Kratom & 7-OH Pt II

“I have no question that 95-plus percent of what we’re doing with 7-OH is for the greater good,” Vince Sanders told me over the phone in late July, a few days before a federal ban on the compound was supposed to take effect. Sanders is the founder of a company in Kansas City that makes hundreds of millions of dollars selling kratom and 7-OH products—the “gas station drugs” at the center of this episode. He employs 500 people. He claims he was the first person in the world to successfully formulate a drinkable, palatable kratom shot. And he believes the addiction stories we’ve been hearing are a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of a much happier reality. This is the second episode Flightless Bird has devoted to kratom and its far more potent synthetic cousin, 7-hydroxy mitragynine (7-OH). After the first episode aired, the show was flooded with listener mail—stories of ruined finances, shattered trust, and brutal withdrawal. So host David Farrier decided to follow up: he checked in with Michael, the construction worker from the first episode who was spending thousands a week on 7-OH; he read out a stack of listener experiences, almost all of them negative; and he sat down with Sanders, the man who makes the stuff, to hear the other side. What emerges is a portrait of a substance that exists in a regulatory gray zone—legal, sold at gas stations and convenience stores, unstudied in