Kratom Illegal in What States? Nine of Them, and Massachusetts on 28 August 2026

By Kemal Whyte, founder and CEO of Rebel X Brands.
Published 17 August 2026. Status box updated 27 August 2026.

Kratom is illegal in what states? Nine of them outright: Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Vermont, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Connecticut, Kansas and Tennessee. Massachusetts is not one of those nine. On 28 August 2026 it becomes something standing next to them, and the route it took to get there is the reason I am writing this instead of colouring in a map.

The first half of this column is reporting: what each state did, under which instrument, and what the numbers in the coverage actually say. The second half, clearly marked, is my opinion about it.

The record: nine states, and the four that every list gets wrong

Nine states prohibit kratom outright. Four more sit in positions a national tracker describes badly or not at all, and Massachusetts becomes a fifth on 28 August 2026.

So the honest answer is nine, with an asterisk on four of the rows and a date on two more. That is also why this site has never published a map. A map gives a state one colour, and four of those rows cannot be drawn in one colour: a temporary executive order, a temporary regulation, a prohibition that has not started, and a repeal half the internet has not noticed.

In the space of one month, three states did three different things to the same plant, using three different instruments, with three wildly different amounts of warning. Minnesota passed a law. North Dakota signed an order. Massachusetts scheduled every form of kratom by regulation, and handed enforcement of it to several hundred municipal boards of health.

What the Massachusetts order does

The instrument is 105 CMR 726.000, "Temporary placement of kratom in Schedule 1 pursuant to MGL c. 94C s. 2A", issued by DPH Commissioner Robbie Goldstein, MD, PhD and announced by Governor Maura Healey on 13 August 2026. It designates kratom a Schedule I controlled substance under Massachusetts law in every form, runs on a 14-day notice period that fixes the effective date at 28 August 2026, and stays in force for up to one year. You can read the order without a lawyer sitting next to you.

Two details are worth pulling out because the coverage has mostly skipped them. On the mechanism, Boston.com set out the statutory route: the state can temporarily place a substance in Schedule I where the department finds it necessary to avoid an imminent public safety hazard and the substance is not already scheduled elsewhere. Schedule I in Massachusetts means high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use, which is a legal category rather than a scientific finding.

On enforcement, the governor's office language is the most consequential sentence in the announcement, and it is carried in the same words by NBC10 Boston's account and Patch's summary of the release: the order gives local boards of health and other municipal officials additional authority to take enforcement action against retailers selling kratom products. The state wrote the rule. It did not build the machine to enforce it.

Three instruments, one month

Minnesota raised the age to purchase and possess from 18 to 21, effective 1 August 2026. The bill, HF 3453, enacted as Chapter 63, was signed on 5 May 2026 inside a list of nine bills, one sentence long in the governor's release. It cleared the House 127 to 5 and the Senate 56 to 10. Eighty eight days of runway. Penalties untouched.

North Dakota prohibited outright. Executive Order 2026-04 took effect at 5 p.m. on 5 August 2026, reaches sale, purchase and possession, and gave the trade roughly two days. Its duration language is worth reading in the document rather than in the coverage of it. Clause 1(e) says the prohibition and public health emergency "remains in effect until rescinded or until such time as the conditions of N.D.C.C. Section 37-17.1-05(3)(b) or (c) have been met." That is the whole of the duration language, and in practice it means until the legislature acts. A special session convenes on 2 September 2026 to decide whether prohibition goes into statute after the fact. The 30 day figure that has followed this order around since it was signed came from news reporting; the words 30, thirty, expire and lapse appear nowhere in the document linked above.

Massachusetts sits between the two on notice and carries the longest stated ceiling of the three: a 14-day notice period, fifteen calendar days from publication on 13 August 2026 to effect on 28 August 2026, and a ceiling of a year.

The 91 figure, and what the state itself published

One number in the coverage needs its provenance attached every time it is used, so here it is in full. GBH reported that the Massachusetts Office of the Chief Medical Examiner recorded 91 deaths between 2020 and 2025 in which kratom or mitragynine was a cause or a contributing factor. That is a medical examiner figure, reaching the public through news reporting, covering a six year window, on a cause-or-contributing basis.

The state has never published that number. Its own materials use different language, and the two documents are worth quoting apart rather than blended together. The Department of Public Health kratom page says, in these words: "Although rare, kratom-involved deaths have been reported." The governor's announcement of 13 August 2026 says: "While uncommon, kratom-related deaths have been reported, particularly when kratom is used with other substances or by people with underlying health conditions." Two documents, two phrasings, neither of them carrying a count.

Both the 91 and the "rare" are accurate statements from different sources, and the gap between them is where most of the argument about this order is actually happening. "Cause or contributing factor" is doing a great deal of work in the medical examiner line, because a contributing factor in an examiner's file is not the same claim as a cause, and post-mortem toxicology very often finds several substances in one person. That is a distinction between a count and a conclusion, not a dismissal of either.

Since this column was published the state's own findings document has become available, and it carries a different table again: kratom-associated deaths of 15, 10, 16, 19, 18 and 21 across 2020 to 2025, and 8 in the part year to 28 July 2026. The state marks 2023 to 2025 as preliminary and warns that deaths may be underreported because no ICD code names kratom. Neither that table nor the 91 figure is the other one restated, and anyone quoting either should say which document it came from.

Everything above this line is reporting, sourced and linked. Everything below it is my opinion, and you should read it as one operator's argument rather than as a description of the record.

Opinion: the venue moved again, and this time it moved twice

On 4 August 2026 I wrote that the venue where this gets decided had moved from legislatures to governors' offices, and that the industry was watching the wrong door. I have thought about that sentence a great deal since 13 August 2026, because Massachusetts shows I stopped one building too early. The venue did not move to the governor. It moved to a public health commissioner, and from there it moves again on 28 August 2026, down to city hall.

In July the argument was about which chamber. In early August it was about which branch. Massachusetts makes it about which level of government, and it does that in two hops. First the decision moved from the legislature to an agency, which is the same shift North Dakota made. Then, from 28 August 2026, the operating authority moves again, from the agency to municipalities. Read the department's own kratom page and the direction of travel is right there in the practical advice: from that date, questions about sales in your municipality go to your local board of health. Not to DPH. Not to a state hotline.

Massachusetts has 351 cities and towns. Almost every one has a board of health, most of them autonomous, most of them three or more members, many of them volunteers, all of them now holding a piece of authority over a product category. Think about what that means for anyone trying to comply. There is no single conversation to have. There is no one office that can tell you what happens to the stock in your back room, because the answer is a local one and the person who gives it may be reading the order for the first time at the same meeting where they decide.

Some towns had already moved before the state did, which is the part I find most telling. Northampton's board of health adopted a local regulation in 2025, reaching synthetically derived kratom rather than kratom generally, and Marlborough's board voted its own prohibition in October 2025, with Belchertown, Lowell, Chelmsford and Dracut ahead of it. So a Massachusetts retailer on 28 August 2026 is not necessarily stepping from an unregulated market into a regulated one. Some are stepping from one local rule into a state rule enforced by the same local officials who wrote the first one, and the rest are meeting their board of health as a regulator for the first time in their commercial lives.

I do not think this was designed to be difficult. I think it is what you get when a state uses the fastest instrument available and the fastest instrument available happens to be one that borrows other people's inspectors. But the effect on an operator is the same either way, and the industry's entire monitoring apparatus, such as it is, is built to watch statehouses.

Opinion: only one of the three had to survive a vote

127 to 5. 56 to 10. Those were the Minnesota numbers, and I keep repeating them because they are the only two figures published about this category all year that describe what a legislature actually thinks when you ask it a reasonable question.

Nobody voted on the North Dakota order. Nobody voted on the Massachusetts one either. That is not an accusation of bad faith, and I want to be careful here, because emergency powers exist for a reason and both states used a mechanism their own law gives them. A public health commissioner who believes a product is hurting people and who has a statutory route to act on that belief is doing the job the statute describes. I would say the same thing if I liked the outcome.

What I will say is that the three instruments are not interchangeable, and the differences run in one direction. A bill has committee hearings, a public record, a recorded vote and an opposition. A regulation issued under emergency authority has a notice period and a commissioner. The first is slower and harder to get, and it is also much harder to reverse in a bad news cycle, which is the trade the industry keeps refusing to price properly.

Opinion: the uncomfortable part is ours

Now the bit I would rather not write.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health is not only restricting a product. It is publicly planning for what happens to people when the product goes away. Its page says it "expects disruptions in the availability of all kratom products", and that "people who regularly use these products are likely to experience opioid tolerance and withdrawal symptoms when they stop or reduce their use". It tells those people they "should seek medical care and/or substance use treatment". It writes that medications used to treat opioid use disorder, "like buprenorphine, have been found to be effective for treating kratom use disorder". Likely is the department's word, and it is doing exactly the work a health department's word should do.

An editorial note rather than a services block. I sell botanical products, so treatment advice is not mine to give. The number worth carrying is the Massachusetts Substance Use Helpline, 24 hours a day, every day: call or text HOPE to 800-327-5050. Everything else on this belongs to a clinician.

An industry that has spent years insisting dependence is not a real problem does not get to act surprised when a health department starts planning for withdrawal. That is us. Not the bad actors, not the synthetics people, not whoever we point at when this comes up. Us.

I have sat in rooms where the party line was that kratom dependence is mild, comparable to coffee, overstated by people who want it prohibited. I did not push back hard enough in those rooms. Meanwhile the honest version has been available the entire time and is not even complicated: some people who use this every day for a long time will have a rough stretch when they stop, many will be fine, some will need real medical help, and the responsible thing is to say so on the label and mean it. If we had been saying that for the last five years, the Massachusetts order would still have happened. But we would be in a much better position to argue about its scope, because a health department that has been told the truth about dependence by an industry is more likely to believe that industry about anything else.

One more thing, and I have written it before. Kratom is not a treatment for opioid use disorder and it is not a treatment for withdrawal. The medicines that treat those are buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone. I am not going to make a medical claim about a product I sell in order to win a regulatory argument.

Opinion: what I would actually do with this

If you sell, stop treating "the legislature" as your monitoring target. Three states in one month, and only one of them used a bill. Your watch list needs public health commissioners, boards of pharmacy, governors' offices and, after Massachusetts, municipal boards of health in the towns where you actually have doors. That last one is genuinely new work and I do not know anybody doing it properly, including me.

Second, and this is the Massachusetts specific one: a fortnight of notice is enough to do the work if you start on the day you read about it. North Dakota gave two days and I watched people lose real money because there was nothing to be done in two days. A 14-day notice period is a runway. Use it on the boring things, the SKU level audit, the accounts list, the conversation with a lawyer licensed in that state, and not on arguing with the news.

Third, know what is in your own products by compound rather than by category. When I audit my own catalogue I treat mitragynine content as the line, because it is the question a supplier can answer and a lab can confirm, and because mitragynine turns up in things that do not present as kratom on the front of the package. That is an auditing method and not a legal opinion; whether the order as written reaches a particular product is a question for counsel, and the compound list is what you take to them. If your team cannot answer it for every SKU in five minutes, Massachusetts is not your biggest problem.

If you buy, check the state itself rather than a tracker. National trackers were wrong about Rhode Island for months after it reopened and they will be slower on this, not faster. In Massachusetts the position before 28 August 2026 is that kratom is legal, and from that date it is Schedule I under state law in every form, and your local board of health is who you ask about anything more specific. On the questions everybody actually wants answered, what happens to stock on hand, to a parcel in transit on the date, to a personal supply in a cupboard, I have no answer and neither has anyone else I have read since 13 August 2026. Nothing published addresses them. Take those to a Massachusetts lawyer and treat confident answers from anyone else, including me, with suspicion.

I keep the state map and bill tracker on the industry intel page. The 4 August 2026 column on North Dakota has the executive order detail if you want the other end of the notice spectrum, and the Minnesota column argues that an age limit passed 127 to 5 is the best thing that has happened to this category all year. Read those two next to this one and you have the whole month.

This column will be wrong eventually, because the subject is moving faster than anything I publish. When you are making a decision with money attached, verify with a lawyer in that jurisdiction. I mean that as advice rather than as a disclaimer. And if you have a Massachusetts operation and want to compare notes, I am reachable here, which is a better use of the time than another thread about whether the number was 91.

Disclaimer: This article summarizes publicly reported developments as of 17 August 2026, with the status box updated on 27 August 2026, and links to primary sources so you can check them yourself. It is general commentary, not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for counsel in your jurisdiction. Sections marked as opinion are the author's own. Laws in this area change quickly and local rules may differ from state rules. Nothing here is a health claim, and statements about botanical products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

Written by Kemal Whyte, founder and CEO of Rebel X Brands, Austin, Texas.