Kratom is prohibited in Portugal, but not as a drug. It is not in the tables annexed to Decreto-Lei 15/93, the act that governs trafficking and consumption of narcotics and psychotropics. It is on a different list entirely, the list of new psychoactive substances, where producing, importing, exporting, advertising, distributing, selling, holding or supplying it is prohibited outright.
The practical consequence is that a Portuguese shop selling kratom is committing a very serious economic administrative offence, punished with a fine rather than a prison term, and one that the food and economic safety authority is the body to prosecute. A person holding it for their own consumption is sent instead to Portugal’s law on drug consumption.
Both halves of that get reported wrongly. Portugal’s reputation for decriminalisation leads people to assume kratom can be bought there, which it cannot. Seeing Portugal on the EU Drugs Agency’s list of countries that control kratom leads people to assume it carries a trafficking charge, which it does not.
Where kratom actually appears
The list of new psychoactive substances is annexed to Portaria 154/2013 of 17 April 2013 and is amended by ministerial order as substances come and go. The current version was republished in full as the annex to Portaria 232/2022 of 7 September 2022, which took effect the following day.
Item 108 of that republished list sits under the heading for plants and their active constituents. It reads, in the original: Mitragyna speciosa (Kratom e respetivos constituintes psicoativos mitraginina e 7(alfa)-hidroxi7H-mitraginina). In English: Mitragyna speciosa, kratom, and its psychoactive constituents mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine.
The single item names the plant and both alkaloids. What closes the gaps around it is article 3 of the governing act, which extends the list to derivatives, isomers and salts of the listed substances, and to every preparation in which they are combined with other compounds.
That 2022 order also removed thirty-eight substances from the list, because they had been added to tables II-A and II-B of Decreto-Lei 15/93 and so had become controlled drugs under that act instead. Kratom was not among them. It stayed where it was.
What the prohibition covers
Decreto-Lei 54/2013 is the governing act. Article 4(1) prohibits producing, importing, exporting, advertising, distributing, selling, holding or making available a new psychoactive substance, except where it is destined for industrial or pharmaceutical use and INFARMED, the national medicines authority, has authorised it.
Article 4(2) extends that expressly to street selling, door-to-door selling, product exhibitions and distance selling, naming catalogues and internet sites. A Portuguese-facing webshop is squarely inside the prohibition.
Article 5 gives ASAE, the food and economic safety authority, the power to inspect and the job of instructing the proceedings and imposing the fines, expressly without displacing the security forces, the health authorities or other bodies. Any of those authorities can close premises provisionally for up to twelve hours while evidence is gathered, and again for up to twelve hours where an offence is found in progress and there is a serious risk it will continue. Seizure is dealt with separately, in article 8.
Article 6 is not a discretion. Where new psychoactive substances are produced, distributed, sold, made available, or simply kept for those purposes or for export, the competent health authority shall order the premises closed. Where other goods or services are supplied from the same place, it orders the activity suspended, and it may close the premises entirely for up to three months if that is strictly necessary to remove the threat to public health.
Sale is an administrative offence, and so is personal possession
Article 10(1) classifies a breach of article 4 as a very serious economic administrative offence, punished under the general regime for economic administrative offences, the RJCE. We did not read that regime, so this page does not state the size of the fine. Attempt and negligence are punishable too, under article 10(3).
Article 11 allows additional sanctions on top of the fine: forfeiture of the goods, a ban on carrying on a licensed trade or profession, loss of public subsidies, exclusion from public tenders, and suspension of licences and permits. All but the forfeiture are capped at two years, running from the final decision.
Article 10(2) treats the user differently. Possession of a psychoactive substance for mere personal consumption is dealt with under Lei 30/2000 of 29 November, the act governing the consumption of narcotic and psychotropic substances, applied with the necessary adaptations. We have not examined that regime for this page, and you should not read this paragraph as a description of how a Portuguese dissuasion commission would treat a kratom case. Note that article 10(2) sets no quantity threshold of its own, and that the phrase “with the necessary adaptations” is doing undefined work for a substance the 2000 regime was not written around.
What this means in practice
You cannot lawfully buy kratom in Portugal, and a shop that sells it is exposed to a fine and to closure that the health authority is obliged rather than merely permitted to order.
Ordering it from another EU country looks like importing a prohibited new psychoactive substance under article 4(1), whatever the law of the country the parcel left. We flag that as the natural reading rather than a settled one: article 4 prohibits importing, and article 10(2) sends possession for personal consumption somewhere else, and nothing we read resolves which of the two governs a consumer’s own order.
The offence framework is not the criminal drug law, so the language of trafficking, seizure thresholds and prison sentences that surrounds kratom in Italy or Denmark does not transfer to Portugal. That is a real difference, and it is not the same thing as kratom being permitted. Disobeying a closure order is a separate matter, and article 6(4) requires the notification to warn of the criminal consequences of doing so.
One limit on all of the above. Article 16 applies the act throughout the national territory without prejudice to the Autonomous Regions’ own legislation, and Madeira and the Azores both have their own instruments in this area. We did not read them, so treat this page as describing mainland Portugal.
How current this is
The list changes by ministerial order, and the last full republication was in September 2022. This page rests on that republished annex and on the consolidated text of Decreto-Lei 54/2013, both read on the verification date at the top. The annex was read from the official PDF of the September 2022 order as published in the first series, and checked against the Diário da República’s own consolidated page for the list, which confirms item 108 and records no amendment since 8 September 2022.
The negative claim is the one worth stating carefully, and it is better supported than an earlier version of this page allowed. The consolidated text of Decreto-Lei 15/93 published by the Diário da República renders all of its tables and is current to the amendment of 8 May 2026, in force the following day. We searched it: no Mitragyna, no kratom, no mitraginina anywhere in the tables. That amendment is worth naming because it looked like the obvious falsifier, it was headed as bringing new psychoactive substances within the definition of a drug, and it does not touch kratom.
If a later order has moved kratom into the tables or off the list, write to editorial@wikikratom.com and we will correct the page and credit the correction.