Kratom is a controlled substance in Belgium. It is listed by name in annex IVB to the koninklijk besluit van 6 september 2017 houdende regeling van verdovende middelen en psychotrope stoffen, the royal decree that carries Belgium’s substance lists. The line was inserted by the royal decree of 24 April 2024, published in the Belgisch Staatsblad of 22 May 2024, and it has been in force since 1 June 2024.
Possessing kratom without a licence is an offence. So is importing it, transporting it, selling it, offering it, supplying it or acquiring it, whether or not money changes hands.
We previously told readers the opposite, and we were wrong. From 14 July to 27 August 2026 this page carried the heading “we cannot find the ban everyone reports” and a status of unclear. The ban was real, it was where a Belgian lawyer would look for it, and we did not read the document that contained it. What follows is the instrument, and then an account of how we missed it, because the second part is the more useful of the two.
The listing
Belgium’s substance lists are annexes to the 2017 royal decree. Annex IV holds substances Belgium controls on its own initiative rather than under the 1961 and 1971 United Nations conventions: IVA catches substances by generic chemical structure, and IVB lists them individually by name.
The royal decree of 24 April 2024 puts kratom into annex IVB twice over, by two separate articles, and a reader needs both.
The plant. Article 19, point f) of the Dutch text inserts one line into annex IVB directly below the line beginning SALVIA DIVINORUM. It reads, in the Dutch and French texts as printed:
KRATOM: alle delen van de plant “Mitragyna speciosa” die mytragynine bevatten
KRATOM: toutes les parties de la plante “Mitragyna speciosa” contenant de la mytraginine
That is: all parts of the plant Mitragyna speciosa that contain mitragynine. No concentration threshold, and no distinction between leaf, stem and root. The gazette misspells the alkaloid in both languages (mytragynine, mytraginine), which is how it is printed and how we reproduce it.
The alkaloid, on its own. Article 18 of the same decree inserts the substances set out in its annex IV into annex IVB, below the line beginning TH-PVP. That annex, printed on page 64417 of the same gazette, lists MITRAGYNINE by name with its full chemical designation.
So a reader should not conclude that this catches plant material and leaves extracts alone. Isolated mitragynine is separately controlled, and a preparation containing it is caught by the alkaloid line whether or not any plant is left in it.
7-hydroxymitragynine is not listed. We read every page of the decree’s annexes and it appears on none of them. That is a real limit and we state it as one, not as a permission: 7-OH occurs in the plant, so a kratom preparation is caught by the two lines above regardless.
The same decree made six other changes to the plant list in the same breath. Five widen a listing from named parts to all parts of the organism (cannabisplant, khat, fungi containing psilocin or psilocybin, peyote and Salvia divinorum), and the fungi entry goes further, from three named genera to all fungi, “for example mushrooms and truffles”. The sixth raises the cannabis THC threshold from 0.2 to 0.3 per cent. Kratom was added to a schedule that was being tightened, not created.
What that means for a reader
Article 6 §1 of the 2017 decree is the operative prohibition. Nobody may import, export, transport, manufacture, produce, possess, sell or offer for sale, deliver, dispense or acquire a listed substance, for payment or for nothing, without a prior activity licence from the minister. Article 3 §2 applies that title to the substances in annex IV, so it reaches kratom. Licences are granted for scientific or medical purposes only.
There is no personal-use exception. Article 61 §2 of the decree routes import, manufacture, transport, acquisition, possession and cultivation for personal use to a lighter penalty track, and it is written for cannabis alone. Kratom does not fall inside it.
Penalties come from Article 2bis of the Law of 24 February 1921, the Act under which the decree is made. One caution about that article, and it matters: the text the official consolidation now serves is the version that takes effect on 1 September 2026, under which these offences carry a level 3 penalty on the new Criminal Code’s scale and the fine is capped at 800,000 euros. We have not separately read the version in force until 31 August 2026, so we do not state its tariff here. The conduct is criminal either way.
How we got this wrong
The founding lesson of this site was that a claim repeated by fifty websites is still one unsourced claim. That is true. It is not the same as the claim being false, and we let the two run together.
We read the 2017 annexes, correctly, and found no kratom. We then read the decrees amending them. We counted seven such amendments and said that two set their changes out as text while five published theirs as images we had not read. The count was too low. Nine royal decrees change the substance annexes: four publish their new lists as text, and five publish theirs as images. The decree of 24 April 2024 was one of the five. We have now read it, and the remaining four are still unread.
We also wrote that the decree of 19 December 2025 was the most recent amendment. Two later ones already existed when we wrote it, on 15 March 2026 and 3 June 2026. Both are text, and neither names kratom.
The 24 April 2024 decree hides its content in a specific way. Its body is ordinary administrative text about licences, storage and order forms, and it never uses the word kratom. The substance goes in through Article 19(f), which says only that a line set out in annex V is to be inserted below SALVIA DIVINORUM. Annex V itself is not in the consolidated text at all: Justel prints “Beeld niet opgenomen om technische redenen” and refers the reader to the printed gazette. In the gazette PDF the page has a text layer, so an extraction appears to work, and it returns mojibake because the annex uses an embedded font with no character map. The pages are also printed sideways.
So an electronic search of every obvious source returns nothing, three times over, and each nothing looks like an answer. Reading it took rendering page 64420 of the gazette of 22 May 2024 as an image, rotating it, and running optical character recognition over it. Three different page-segmentation settings return the same line.
To check we were reading a real list rather than noise, the same pass over the surrounding annex pages returns 2-methyl-AP-237, etazene, protonitazene, ADB-BUTINACA, alpha-PiHP, adinazolam, 3-methylmethcathinone and a run of hexahydrocannabinol and tetrahydrocannabinol derivatives. Those are substances Belgium controls, and they are of the right period, so the lists rendered and they were current.
Still in force
Nothing since has removed either line. Annex IVB has been amended twice, by the decrees of 19 December 2025 and 15 March 2026. Between them they take out butonitazene, bromazolam, four tetrahydrocannabinol homologues, four nitazenes and hexahydrocannabinol, and several of those are moves to another annex rather than deletions. Neither touches kratom or mitragynine.
The 19 December 2025 decree records annex IVB as laatstelijk gewijzigd bij het koninklijk besluit van 24 april 2024, most recently amended by the royal decree of 24 April 2024, which confirms from the other direction that the 2024 amendment took effect and stood.
One limit on that. The consolidated text we read is marked updated to 11 June 2026, so it would not show an instrument published between then and the verification date at the top of this page. We have not separately searched the gazette for that window.
Two sources that still do not show it
Neither of these changes the finding. Both are worth knowing if you go looking yourself.
The EU Drugs Agency says kratom is controlled in “at least 12” of its reporting countries and names them: Denmark, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Finland, Sweden and Turkey. Belgium is not among them. Neither are Ireland, Slovakia or Czechia, all of which control it and all of which we have read. The agency’s profile records what member states report to it, and on this substance Belgium’s listing is not reflected there.
The Belgian medicines agency publishes a page on specially regulated substances that does not name kratom either. The annexes to the royal decree are the law. A regulator’s summary page is not.
We cited both of these in support of the earlier finding. An official source that is silent is not an official source that says no, and treating the two as equivalent is the mistake that sat under this page for six weeks.
Food law, as before
EU food law binds Belgium directly and is unaffected by any of the above. Regulation (EU) 2015/2283 bars any food without a significant history of consumption in the Union before 15 May 1997 from being placed on the market until it is authorised. The regulation is a framework and does not name kratom; the classification comes from the Commission’s practice, which we set out on our European Union page. No authorisation has been granted. That was already enough to make selling it for human consumption unlawful in Belgium. It is now the lesser of the two problems.
Tell us if this is still wrong
We got this page wrong once in the permissive direction, which is the direction that can put a reader in front of a magistrate. If you can show us that we have it wrong again, in either direction, send the citation to editorial@wikikratom.com and we will publish the correction and credit it.