The 7-OH shortage is here: Why brands are shutting down (and what we’re doing about it)

If your go-to 7-OH brand has been sold out for weeks, or just quietly disappeared, you’re not imagining it. We’ve watched brands close their doors one after another over the last few weeks, and a big part of the story is what’s happening at the very top of the supply chain. The manufacturers who actually make 7-OH have stopped taking orders. Here’s what’s really going on, and the very big (and very risky) thing we did about it.

What happened

Kreleaf is done - they sold through their inventory and shut down for good, because it can’t keep buying inventory when it might have weeks, days, or even less time to sell it. Omega Extrax has shut down. So has 7OHMZ, and several other brands are in the process of winding down.

Meanwhile, the legal picture is stagnating (at least, it was until this past Friday). The DEA announced in July that it plans to put 7-OH above a set threshold (0.05%, or more than 1 mg per tablet) into Schedule I. On August 26, it did exactly that to three related compounds, MP, MGM-15, and MGM-16, but on the same day, HHS pushed the 7-OH comment deadline back to September 10. That deadline has come and gone. On Friday, the DEA published a second intent to schedule, which if passed would kick off a second 30-day notice period that would end in mid-November. In short, the industry is filled with regulatory uncertainty and mixed messages.

Why manufacturers have pulled the plug

To understand why the factories stopped, you have to understand how long it takes to make a bottle of 7-OH tablets. It’s a much longer process than you might think, so we’ll walk through it week by week, from the leaf to your door.

Weeks 1 to 4: The boat

It starts in southeast Asia. A manufacturer orders kratom extract, which is typically something like 80% mitragynine and only about 0.5% 7-OH, since 7-OH exists in tiny amounts in the plant on its own. Once the order is paid, that extract goes into a shipping container headed for Long Beach. It spends three to four weeks at sea, then rides a truck to wherever the lab is (Kansas City, for example). By the time the extract is sitting in the manufacturer’s building, it’s been a full month.

Week 5: The reaction

Now the chemistry. The lab uses solvents to run a reaction to convert mitragynine into 7-hydroxymitragynine, which takes two or three days. You don’t want to eat those solvents, so next the powder goes into vacuum ovens to pull the solvents back out. It then takes two days to properly dry out. This is one spot where corners get cut, because some labs pull the powder after 12 or 24 hours to speed up the process.

One round of reaction and drying might get you a powder that’s around 30% 7-OH. Run it again and you might hit 50 or 60%. A lot of manufacturers stop right there. The manufacturer we use keeps going, round after round, and the material we press with is about 85-90% pure. Every extra round costs money and time, and you lose some material each time, which is exactly why most people don’t bother. The dream would be 100%, but nobody gets there at a price anyone would pay. We have seen (and tested) 99% 7-OH powder, which is quite an impressive feat.

Week 6: The V-mixer and the press

The finished 7-OH powder ships to a tablet presser. There it goes into a V-mixer (a big V-shaped tumbler) along with excipients, which are the binders and fillers that hold a tablet together, plus flavoring. This is the step where the math has to be right, because if you get it wrong you get underdosed or overdosed tabs.

We get asked about underdosed tablets constantly, and the cause usually isn’t a brand lying. It’s usually this step. Maybe they trusted a COA that said the powder was 80% when it was really 60%, so every tab came out short. Maybe the tab ended up weighing 450mg instead of 500mg which resulted in 10% less active. The lab could have done some bad math. We still can’t tell you what happened back when EatOhmz was putting 17 mg in a tablet labeled 35 mg, but this is the step where that kind of thing happens.

Then comes the press. A tablet press is basically a plate full of tablet-shaped holes. A depositor drops powder into every cavity, then the machine squeezes it hard enough that it holds together. Our manufacturer presses 40,000 tabs/hour, and when you add setup and mixing time, we’re looking at roughly 1,000 bottles for four hours of work. That’s fast, but between getting the powder over, scheduling and testing, this whole stage realistically eats about a week.

Week 7: Co-packing

Next the tablets go to co-packing, where they get counted into bottles, sealed, and labeled. This is the easy part, but it takes another week before the product can be sold.

Week 8: Off to the warehouse

Finally, the finished bottles ship to the brand’s warehouse, usually a 3PL (a third-party logistics company that stores and ships orders for brands). Only now can the brand actually sell anything.

Add it up

Four weeks on the water, a week of reactions, a week of mixing and pressing, a week of co-packing, and about a week to get to the warehouse. That’s roughly two months from the day a manufacturer accepts an order to the day the brand has something to sell.

If you’re a manufacturer and you accept an order today, in early October, you’re betting that 7-OH is still legal in early December. If the DEA order drops in week 5, while your powder is still in the oven, everything you just paid for is a Schedule I substance and your money is gone. That’s why all these brands have stopped. Most of them aren’t out of business. They’re waiting to see what happens, and they don’t want their cash floating in a container on the Pacific when it does.

What’s left on the shelf

When the factories stop creating new 7-OH, brands are forced to purchase from whatever inventory remains. The high purity 7-OH runs out first, because that’s the stuff everyone wants. Once that runs out, tabs start getting pressed with powder that only went through one or two rounds of purification: the 30-50% stuff. It technically does the job, but not nearly as well as higher purity active.

Quick Maths: let’s say a tablet is labeled 30mg 7-OH.

With 85% pure powder, that tablet needs about 35mg to get the necessary 30mg of 7-OH, so roughly 5 mg of it is something other than 7-OH (on top of the normal fillers that hold the tablet together).

If you switch to 50% 7-OH, the same tablet needs 60mg of base powder, which leaves 30mg of “other” stuff.

And if all you have is 30% powder, it needs 100mg to yield 30mg of 7-OH, which leaves 70mg of other materials. Same label, same 30mg, but anywhere from 5 to 70 mg of “extra” stuff riding along with it.

The extra stuff varies. Sometimes it’s leftover mitragynine, and sometimes it’s other alkaloids from the plant. Sometimes it’s plant matter, and sometimes it’s leftover solvent from a rushed dry. In our experience, all that “other” material adds nothing you want and maybe some things you don’t.

What we did

When we saw other manufacturers slowing down, we did the math above and didn’t like where it went. Pretty soon all the good material will be sold out, and the only thing left to sell would be the low quality stuff. We decided as a company that we won’t sell that.

So we worked out a deal with our manufacturer. We made the biggest bet made in our company’s history to buy out the entirety of their remaining supply of high purity 7-OH. We’re pressing all of it into TMK tablets right now.

This is a real risk. 7-OH could be scheduled any day. If that happens, we stop selling it that day, and we still owe the people who lent us that money. We did this because we never want you to have to wonder about the source, the safety or the quality of what you’re putting in your body. If that matters to you too, the best way to back it up is to get your tablets from us while we have them.

Watch your next few batches

If you shop with other brands, keep an eye on quality over the next few batches. If your usual tablet starts giving you more headaches, more nausea, or just doesn’t feel as clean as it used to, this is probably why. We can’t prove which impurity causes what, and nobody has studied it properly, but a tablet that’s half mystery material is a reasonable suspect.

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