing this column genuinely saddens me.
It’s not just grief for myself and what I will have to endure when I can no longer take the most effective pain reliever I’ve ever had. It’s the fact that tens of thousands of other people will also be losing the same thing at the same time.
Advocacy groups think the total number of Americans who have used 7-OH is as high as one million. That’s a lot of potential felons. Some of them are my loved ones.
I have seen firsthand how 7-OH has relieved their pain and given them their lives back – in ways I never could have dreamed just two years ago.
I don’t want people to get a false hope that the DEA could backtrack on this, like they did with the kratom ban in 2016. But I also know that doesn’t mean we should just give up.
We have to keep fighting, not just for ourselves, but for all the people who could be helped by this soon-to-be illegal substance.
If you support legal 7-OH, please go leave a public comment on the Federal Registrar. Here are links to the public comment page and the comment portal. Over 17-thousand people have commented already. The deadline is July 31.
Personal comments will have more of an impact. It’s important to remember that they are only asking for a threshold amount of 7-OH that should remain legal. So you should share what dosage you safely take on a daily basis.
We have not lost yet. As such, we can’t stop fighting for this either.
