By GUD Tonics.
Published 14 September 2026.

Five states have now banned kratom. If you used it every day and the shelf in your state has just emptied, there is a version of this article that a kava company is supposed to publish in a week like this, and you have probably already been shown one by somebody. It goes: your thing is gone, here is our thing. We are not writing that one. Kava is not a treatment for kratom withdrawal, we sell kava drinks and we will not sell them as an answer to withdrawal, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling you something.

That is the article. The rest of it is why we are that certain, what the evidence under this subject actually holds and where it runs thin, where the free help is in each of the five states, and one genuinely uncomfortable fact about our own bottles that anyone trying to avoid kratom needs to know before they buy any drink in this category, ours very much included.

The sale this article is refusing to make

Look at the shape of the situation from the outside for a second, because the shape is the whole problem. A product a lot of people use daily has been removed from sale in five states. A company that sells a different drink then publishes an article about those bans. Structurally there is only one reason that company is in the conversation, and everybody involved knows what it is.

We would sell more if we wrote the other article. That is not a hypothetical. Search demand for what to do about kratom withdrawal spikes every single time a state moves, the traffic is enormous, it is cheap to capture, and the people arriving are frightened and in a hurry and will click almost anything. It is the easiest money in this category and we are turning it down on purpose.

We said so once already, in smaller print, on 18 August 2026. Our notice to Massachusetts customers ran two sentences near the bottom that we now want to put at the top of something instead:

Two things we will not say. Kava does not treat kratom withdrawal, and we are not in a position to claim otherwise about a product we sell.

That notice was operational. It told Massachusetts customers what was happening to their orders, which products stopped shipping on 27 August 2026 and how refunds worked, and the refusal was a paragraph inside it. This piece is the general case, written for the other four states and for anybody reading from somewhere that has not moved yet, and the refusal is the entire point rather than a footnote near the bottom.

One promise so nobody has to read defensively. Nothing below this line suggests buying anything from us or from anybody else, and there is no product link anywhere on this page. If a sentence in here would make somebody in withdrawal reach for a drink, we have written it badly and we would like to know, because the whole point of publishing it was to do the opposite.

Kava is not a treatment for kratom withdrawal

Here is what the word treatment is doing in that sentence, because it is carrying almost all of the weight and it gets used very loosely in our industry.

A treatment for a withdrawal syndrome means a substance that has been given to people in that syndrome under controlled conditions, measured against people who did not get it, with the dose and the schedule and the failure modes written down by somebody qualified to write them down, and with a clinician deciding whether a particular person in front of them should have it at all. Kava has none of that for this. Not a small amount of it. None.

So there is no honest way for us to put kava anywhere near the word withdrawal, and there is no clever way either. Not as a bridge. Not as something to take the edge off. Not as a thing to have in the fridge for a hard evening. Those framings all do the same work as the direct claim while leaving us room to say we never made it, and the person on the other end of them does not read the distinction, because nobody in a bad week reads the distinction.

This article makes no claim about what kava does for anybody, for anything, at all. If you want a neutral summary of what is known and not known about the plant, including the liver safety questions, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health keeps a page on kava and it is not written by anyone with something to sell you.

We also will not publish a tapering schedule, and we get asked. Somebody coming off a substance with an opioid-like withdrawal should be doing that alongside a clinician who can see them, take a history, and change the plan when it is not working. Connecticut's health agency says the same thing in stronger language than we would dare use, and we will get to that.

What does have an evidence base, and how thin the kratom part of it really is

The medicines with a serious evidence base behind them for opioid use disorder are buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone. Decades of trials, real prescribing guidance, actual clinicians. That is the list, and no botanical is on it.

Which is the moment to say the other half of it, because in our industry it usually goes unsaid. Kratom is not a treatment for opioid use disorder either, and it is not a treatment for opioid withdrawal or for withdrawal from itself. People sell it that way. People we know sell it that way. It is not true when they say it and it does not become true because a ban made the sentence more sympathetic.

On kratom specifically the picture is genuinely unsettled, and we would rather show you the seams than iron them out. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health writes on its kratom page that "Medications used to treat opioid use disorder, like buprenorphine, have been found to be effective for treating kratom use disorder", and that they "can also improve withdrawal symptoms". That is a state health department, and it is a reasonable thing for a state health department to tell its residents.

Follow the citation under that sentence, though, and what holds it up is a 28 patient case series published by Broyan and colleagues in 2022. Twenty eight people. A 2024 review by Smith, Epstein and Weiss in Current Psychiatry Reports records that most clinicians reach for buprenorphine here "although there are no controlled studies showing that buprenorphine is safe or efficacious in this patient population", and the National Institute on Drug Abuse states flatly on its research page that there are currently no approved medical therapies for these conditions.

Both of those things are true at once and the honest version keeps both. Buprenorphine for kratom use disorder is emerging rather than established. Its strong evidence base is for opioid use disorder, its use in this particular population is an extrapolation that clinicians are making because the trials do not exist yet, and Massachusetts is describing where clinical practice has landed rather than reporting a settled result. If your doctor suggests it, that is a normal and defensible thing for a doctor to suggest. It is simply not the same kind of fact as the trials behind methadone, and a company with no clinical standing whatsoever should not be the one blurring the two.

The part that costs us: read the ingredient panel, ours included

This is the single most useful thing we can tell anyone who has decided to stay away from kratom, and it happens to be the most awkward thing on this page.

A number of drinks in this category that are sold as kava, marketed as kava, and named after kava on the front of the bottle are formulated with mitragynine, the principal alkaloid of Mitragyna speciosa, which is the kratom plant. Kava and kratom are unrelated plants with unrelated chemistry, and none of that helps you, because what is in a bottle is a formulation decision rather than a botanical fact. The plant on the front of a bottle does not tell you what is in it.

That warning is not about our competitors. Four of our five products list Mitragyna speciosa on the ingredient panel. One of them does not, and we are deliberately not naming it or linking it here, because in the context of this particular article a link would function as a recommendation, and a recommendation is the one thing this article will not make. It is on our site and you can find it in a minute if you want to. We are just not going to hand it to somebody who arrived here in withdrawal.

So, practically. Turn any bottle around and read the ingredient panel rather than the front label or the product name. If it lists mitragynine, MIT, Mitragyna speciosa or kratom, it contains the compound you are trying to avoid. If it lists only kava, kava root or kavalactones, it does not. And if the panel is vague about what is actually in the bottle, treat that as its own answer, because a product that will not tell you what it contains cannot tell you whether it contains the thing you are avoiding.

That test answers exactly one question, which is whether a particular bottle contains mitragynine. It does not tell you that the bottle is a good idea, and for the reader this article is written for it is not one, which is why the paragraph above is about what to avoid rather than what to pick up.

We made this same argument in August about the North Dakota order, in our post on whether that order reaches kava drinks, where the point was legal exposure rather than personal risk. The reasoning is identical and it runs the same way in both directions: an order that names mitragynine reaches a kava drink containing mitragynine, and a person avoiding mitragynine has to avoid that same drink. Our per-lot alkaloid numbers sit on the lab results page against the lot codes, so the figure that applies to a bottle you already own is the one printed on that bottle rather than an average.

What the five states actually published for the people left in withdrawal

We went looking for what each of the five states put in front of dependent residents around the time its ban took effect. The results are uneven enough to be worth a table.

Massachusetts is the one that surprised us. Its health department wrote down, in advance and on a government website, exactly what its own order was about to cause: that it "expects disruptions in the availability of all kratom products", that these products "can act like potent opioids", and that people who use them regularly "are likely to experience opioid tolerance and withdrawal symptoms when they stop or reduce their use, including craving, nausea, diarrhea, muscle and head aches, sniffling, sneezing, sweating, and irritability". It then tells those residents to seek medical care or substance use treatment, and it says that if someone using these products has an overdose and has reduced or stopped breathing, naloxone should be given as though it were an opioid overdose.

Connecticut, five months earlier, published what we think is the most useful sentence any government has written on this subject. The Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services says on its kratom page:

If you or someone you care about has been using kratom regularly and is now struggling, whether it is due to the recent changes in the law, physical dependence, or a desire to stop, you are not alone and help is available in Connecticut.

Connecticut is the only one of the five that names its own law as a reason a resident might need help right now. The same page tells people that medical supervision during withdrawal is strongly recommended and that they should not stop abruptly without consulting a healthcare provider, which is a state agency saying out loud the thing we said above in more cautious language.

North Dakota gave the subject one paragraph. The Governor's announcement closes by pointing residents to 988 and 211, and it is one paragraph at the end of a press release about enforcement. That order was rescinded on 4 September 2026, and kratom remains banned in North Dakota.

Tennessee published, but not for the people its ban cut off: a February 2026 surveillance brief that predates the prohibition, and a prevention and overdose response page, both carrying treatment referral numbers and neither addressing withdrawal management.

Louisiana is the one we came back empty on, having looked where an ordinary resident would look. The only Louisiana state announcement we located came from the Department of Revenue, the tax agency. Thirteen months on we still cannot find a health department page underneath it. If you have one, send it to us and we will correct this article and say who found it.

The number you will see misquoted, and the things nobody knows yet

One figure is about to be everywhere, in both directions, and it deserves its caveat every single time it is used.

Hill and colleagues, publishing in the Journal of Addiction Medicine in 2024, surveyed 2,061 current kratom consumers online and found that 25.5 per cent of them met kratom use disorder criteria adapted from the DSM-5, most often through tolerance at 81.3 per cent and withdrawal at 68.0 per cent. That is an anonymous online convenience sample of people who currently use the product. It is not a population prevalence estimate, it cannot be turned into a statement about kratom users in general, and it should never be written as one in four. We have watched people on both sides of this argument do exactly that, and it is the same error whichever conclusion it is being used to support.

Around that number, here is the honest state of the field. That physical dependence and an opioid-like withdrawal syndrome occur in regular users is established, and it is Massachusetts, Connecticut and the clinicians on the record who put it that way. Almost everything downstream of that is thin. There is no agreed severity scale, no agreed timeline, no standardised protocol, and the main systematic review of kratom withdrawal is built substantially on case reports rather than trials.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse is more cautious than the states, and an article refusing to sell you something does not get to hide the inconvenient half of its own evidence. NIDA writes that studies suggest people "may experience mild to moderate withdrawal symptoms when they stop regular kratom use, but more research is needed". Worth knowing before somebody quotes the federal government at you as having closed the question.

Which is a strange thing for a company to publish, since a thin evidence base is exactly the gap a marketing department drives through. Nobody selling you anything, us included, can fill it with a product.

If you are the person this article is actually about

Then here is the part that matters, and it is short.

Call one of the numbers in the box at the top of this page, or ring your own doctor, and tell them plainly how much you were taking and for how long. Not a rounded figure. The real one. That single piece of information is what lets somebody qualified tell you whether you need anything, what you might need, and how fast is too fast, and Connecticut's guidance is explicit that stopping abruptly is not something to do without consulting a healthcare provider. None of that costs money on any of the helplines listed above.

What will not help is a different bottle. Not ours, not anybody else's, and not one recommended by an account that turned up in your feed lately with a great deal of confidence and no medical training. The answer is also not a bigger cupboard, and it is not buying ahead of a date, and if you see us or anyone in this trade suggest otherwise in the next few weeks then hold this page up, because we will have earned it.

We are not a recovery service and we are not going to pretend to be one. We sell drinks, which means our opinion about your withdrawal is worth precisely nothing next to a clinician's and we would rather say so than dress it up. What we can do is tell you what is in our bottles and refuse to sell you a story about them. If a state we have written about has published something we missed, or if a sentence anywhere on this page reads to you like a soft pitch we did not notice ourselves writing, tell us and we will fix it and say that we did.

Five states have now taken this product off the shelf, more will follow, and every one of those weeks is a week when the easiest article for a company like ours to publish is the wrong one. Turning that down is not a favour to anybody and it does not make us admirable. It is the minimum, it costs us the traffic, and we would rather lose the traffic than be the reason somebody in a bad week reached for the wrong thing because a company they trusted implied that they should.

This article summarises publicly available material as of 7 September 2026 and links to primary sources so you can check them. Where it says we could not find something, that means a search did not surface it rather than that nothing exists. It is general information, not legal or medical advice, and it is no substitute for a clinician who can see you or for counsel licensed in your state. Laws in this area change quickly and local rules can be stricter than state rules. Nothing here is a health claim about any product, and these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Our products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. For adults 21 and over only.