News

Los Angeles – More than 32,000 Americans have joined together to oppose a federal ban on 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), marking a major milestone in a rapidly growing national movement pushing back against what advocates describe as government overreach that ignores science, real-world data, and lived experience.
The 7-HOPE Alliance, (7-HOPE) and The Holistic Alternative Recovery Trust (HART) announced the milestone today, underscoring a clear shift in the national conversation surrounding 7-OH. Once framed almost exclusively through fear-based narratives, the compound is now increasingly discussed by scientists, consumer advocates, and major media outlets as a potential harm-reduction tool that warrants responsible regulation, not prohibition.

Today is Veterans Day, honoring approximately 17.6 million living veterans in the United States. And some of them are using this time to call on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to end his efforts to ban 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) — a naturally occurring compound in the kratom plant.

Most politicians love to call themselves champions for veterans. You’ll see the photo ops, speeches about sacrifice, and endless talk about “America’s heroes.”

Every Veterans Day, elected officials will forcefully highlight how we need to put veterans first.

The truth, as they say, is nothing like the brochure. Far from putting veterans first, the federal government has long been one of our biggest obstacles. Veterans are losing access to care, income, and dignity because of deliberate decisions made by government agencies.

When I came home from Iraq in 2005, I thought the hardest part was behind me. I was wrong. I brought back more than tough memories. I also brought back chronic pain that’s never left.

Like a lot of guys in my unit, I came back with injuries that never fully healed. The pain’s always there, humming under the surface. Some mornings it’s a dull ache; other days it feels like someone’s driving a nail into my spine.

You learn to live around it, but you never forget it’s there.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Holistic Alternative Recovery Trust (HART) today released the
following statement in response to misleading and incomplete media reports surrounding a 7-
hydroxymitragynine (7-OH):
“The misinformation circulating about 7-OH misrepresents both the science and the safety record
of this compound,” Jeff Smith, PhD, National Policy Director for HART. “The only clinical
study cited by the FDA comes from a researcher funded by the Global Kratom Coalition, a group
actively fighting 7-OH products that have cut into their market share. That unreviewed,
unpublished study sought to demonstrate harm by injecting 7-OH directly into mice’s
bloodstream, even though humans consume it orally. Anything can be harmful if injected, eat a
chocolate bar and you’re fine; inject it and you’ll die. The study was biased and misleading.”

About Gov. DeWine’s suggestions to crack down on kratom and 7-OH (a compound made from kratom), all I can say is: this is absurd. 7-OH is used by millions of Americans to help with chronic pain (I use it to help with pain from fibromyalgia). There have not been any indications of a public health crisis. The FDA’s own database, FAERS, shows 37 “incidents” of any kind, nationwide, in the entire history of 7-OH. If that’s dangerous, then coffee, energy drinks, and half the medicine aisle are next.

When I found 7-OH, recovery suddenly felt possible. I could think about my future instead of just surviving the present. I went back to work, to my family, and to living my life instead of barely surviving.
This ban won’t save lives. It will put people like me back in the grip of opioids or push us toward unsafe street drugs. Florida should fix this mistake by regulating 7-OH instead of outlawing the only thing that worked when everything else failed.

Washington, D.C. — The Holistic Alternative Recovery Trust (HART) today released statements from leading organizations, policy experts, and advocates opposing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) proposal to schedule 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH). These voices, spanning physicians, veterans, fiscal watchdogs, youth advocates, consumer choice groups, and policy think tanks, warn that prohibition would cause more harm than good, repeating the failures of the War on Drugs while cutting off promising avenues for public health.