Kratom appears in no schedule of any United Nations drug convention. Not the 1961 Single Convention, not the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, not anywhere. The EU Drugs Agency states it plainly: neither Mitragyna speciosa nor mitragynine nor any other alkaloid from the plant is internationally controlled.
That sounds permissive. It is the opposite. International scheduling is what creates a rough global baseline for a substance, so that a traveller carrying morphine has some idea what to expect anywhere. Kratom has no baseline at all. Every country’s position was invented locally, answers to nothing above it, and lines up with its neighbours only by coincidence.
So a substance you bought lawfully at home can be a criminal offence on arrival, and there is no international logic connecting the two positions that would let you predict it.
Schengen removes the checkpoint, not the law
This is the most common and most expensive misunderstanding in European kratom travel.
Article 22 of the Schengen Borders Code says internal borders may be crossed at any point without a border check on persons. That is true, and it is about checks. It says nothing about which substances are lawful on the other side.
Article 23 of the same regulation is the part people never read. The absence of border control does not affect the exercise of police powers by member states under national law, and it says expressly that this applies in border areas too. Customs and police work inside the territory continues. What disappeared was the systematic booth at the line, not the enforcement behind it.
The practical consequence is worth stating without euphemism. Driving from the Netherlands to France, nobody stops you at the border. You are nonetheless in possession of a prohibited psychotropic substance from the moment you cross, and whether anyone noticed is a question about luck, not about legality.
Where kratom is controlled in Europe, and why our tracker is not enough
Our legal section has pages for fourteen jurisdictions. Three European ones are outright bans: France, Poland and Sweden.
That is not the full list, and you should not treat it as one.
The EUDA reports kratom, mitragynine or 7-hydroxymitragynine as controlled in at least twelve of its reporting countries: Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Finland, Sweden and Turkey. We have written pages for three of those. The other nine are real controls in countries a European traveller routinely passes through, and we have not yet verified them against their national instruments, which is the only standard we publish to.
One caution about that list itself, since we are relying on it. It also records Thailand as controlling kratom under its narcotic law, and that has not been true since 2021. See our Thailand page for what changed. A list that is out of date in a way we can demonstrate is a starting point for your own checking, not an answer.
Possession, import and use are different offences
People treat “is it legal there” as one question. Frequently it is three, and crossing a border engages the harshest of them.
Carrying a substance into a country is an import. In several jurisdictions importing carries heavier penalties than simple possession, because the offence is framed around supply rather than personal use, and the quantity that looks personal to you may not look personal to a prosecutor.
Our own pages record the pattern. In Sweden, possessing, selling, importing and even using kratom are all criminal offences since March 2025. In Poland, possession can carry up to three years, and importing and selling are separate criminal offences on top. In France, both possession and sale are prohibited.
Ordering online across a border is the same act in law. A parcel entering a country is an import whether you carried it or a courier did.
There is no doctor’s note for kratom
People assume a prescription or a letter solves this. There is a real mechanism, it is well documented, and kratom cannot use it. Worth understanding exactly why, because the reasoning is not obvious.
Article 75 of the Convention implementing the Schengen Agreement lets travellers carry the narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances necessary for their medical treatment, provided they produce a certificate issued or authenticated by a competent authority of their state of residence. The Executive Committee decision of December 1994 sets the form: valid for a maximum of 30 days, one certificate per substance, issued on the basis of a medical prescription. Germany’s federal medicines institute publishes the form and the procedure.
The gateway is the prescription. And the EUDA is unambiguous that there is no approved use of kratom or its alkaloids in modern medicine. No physician in the EU can prescribe a substance that is not a licensed medicine anywhere in it, so no competent authority has anything to authenticate.
France sharpens the point to absurdity. France controls kratom as a psychotrope, which is precisely the category Article 75 was written to cover. The route is still closed, because what opens it is a prescription rather than a classification, and kratom cannot be prescribed.
The mechanism exists. For this substance the door does not open.
What we will not tell you
This site does not publish advice on carrying kratom into a country that prohibits it, on reducing the chance of detection, or on how enforcement patterns might work in your favour. That rule is in our editorial policy and it is not negotiable.
Two reasons, and only one of them is about us. Our disclosure explains the commercial conflict that makes anything functioning as help to a buyer inappropriate here. The other reason is about you: evasion guidance from a website is worth very little against a customs service, and acting on it converts a possession question into a smuggling question.
If you use kratom regularly and are travelling somewhere it is banned
Withdrawal does not respect borders, and a person who is physically dependent does not stop being dependent at passport control. It is worth planning for honestly rather than discovering it in a hotel room.
Regular use can produce a genuine withdrawal syndrome. Our review of that evidence sets out what is known, which is less than either side of the argument claims. The useful step is a conversation with a clinician before you travel rather than after, because the options for managing withdrawal are medical ones and a website cannot supply them.
Where an actual answer comes from
Not from us, and not from any other website, for a specific destination on a specific date.
The INCB, the UN body that collects national rules for travellers carrying controlled medicines, publishes country-by-country regulations and then attaches a caveat that deserves repeating: responsibility for keeping those entries current lies entirely with the governments concerned, INCB cannot confirm their correctness or accuracy, and travellers are strongly advised to contact the embassy or consulate of the destination, or the competent national authority, directly.
If the body that maintains the register will not vouch for it, no kratom site should be vouching for anything either. Ask the destination country. Ask in writing.
The honest position
Kratom’s legal status is purely national, changes at every border, and is not predictable from any international rule. Schengen removed the checkpoint and left the law untouched. Import is often a separate and more serious offence than possession. The medical exemption that covers controlled medicines does not reach kratom, because kratom is not a medicine anywhere in the European Union.
We have verified fourteen jurisdictions and there are more that matter. If your route touches a country we have not covered, the honest answer is that we do not know yet, and we would rather say so than let you infer permission from our silence.
If you find an error here, or want to point us at a national instrument we have missed, write to editorial@wikikratom.com.