North Dakota Is Closed: The Kratom Ban Nobody Voted For

By Kemal Whyte, founder and CEO of Rebel X Brands.
Published 6 August 2026. Updated 7 August.

North Dakota is closed. Not closing, not proposed, not waiting on a vote. As you read this it is an offence there to sell, buy or even possess kratom in any form, and no elected body agreed to that.

Last month I wrote that the question worth asking about any jurisdiction was whether it banned the plant or banned the concentrate. That is still the right question. North Dakota has added a second one, and it is arguably more important: who decided, and did anybody get to speak?

No bill. No committee. No floor vote. Here is what is actually in force, and why I think it is the most significant development of the year for this industry, ahead of anything the DEA has filed.

What is in force right now

Two administrative actions are live, and both were signed on Monday 3 August.

The governor signed Executive Order 2026-04, declaring kratom, mitragynine and 7-OH a public health emergency. It came into force at 5 p.m. on Wednesday 5 August and runs 30 days, which carries it to roughly 4 September. Read the operative language rather than the coverage: under the order nobody may knowingly create, manufacture, deliver, distribute, sell, purchase or possess kratom or related products. Violations are an infraction carrying up to a 1,000 dollar fine.

Separately, the Board of Pharmacy issued an emergency rule placing 7-OH into Schedule I, alongside LSD and heroin. That one is valid roughly six months while a formal rulemaking process with hearings and public comment unfolds, and its penalties are heavier than an infraction.

The attorney general's office published take-back locations, around 200 statewide, and told law enforcement to focus the first days on notice and voluntary compliance rather than arrests. Agencies across the state have said they are ready to enforce it. That is a humane way to start, and it does not change what the order says.

A special legislative session has been called for 2 September to address the emergency rule and, in the governor's office's own framing, to cement the prohibition into state law.

Read the order of operations, because it is the whole point. The prohibition is already in force. The legislature convenes a month from now to ratify something that is already law.

The legislature had already said no. Three times.

This is the part I have not seen reported anywhere and it is the part that matters.

In 2025 North Dakota lawmakers rejected a proposed ban on a kratom compound. They then took up a regulation bill instead. That bill was amended into a recommendation for a study. The study was never pursued. Three attempts through the front door over two sessions, and the outcome each time was that the elected body declined to prohibit.

This month the executive branch reached the opposite outcome in a morning, and it is the version that is now law.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read that as an accusation of bad faith and I do not mean it that way. Emergency powers exist precisely so a state can act between sessions when officials believe people are dying. That is a legitimate function, and the stated basis was not procedural. The state epidemiology office reported that kratom, 7-OH or a related compound were part of the primary cause of death for 23 people, and a contributing cause in one more. Poison control calls rose from seven in 2024 to 22 in 2025.

If you want that stated as plainly as it can be stated: the legislature's own five-member working group, convened to draft what comes next, met on the morning of Friday 7 August at the Capitol. The meeting was open and livestreamed. The published agenda included no opportunity for public comment.

I am not alleging anything improper. Working groups draft, committees hear, and there will be process later. I am pointing out that the drafting is under way, in a room where the industry has no scheduled moment to speak, over a prohibition that is already operating, and that most operators did not know the meeting existed.

Why this breaks last month's framework

In July the encouraging pattern was that a growing number of states were separating the leaf from the concentrate. Ohio exempted vegetation-form kratom while banning the synthetics. Florida, Virginia, Utah, New York, Colorado and Mississippi landed in roughly the same place. I argued, and still believe, that this is the industry getting close to the rules it publicly said it wanted.

North Dakota did not do that. The order names kratom, mitragynine and 7-OH. Naming mitragynine reaches ordinary leaf powder, and it reaches anything blended with it, including products that do not present as kratom at all. There is no threshold in the order and no leaf exception, so nothing on a North Dakota shelf survives it.

So the federal carve-out I spent last month explaining does nothing for you in Bismarck. A correct answer to a federal question is not an answer to a state one, and any operator relying on that threshold as a general defence has just been shown its limit. The Federal Register notice still says what it said. It just does not travel.

The uncomfortable part

I am not going to write the version of this where the industry is purely a victim, because I do not think that is true and you would know I was performing.

Officials do not reach for emergency powers over a category that polices itself. They reach for them when the visible facts are a product sold beside a fizzy drink at a petrol station, with no age check, no consistent labelling, and potency that varies by an order of magnitude between two packages that look identical. That is the picture North Dakota's officials described, and it is a fair description of a real part of this market.

Every serious operator I know has been saying for years that the concentrated end of the category was going to bring the whole thing down. It is now bringing the whole thing down. The people who built businesses on selling something as strong as possible with as little disclosure as possible have handed regulators a case that is very easy to make, and the rest of us are inside the blast radius.

That is not a reason to accept a whole-plant prohibition as correct. It is a reason to stop pretending the industry has no part in how it got here.

What this means practically

Three things follow, and none of them are comfortable.

The advocacy model is aimed at the wrong building. Most industry effort goes into legislatures: testimony, model bills, KCPA campaigns. That work matters and should continue. But North Dakota is proof that a legislature can decline three times and be routed around anyway. If your monitoring and your relationships only cover the statehouse, you are watching a door the decision no longer comes through. Boards of pharmacy and governors' offices deserve the same attention, and almost nobody is giving it to them.

Lead time is no longer a planning assumption. Connecticut gave about a month. Kansas and Tennessee gave roughly two. North Dakota gave two days, and anyone still holding stock there on Wednesday afternoon was holding contraband by Thursday morning. Any inventory strategy that assumes a runway to sell down a closing market is now carrying a risk it was not priced for.

The paperwork question changed shape. A certificate of analysis answers a threshold question. Where a state has not asked a threshold question, it answers nothing. That does not make testing less important. It makes it important for a different reason: it is the only way the industry can eventually argue, with evidence, that a measurable, labelled, age-gated product is a different thing from what got people killed.

Rhode Island is still the exit, and it is not a soft one

I keep coming back to Rhode Island because it is the only proof we have that this direction reverses. It reopened in April, the first state ever to undo a kratom ban.

It did not reopen into a free market. It reopened into four licence classes, sales restricted to 21 and over, hard caps of 150 mg of mitragynine and 1 mg of 7-OH per serving, heavy-metal limits and packaging rules. That is the price of the exit, and I think it is roughly the right price.

North Dakota's session on 2 September is the next real test, and it starts from a harder place than a normal bill would, because the ban is already the status quo it has to argue against. What lawmakers take up has not been settled publicly, and you can follow it directly at ndlegis.gov rather than through coverage. If the industry shows up to that session with data, caps it is willing to accept and a straight answer about concentrates, there is a version of this where North Dakota reopens regulated. If it shows up insisting nothing is wrong, there is not.

What I would actually do with this

If you sell, add pharmacy boards and governors' offices to whatever you monitor, and assume any unsettled state can close inside a week. Know your exposure by state as a number you can produce in five minutes, not a spreadsheet you build after an announcement. And separate leaf from concentrate on your own shelf, because that distinction is the only argument the industry has that will still be standing in two years.

If you buy, check your own state before you order, and check it against the state itself rather than a tracker. In North Dakota the answer is simply no, and the roughly 200 take-back sites the attorney general published are the disposal route. Several national trackers were still wrong about Rhode Island months after it reopened. They will be slower on North Dakota, not faster. Residents there who are worried about their own use can reach the DHHS crisis lifeline at 988 or the 211 helpline, and that is a better call than a message board.

I keep the state-by-state map and bill tracker on the industry intel page, and North Dakota has been moved to closed. The North Dakota Monitor's explainer is the best single account of the order, the disposal guidance and what the legislature is drafting. For last month's picture, including the federal threshold and the states that got this right, see the July update.

It will be wrong eventually, because this 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, not as a disclaimer.

Disclaimer: This article summarises publicly reported developments as of 7 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. 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.