If you look at what is sold under kratom’s name, you will meet a small vocabulary: leaf, powder, extract, enhanced, full spectrum, isolate, 7-OH. It reads like a set of grades, as though the words sat on a scale somebody had defined.
Most of them are defined by no one. The exception is instructive. “Extract” is the word the law has begun to pin down: several jurisdictions now give it a legal meaning, and they do not agree on what it is. “7-OH”, separately, is becoming a legal term by being measured in a laboratory rather than by being printed on a package.
This piece sets out what each word denotes, who if anyone has defined it, and what it cannot tell you. It does not tell you which to use, and it is not a reason to use any of them.
Leaf, and powder
The plain case. Mitragyna speciosa is a tree in the coffee family, and the part people consume is the leaf, usually dried and milled to a powder.
How much alkaloid is in it is a range rather than a figure. A 2026 review in Substance Abuse and Rehabilitation puts total alkaloid content in native leaf products at 2 to 5 percent by weight, with mitragynine accounting for up to about 2 percent of native leaf. The EU Drugs Agency’s own drug profile puts the total alkaloid content of dried leaves lower, at 0.5 to 1.5 percent, and notes that mitragynine’s share of the alkaloid fraction varies sharply by origin, from up to 66 percent of total alkaloids in some material to about 12 percent in Malaysian leaf. The two estimates do not agree, which is part of the point: even plain leaf has no single agreed potency. So two bags of plain leaf powder are not interchangeable, and neither carries a stated potency unless a state requires one.
“Powder” tells you the physical form and nothing else. It does not mean unconcentrated: a concentrated extract dried and milled is also a powder.
Extract
An extract is leaf material that has been put through a solvent to pull the alkaloids out, then concentrated. The word tells you that concentration happened. It does not tell you how much.
The same review puts the range at 5 to 50 times the alkaloid content of native leaf. That is an order of magnitude of uncertainty sitting behind one word, and the word is the same at both ends of it.
In much of the law we have read the word merely appears in a statute, which is not the same as being defined. Texas, whose kratom chapter we read in the state’s own publication of its code, defines “kratom” as any part of the leaf of the plant and defines a “kratom product” as a food, “including an extract, capsule, or pill”, containing any form of kratom. Florida names “an extract” too, writing it into the list of things a kratom product may contain. In both the word is named and never defined: nothing says what an extract must contain.
But “extract” is the one product word that several jurisdictions have started to define outright, and they do not define it alike. Oklahoma is the most precise: its Kratom Consumer Protection Act defines “kratom leaf extract” as material obtained by extracting kratom with water, ethanol or food-grade carbon dioxide, and requires that the result still have mitragynine as its most abundant alkaloid. A product enriched so that 7-OH predominates is therefore not a kratom leaf extract in Oklahoma at all. Utah defines “kratom extract” separately as a preparation containing part of the plant in concentrated form, and then bars extracts from sale. The Czech Republic lists “kratom extract” as a regulated substance in its own right, separate from the leaf, and its implementing decree sets the permitted forms and package limits. Three definitions, one built on process, one on concentration, one on a regulatory list, and no two the same.
So the word does carry legal content in some places and none in others, and even where it is defined the definitions disagree. What none of them fixes is the everyday question a shopper has: how concentrated a given extract is. The word tells you concentration happened. It does not tell you how much.
That matters for a practical reason. If you are used to plain leaf and you treat a spoon of extract as the same unit, the alkaloid quantity is not comparable, and nothing on the package is obliged to tell you by how much.
Enhanced, full spectrum, premium, and the rest
These are marketing vocabulary. We have not found a definition of “enhanced”, “full spectrum” or “premium” in any instrument we have read, across the national and US state laws on this site, and no regulator we have read defines them either.
The 2026 review does describe the category they sit in. It records a diversification of kratom products since 2021 into “enriched extracts, edibles, resins, and isolates”, with purified mitragynine and semi-synthetic 7-hydroxymitragynine at the concentrated end. So “enhanced” usually signals that something was added or concentrated. Which substance, and how much, the word does not say, and no rule compels the seller to mean anything consistent by it.
An isolate is the end of that road: a single purified compound rather than a plant preparation. It is a description of chemistry, not a regulated category.
7-OH
This is the word that is turning into a legal term, and it is worth being precise about where the process has got to.
7-hydroxymitragynine, written 7-OH, occurs in kratom leaf naturally and in trace amounts. It is considerably more potent at opioid receptors than mitragynine. Products sold as concentrating or containing it are a different pharmacological proposition from leaf, which is the whole subject of our piece on the leaf-versus-concentrate argument.
On 6 July 2026 the DEA published a notice of intent at 91 FR 40917, proposing to place 7-OH above a threshold in Schedule I. We read its full text from the Federal Register’s plain-text endpoint. The article it would control is defined by content, not by product name:
Botanical material of Mitragyna speciosa containing more than 0.050 percent 7-OH on a dry weight basis. Or, alternatively, an article resulting from synthetic methods containing 7-OH above 0.050 percent by weight or volume, or more than 1.00 milligram of 7-OH in the article. Or material derived from the plant and further processed into “extracts, concentrates, processed edibles, or pressed pills” where chemical, thermal or other methods have left 7-OH above those same limits.
Two things follow, and they are the reason this section exists.
The test is a measurement. Whether a product falls inside it depends on what an analysis finds, not on whether the label says leaf, extract or 7-OH. A package saying “leaf” is inside the definition if its 7-OH is above the threshold; a package saying “7-OH” is outside it if the compound is not actually there in quantity.
It is proposed, not in force. That notice said a temporary scheduling order would be published “on or after August 5, 2026”. No such order has appeared: the Federal Register returns nothing on the relevant terms after 26 August 2026, and the documents of that date place three laboratory derivatives of mitragynine in Schedule I rather than 7-OH itself. The DEA’s notice of intent carried no comment period, and said the ordinary notice-and-comment steps did not apply to it. Separately, a US health-department request for information on the threshold did take comments, and that window closed on 10 September 2026; nothing has followed it. A proposal is not a prohibition, and the gap between those two is where most coverage of this subject goes wrong.
Separately, a number of US states have written 7-OH ceilings into their own consumer-protection acts, and they do not agree with each other or with the federal figure. We set out the twelve statutes and their different limits in our KCPA explainer.
What happened when somebody tested the labels
Here is the finding that should change how you read any of these words.
A 2026 analysis in the Journal of AOAC International took commercial products whose labels all described them as containing “kratom extracts” and measured them by a validated published method.
Mitragynine came in at 2.0 to 6.0 mg per gram of dry weight, which the authors note is substantially lower than is typically found in kratom leaf or in extracts. 7-OH came in at 22 to 75 mg per gram, between 5 and 28 percent higher than the products’ own label claims. The chromatographic profiles did not match kratom leaf: the other major naturally occurring alkaloids were missing, and peaks appeared that leaf does not produce.
The authors conclude that those 7-OH levels are achievable only by synthetic means, and that the products are not kratom extracts as labelled but synthetic derivatives marketed unlawfully as unapproved new drugs.
Read the shape of that rather than only the numbers. Products labelled as a concentrate of the plant contained less of the plant’s main alkaloid than plain leaf does, more of a different compound than they claimed, and substances that are not in leaf at all. The word on the package described neither what was in it nor how much.
Who is telling you this, and what they are paid for
Two of the sources above come with declared interests, and we would rather print them than tidy them away.
The review we have used for the alkaloid ranges is co-authored by a researcher who discloses honoraria from a forensic research centre, payments from law firms as an expert witness in legal cases involving kratom, and a professional society presidency. That is disclosed in the paper itself.
This pattern is not one-sided. Work pointing the other way, arguing that the harm evidence is weaker than claimed, includes a widely cited 2025 case-report review whose authors were all employed by one consulting firm and one of whom has served as a paid expert in kratom litigation.
Neither disclosure makes either paper wrong. It does mean that on this subject a good deal of the published literature is written by people who are paid to give evidence about it, in both directions, and that is worth knowing before you weigh any single claim, including ours.
What none of this settles
Whether any of these categories is safer than another. The 2026 review reports that concentrated products and purified compounds are likely associated with higher risk of dependence and overdose than native leaf. That is a synthesis of existing literature rather than a trial result, the comparison has not been tested directly in humans, and we are reporting it as what that review concludes, not as a finding to act on.
What is in any individual product. The AOAC work tested a small number of items off the market. It establishes that labels have been wrong. It cannot tell you the rate at which they are wrong, and it says nothing about any product you might be holding.
Whether the federal threshold will be set at 0.050 percent, or at all. It is a proposal with an open outcome.
The short version
“Leaf” and “powder” describe a form. “Extract” tells you concentration happened and not how much; a few jurisdictions now define it in law, and not in the same way as each other. “Enhanced”, “full spectrum” and “premium” are defined by nobody. “7-OH” names a real compound whose legal meaning, where it is acquiring one, is a measured concentration rather than a word.
A word on a package is a claim made by a seller. In the one published test we have of those claims, they did not hold.
If you find another instrument that defines any of these terms, we would like to see it. Write to editorial@wikikratom.com and we will correct the page and credit the correction.