Connecticut Banned Kratom Leaf. Federal Regulators Just Drew the Line the State Refused To.

On October 9, 2026, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sent the Drug Enforcement Administration a recommendation built on a single distinction: natural kratom leaf is one thing, and concentrated or chemically altered 7-hydroxymitragynine is another.

HHS put numbers on it. Under the recommendation, 7-OH and mitragynine pseudoindoxyl would be controlled in Schedule I for temporary scheduling purposes when either compound alone, or both combined, exceeds 1 milligram per gram in solids or 1 milligram per milliliter in liquids, or when the mass of mitragynine divided by the mass of those compounds falls below 100. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the approach draws a clear line between natural kratom and dangerous enhanced opioid products, and that the threshold targets concentrated 7-OH without sweeping natural botanical kratom into Schedule I.

Connecticut swept natural botanical kratom into Schedule I six months earlier.

Since April 2, 2026, section 21a-243-7 of the Regulations of Connecticut State Agencies has listed “Mitragyna speciosa (kratom), including its leaves, stem and any extracts” in Schedule I, alongside 7-hydroxymitragynine, bromazolam, flubromazolam, nitazenes, tianeptine and phenibut. Schedule I is the most restrictive tier. The regulation carries Secretary of the State file number 6466.

The federal recommendation does not change Connecticut law. What it does is make the state an outlier in a documented way. The distinction HHS adopted in October 2026 is the same distinction that a Yale epidemiologist, a UConn pharmacy academic, the Speaker Pro Tempore of the Rhode Island House, and hundreds of commenters asked Connecticut to make in the fall of 2025, and that the state said it had no authority to make.

How Connecticut got here without a kratom vote

Connecticut never held a floor vote on banning kratom.

Section 4, subsection (i) of Public Act 25-101 directed the Commissioner of Consumer Protection to designate seven substances as controlled and classify each in the appropriate schedule. Kratom was on that list by name, including its leaves and stem.

PA 25-101 is House Bill 6855, “An Act Concerning the Department of Consumer Protection’s Recommendations Regarding Drug Control and Cannabis and Hemp Regulation.” It was an agency bill, a package of departmental requests covering nonresident pharmacy inspections, cannabis regulation and hemp definitions. The kratom mandate sat inside it.

The provision was disclosed. Commissioner Bryan Cafferelli’s written testimony to the General Law Committee on February 14, 2025 said Section 4 adds substances such as kratom, “designer” benzodiazepines and nitazenes to the controlled substances list. The Global Kratom Coalition testified in opposition at that same hearing, specifically over kratom’s inclusion, and urged the committee to reject the bill.

The committee reported it out 22 to 0 on March 24, 2025. It passed both chambers unanimously. Lamont signed it in June 2025.

Because the mandate rode inside an agency bill and passed without dissent, no Connecticut legislator is on record casting a vote to ban kratom.

What the Department said it could and could not do

DCP opened a comment period on the implementing regulation from September 18 to October 20, 2025, and held a virtual public hearing on October 15.

In its written response, the Department set out its position plainly. The Legislature had decided the substances were controlled and would be scheduled, so the Department had no authority to leave them unscheduled. Its authority, it wrote, was limited solely to determining which schedule applied. And whichever schedule it chose, the substances could no longer be sold at retail, because no controlled substance is available over the counter.

The Department chose Schedule I. Its stated reason: the FDA has approved no product or use in the United States for any of the seven substances. DCP wrote that it does not conduct independent research or studies on the safety or efficacy of drugs, and therefore must rely on the federal agencies that specialize in that work.

That sentence is where the October 9 recommendation lands. The federal agency Connecticut deferred to has now concluded that concentration and ratio can separate natural leaf from enhanced product, and has recommended scheduling only above those thresholds. Connecticut’s justification for Schedule I rested on federal silence about kratom. Federal silence has ended, and it did not break the way the regulation assumed.

The off-ramp the state wrote, and why it does not open

Connecticut anticipated that federal policy might move. The regulation’s own Statement of Purpose says that if any of the substances are rescheduled by the FDA, subsection (g) of the regulation adopts the schedule the FDA determines.

Read it closely and the escape hatch does not fit this situation. Subsection (g) applies to a Schedule I controlled substance “used for a medical purpose under the supervision of a practitioner, that has been approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration, or successor agency, to have a medical use and is reclassified in any schedule of the controlled substances or unscheduled under the federal Controlled Substances Act.”

The October 9 recommendation is not an FDA approval of a medical use. It is a scheduling threshold recommendation to the DEA, and the agencies have been explicit that no kratom product is FDA-approved for any medical condition. So the one mechanism Connecticut built for following federal policy is keyed to an event, FDA approval of botanical kratom as a medicine, that nobody is pursuing and that the compound’s status as a plant product makes unlikely.

The state deferred to the FDA on the way in and wrote a door that only the FDA can open, from a direction it is not walking.

What the record actually said

Sixty-four people testified at the October 15 hearing. The Department received 405 written comments on the proposal. Every oral and written comment, DCP noted, addressed kratom and 7-OH. None addressed the other five substances.

DCP sorted them into three groups and published the names: those opposing scheduling, those supporting it, and those asking only for a less restrictive schedule. The opposition list runs to hundreds of names. The support list runs to roughly thirty. Seven people asked for a lower schedule.

Two submissions stand out.

Katherine Hill, an epidemiologist and kratom researcher in candidacy for a PhD at the Yale School of Public Health, filed a detailed opposition. She told the Department she has published ten peer-reviewed manuscripts on kratom use, kratom use disorder and the kratom marketplace. Her comment did not claim kratom is harmless. She cited her own research finding that roughly 25 percent of adults who consume kratom meet modified DSM-5 criteria for a kratom use disorder, most of them mild and driven by tolerance and withdrawal. Her argument was that this does not make it a Schedule I drug, that no clinical trials exist either way, and that scheduling would push people toward more potent illicit products, deter them from telling clinicians about their use, and obstruct ongoing research. She recommended age restrictions, limits on where products can be sold, and consumer and clinician education instead.

Brian Patrick Kennedy, Speaker Pro Tempore of the Rhode Island House of Representatives, filed a statement describing why his state went the other way. He wrote that the pivotal moment came when the Rhode Island Department of Health completed its evaluation and concluded that natural kratom leaf does not meet the statutory criteria for scheduling, and that the products creating real safety concerns were synthetic or concentrated 7-OH compounds masquerading as kratom. He pointed Connecticut to the July 29, 2025 joint press conference at which Secretary Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary recommended Schedule I for 7-hydroxymitragynine and specifically excluded pure kratom leaf, and argued that if there had been any basis to include mitragynine, they would have done so. He recommended the Department reject the proposed classification of kratom and instead recommend a regulatory framework to the legislature.

That was filed in October 2025. The federal action Kennedy predicted arrived on October 9, 2026.

Others opposing included a Connecticut physician of thirty years who does not prescribe opioids, a pharmacist of thirty-six years, a peer recovery navigator in Waterbury, the American Herbal Products Association, Jeffrey Singer of the Cato Institute, and Curt Bramble, the former Utah state senator who sponsored the nation’s first Kratom Consumer Protection Act.

The record also contains Connecticut families who blame kratom products for a death or an addiction, a Westport pediatric practice, a counseling center, and an attorney who told the Department he represents families of people who died. Those comments describe real harm and are part of the same record.

The Department declined to revise the regulation.

A public record the public cannot read

There is a further problem. The eRegulations page that is supposed to display those comments does not work.

The comment data is embedded in the page itself, but the portal’s script fails while parsing it and throws a syntax error partway through. The table renders empty. Anyone who visits the state’s official public comment page for PR2025-018 sees a heading, a date range, and nothing else. The comments are recoverable only by pulling the raw data out of the page source.

The bill that never got a hearing

Connecticut had the other option in front of it, in the same session, in the same committee.

House Bill 5427, “An Act Prohibiting Sales of Kratom Products to Individuals Under Twenty-One Years of Age,” was introduced on January 17, 2025 by Rep. Christopher Poulos, a Southington Democrat, with Rep. Rebecca Martinez, and co-sponsored by Rep. Jill Barry and Rep. Craig Fishbein. It was referred to the Joint Committee on General Law.

Nothing else ever happened to it. No public hearing. No committee vote. It died when the session adjourned on June 4, 2025. The same General Law Committee that reported the prohibition bill out 22 to 0 never took up the age limit.

Fishbein’s name on that bill is worth pausing on. He is the ranking House Republican on the Judiciary Committee and a founding member and vice chairman of the General Assembly’s Conservative Caucus. He was the leading House opponent of the 2021 adult-use cannabis law, telling the Judiciary Committee that out of respect for the oath he took he could not support legalizing a substance that remained federally controlled. On kratom, one of the legislature’s most consistent prohibition voices put his name on an age limit rather than a ban.

Rhode Island took that path. The Rhode Island Kratom Act, enacted July 2, 2025 as Public Law 2025 chapter 446, replaced that state’s 2017 kratom ban with a licensed market for adults 21 and over, the first time any state reversed a kratom prohibition. The same act bans synthetic 7-OH, prohibits kratom beverages, vapes and combustible products, and caps any single alkaloid at one percent of total kratom alkaloids. It took effect April 1, 2026, one day before Connecticut’s ban took effect.

Rhode Island drew the leaf and concentrate line in statute in July 2025. HHS drew it in October 2026. Connecticut, in between, drew no line at all.

Where it stands

Kratom in every form, leaf and powder included, has been a Schedule I controlled substance in Connecticut since April 2, 2026. State officials announced the scheduling publicly after the Legislative Regulation Review Committee approved the regulation, and the Department of Consumer Protection said the substances had to come off store shelves.

Undoing it would take the legislature. DCP has said it cannot unschedule what the General Assembly ordered scheduled. Nothing in the federal recommendation alters a state schedule, and the regulation’s own federal-deference clause does not reach this federal action.

Under the state constitution, the General Assembly’s 2027 regular session convenes on the Wednesday following the first Monday in January.