The Last Days of Kratom 7-OH

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I tried sour strawberry flavored gas station heroin

By Denzel Rust · August 14, 2026 · 6 min read

“Have you tried it before?” I ask the Indian guy at the counter of Ave B Beer & Cigars in the East Village.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Very bad. Very addictive,” he says as I tap my Apple Card.

A perfectly legal exchange. $52.35 for a package of OPIA Ultra. “4x High Potency Chewable Tablets” of 7-hydroxymitragynine, also known as Kratom 7-OH. That and a beer. The back of the package warns me not to mix it with alcohol.

Across downtown LA and NYC, 7-OH, referred to simply as Kratom, has become a completely mundane party drug among art hoes, e-girls, finance bros, and the post-Big 10 sorority pledges who roam through the West Village like conquistadors on Friday nights. It bears no mention. I’ve seen it passed around at parties, always broken up into crude unmeasurable crumbs and taken in blindly random dosages. It’s cheap, potent, and ubiquitous. It can cause almost instant opioid withdrawals, liver failure, seizures, and is about to become a Schedule 1 drug on par with Heroin. You can get it at most bodegas, next to the BIC lighters and the RHINO dick pills.

“Who buys this stuff?” I ask the Indian guy.

“Everyone. Girls. Pretty girls.”

In branding, designers establish a “visual language” for a product that usually includes a “key visual.” For Evian it’s the mountains. For OPIA, it’s clouds. Everything is a cloud. The word “Ultra” is in a cloud. The “240 milligram total” (which is now, according to NY state law, 240x the legal limit for the substance) also sits on a cloud. Behind these clouds are a beautiful pink heaven made of AI slop clouds. Amidst them is a vibrant AI slop strawberry, resting blissfully, of course, upon a cloud.

Most Kratom 7-OH competitor brands prefer the key visual of a leaf. Recalling the drug's natural form, Mitragyna speciosa which grows in Southeast Asia. A cursory Google of the name delivers serene images of organic powder in translucent bowls, strewn with leaves and flowers, like an ad for incense or chamomile tea.

But tea this is not. A single kratom leaf, which some rice farmer in Thailand might chew after work, contains dozens of alkaloids among which 7-OH is just a trace constituent. Usually 0.01-0.04% of the leaf's mass. To hit the 60 mg high in just a single bodega Kratom pill you’d need to eat about 1,400 of them. The Kratom leaf is to 7-OH as the coca leaf is to railing a fat white line.

“Isn’t this illegal now?” I ask the Indian.

“I don’t think yet,” he says.

He’s basically right. As of today, the NY State Legislature has voted to prohibit the sale of any amount of 7-OH higher than 1mg per serving (Again, these are 60mg pills in a pack of 4). At the same time, the DEA is moving to make this form of concentrated 7-OH a Schedule 1 controlled substance. But government is slow, and Hochul still has to sign the bill. Making these the last days of 7-OH’s generational run.

“How fast do they sell?”

“Very fast. One guy comes in and he buy them all.

“One guy buys out your whole stock? How often does he show up?”

“Every couple days. He come in and buy them all,” he repeats.

7-OH is incredibly addictive. About 13x stronger than morphine. Thus, when the government announces its ban the way McDonald’s announces the end of a seasonal dipping sauce, it encourages rather than deters sales, creating a Kafkaesque incentive for addicts and resellers to stockpile the drug in massive quantities before it disappears.

Somewhere out there is a forgotten pill, resting legally in the crevice between someone’s futon and bookshelf. One night the clock will strike twelve, and it will magically transform into a lint-covered piece of federal contraband.

“Where do you get it from?” I ask.

“New Jersey. We have a guy. He deliver.”

At some point you start to feel bad for Big Pharma, edged out by Chinese peptides and the average gas station. At almost any Brooklyn bodega, one can load up on a THC + CBD seltzer, a couple 60 mg 7-OH pills, a synthetic mushroom gummy, a nitrous canister, a few ZYNs, a 5-hour energy, a boner enhancer and a twisted tea. Who needs a dealer?

When I’d buy drugs in Los Angeles, I’d order off a menu using an encrypted messaging app. The dealer would give me an ETA and send it via Uber Courier. A brown paper bag would arrive in a box. Inside; a PB&J, small water bottle, and a bag of chips. Inside the bag of chips there’d be drugs. Opened and then resealed using some kind of precision hot glue gun. One of the grossest things I used to do was eat a few of the drug chips out of the contraband Fritos bag. If only I’d been into 7-OH.

So I go home and try it. The recommended serving size, which is 15mg, so only 15x the newly legal limit. It’s great. It’s like a cloud. It’s like leaves. Like the opposite of a headache and the opposite of growing pains. It’s like being a Taiwanese rice farmer with a belly full of rice. It’s like sunshine could come from inside you and stay there ‘til you fell asleep. I can’t move.

It doesn’t make me want to go for a run, it doesn’t make me want to watch a movie, it doesn’t make me wanna dance, read, drive, talk, paint, or jack off. I’m whole, for about three hours, laying there listening to the air conditioner condition the air, lightly reflecting on how everything that isn’t fine eventually will be.

The next day I feel like having some more. I’m not hungover or sick or debilitated, it just sounds like it’d hit the spot, one of those indiscriminate crumbs. I figure I should buy a few packs, since it’s about to be illegal. Maybe I’ll buy a lot. I walk back to Ave B Beer & Cigars, but the shelf is empty.

“No Kratom?” I ask.

“The guy come. He buy them all.”