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<\/p>\nFlorida’s Attorney General recently issued a new emergency rule against chemical compounds found in kratom.<\/p>\n
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014 Recovery centers continue to sound the alarm about what they call a dangerous substance and the impacts it is having on lives across the First Coast. This comes after Florida\u2019s Attorney General issued a new emergency rule last week making 7-OH and related compounds Schedule 1 substances.<\/p>\n
Nick Padlo, the CEO of Sophros Recovery in Jacksonville, has seen the effects of 7-OH firsthand.<\/p>\n
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“We have had an overdose at our facility and had to use Narcan to bring the person back, and that just shouldn’t happen with something you buy at a gas station,” Padlo explained.<\/p>\n
The compound 7-OH comes from the kratom leaf. People often use kratom to help with pain or anxiety as a natural alternative to medication; however, Padlo said there is nothing natural about the way some of these kratom products are being made.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe problem is that everything on our shelves ranges from kratom to 7-OH, and it’s really a spectrum. So you might have the kratom leaf, and then you have enhanced kratom. You have kratom with more mitragynine, which is the primary active ingredient, and then you have that mixed with 7-OH and a handful of other really addictive compounds, and so it’s very hard to tell where you are on that spectrum of potency,” Padlo said.<\/p>\n
Those concentrated compounds are at the center of another emergency rule recently signed by Florida\u2019s Attorney General James Uthmeier. He warns that the state is seeing a rise in people addicted to 7-OH, which is said to mimic the effects of opioids, including opioid withdrawal symptoms. Uthmeier also claims overdoses are on the rise with Florida seeing more than 587 overdose deaths linked to 7-OH since 2013.<\/p>\n
This new emergency rule places 7-OH and six other related compounds as Schedule 1 substances, including mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, 7-acetoxymitragynine, 9-hydroxycorynantheidine, 10-hydroxycorynantheidine, MGM-15, and MGM-16. It also restricts how much of these compounds are allowed in kratom products to prevent super-concentrated formulas.<\/p>\n
“I do think that the ban was important, and I think that it goes a long way in taking steps in the right direction, but we really need the legislature to take the next step,” Padlo said.<\/p>\n
Florida State Representative Dean Black is now leading that charge in state legislature. Lawmakers failed to pass any regulations during the 2026 legislative session despite Uthmeier issuing a similar emergency rule in 2025.<\/p>\n
“We needed to run a bill to make permanent those changes and as we started digging into it, we found that this gets very complicated because there are more chemicals involved in this substance than just 7-OH and if you’re not careful, if you don’t get the law right, you end up playing whack a mole, and you don’t actually solve the problem,” Black explained.<\/p>\n
Black told First Coast News he is now working over the summer and into the fall to come up with the best language for the legislation.<\/p>\n
“There’s nothing out there to help you, even as a consumer, know truly what you’re buying. So if we’re going to have this industry, it’s got to be pure, it’s got to be clean, it’s got to be labeled, it’s got to be tested,” Black said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida’s Attorney General recently issued a new emergency rule against chemical compounds found in kratom. JACKSONVILLE, Fla. \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324122,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117],"class_list":["post-324121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}