Science
How much of what you read about kratom comes from rats
Most claims about kratom, for and against, rest on rodents, cell assays, surveys or case reports. We sorted the claims readers meet by the evidence under each. Few reach a human trial.
WikiKratom
The two most recent news, science and guides articles
Start here
Legal status
Kratom in the Netherlands: not a controlled drug, not a legal food
Kratom appears nowhere in the Dutch Opium Act. It is openly sold in smartshops. It is also, strictly, not lawful to sell for human consumption, and that gap is the whole story.
Science
Kratom's alkaloids: what mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine are, and what they do
Kratom contains more than forty alkaloids, led by mitragynine and the more potent 7-hydroxymitragynine. What they are, how they act on the brain's receptors, and how much is really known in humans.
Guides
Travelling with kratom: what changes at a border, and what does not
Kratom is under no international drug control, so every country decides alone. Schengen removes the checkpoint rather than the law, and no medical exemption exists for kratom.
The latest in each section
News
Science
Guides
Legal status
Kratom legal status by country, and by state in the United States
Legal status around the world
25 of 52 European countries reviewed against the instrument itself.
3 of 50 countries reviewed against the instrument itself. The United States is coloured by federal law only; its states diverge sharply, and the United States view above draws them.
5 of 74 countries reviewed against the instrument itself.
8 of 51 states and districts reviewed against the statute itself. Federal law is a separate page and it is the one the Americas view colours.
Alaska and Hawaii are drawn as insets in the bottom-left corner. Alaska is not to scale.
- Banned 16
- Banned, possession decriminalised 2
- Legal to hold, supply banned 2
- Legal to hold, sale restricted 8
- Legal, regulated 2
- Not reviewed
- Banned 3
- Legal to hold, sale restricted 1
- Legal, regulated 4
- Not reviewed 43
Colour carries two things. The hue says what kind of restriction applies: rust means possessing kratom is itself an offence, amber means holding it is lawful but obtaining it lawfully is restricted or impossible, green means a lawful route exists. Within each hue, lighter is looser and darker is stricter — so the pale gold countries let you hold and use kratom and only bar selling it as a food, while the deep amber beside them has no lawful way to buy it at all. The word is printed beside every swatch, because a finding a reader can only see as a colour is no use in greyscale.
Grey is two different things. Unclear means we read the instrument and it did not settle the question. Not reviewed means we have not read it yet, which is a fact about us and not about the law there. Neither is permission. What every label means · every country in one list · EU-level rules apply across the bloc
Every jurisdiction explained in one sentence.
See the status key
WIKIKRATOM.COMIndependent · non-commercial · every claim cited
Kratom law, science and safety, tracked in public
WikiKratom is an independent publication about kratom: the plant, the law that governs it, and the evidence behind the claims made for and against it. We read the primary source and record what it says.
Four things get written here. Legal status, a page per country taken from the statute itself and dated the day we last read it.Science, what the research has established and, more often, what it has not. Guides, plain explanations of the plant, the terminology and the paperwork. News, when a regulator moves and which instrument actually moved.
We sell nothing, rate no vendors, carry no advertising and take no payment for coverage. Where the evidence is thin we say it is thin, and where a law is unsettled we record it as unsettled rather than rounding it toward safety or toward alarm. Both directions can put a reader in front of a magistrate.
Background photograph: Hridoy Bangladesh, Pexels licence.
How to read this site
Four conventions worth knowing
- The status chip
- Seven legal statuses across four colours, and the word is always printed beside the colour. The colour answers one question: whether you may lawfully hold it, and whether you may lawfully buy it. Grey means we opened the instrument and it did not settle the question. It is never rounded up to legal or down to banned, because both directions can put you in front of a magistrate.
- The verification date
- On a legal page, last verified is the date we last read the instrument itself. Not the date we last thought about it, and not the date the page was published. Drug law moves; if you are relying on a page for a decision, that date is the one to check.
- The source panel
- Every legal and health claim cites the instrument itself: the statute, the register entry, the regulator's notice, the paper. Never a summary of it, and never a vendor's blog. The panel at the foot of an article is the working list, and you are meant to open it.
- Where the evidence is thin
- The research on kratom is limited and contested, and we say so rather than round it into a benefit or a harm.“We don't know” is a finding here, not a gap we fill with the most confident-sounding source available.
Contact
Tell us when we have it wrong
Corrections are the message we most want. If something here is out of date, or misreads an instrument, or is missing a source that would change it, we would rather hear it from you than from a reader who acted on it. Pointing us at the document itself helps most.
Tips, questions and complaints go to the same place. There is no form: that would route what you write through another company's service, and email already works. See contact for what happens to each kind of message, and privacy for the little we collect.