Kratom has been a controlled substance in Turkey since January 2014. The plant itself and three of its alkaloids were brought under Law 2313, the Turkish narcotics control statute, by a Council of Ministers decree whose annexed list was published in the Official Gazette on 25 January 2014.
Turkey lists more of the plant’s chemistry than any other country on this site. Alongside mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, it names mitraphylline, an alkaloid no other European schedule we have read mentions.
The instrument
Turkey does not keep a single consolidated schedule. Law 2313 of 12 June 1933 is the statute, and substances are brought within it by decision of the executive, each decision carrying its own annexed list published in the Official Gazette. Answering a question about Turkish drug scheduling means reading a chain of decisions rather than one document.
The decision that matters here is decree 2013/5742 of 16 December 2013. Its annexed list, headed 16/12/2013 tarihli ve 2013/5742 sayılı Kararnamenin eki liste, was published in the Official Gazette of 25 January 2014, issue 28893. It is a mixed list of about a hundred and ten new psychoactive substances: it opens with synthetic cannabinoids, then runs through cathinones, phenethylamines and tryptamines. Four entries concern kratom, and each is worded in Turkish rather than as a bare chemical name:
Kratom ismi ile bilinen Mitragyna speciosa bitkisi, the plant Mitragyna speciosa known as kratom.
Kratom Bitkisi psikoaktif bileşeni olan mitragynine, mitragynine, the psychoactive component of the kratom plant, with its full chemical name.
Kratom Bitkisi psikoaktif bileşeni olan 7α-hydroxy-7H-mitragynine, with its full chemical name.
Kratom Bitkisi psikoaktif bileşeni olan mitraphylline, with its full chemical name.
Listing the plant in its own right, and then three separate constituents, leaves no formulation outside the entry. Leaf, powder, capsules and extracts are all covered, and so is anything sold as an isolated alkaloid.
Why this listing is so easy to miss
The annex is a scanned image. It carries no text layer, so searching the Official Gazette’s own PDF for “kratom” returns nothing, and so does every ordinary web search that relies on indexed text. We had to render the pages and read them optically to confirm what they say.
How little text is in that file is worth stating plainly, because it is the whole problem. The published PDF is roughly 247 kilobytes and yields no text at all. A text extractor returns three bytes from it, and all three are page breaks. The four kratom entries quoted above were read by optical character recognition from the page images at 300 dpi, not copied from a text layer, because there is no text layer to copy from. They were read that way twice, on separate occasions, and the second reading was done without reference to the first.
That is not a curiosity. It is the reason this page took three attempts, and it is a warning about method: an electronic search of a Turkish gazette PDF that finds nothing has established nothing at all.
An earlier draft of this page was written as a page saying we could not find any Turkish instrument. That draft was wrong, and it was caught before publication by an independent check that went back to the gazette and read the images.
What this means in practice
There is no ordinary retail market for kratom in Turkey. Law 2313 does not phrase this as a flat ban, and the distinction is worth understanding rather than glossing. Article 15 provides that retail sale of narcotics against a prescription takes place exclusively in pharmacies, and article 7 confines domestic sale to licensed pharmacists and drug-trading houses. So the statute creates a monopoly rather than a prohibition. What makes that academic for kratom is that a pharmacy can only dispense against a prescription for an authorised preparation, and we found no Turkish medicine containing kratom or mitragynine. A general retailer has no route at all.
Ordering it from abroad means importing a substance brought under Law 2313.
Because the plant is named separately from its alkaloids, the argument that leaf material is not the listed substance does not run in Turkey.
What this page does not tell you
It does not state the penalties. Law 2313 carries some of its own, in articles 23 to 25, but the trafficking and personal-use offences likely to reach kratom sit in the Turkish Criminal Code, at articles 188 and 191. We did not read those provisions. Nothing here tells you what a Turkish court would do.
It also does not tell you how the listing interacts with the personal-use provisions of Turkish criminal law, which distinguish supply from use and which we did not examine.
How current this is
This page rests on the annexed list to decree 2013/5742 as published in the Official Gazette of 25 January 2014, read on the verification date at the top, and on Law 2313 as published on the government’s legislation system, which records the decree among the instruments bringing substances within the Law.
Turkey adds substances to this regime regularly, so a later decision could in principle change the position. Nothing we found suggests any of the four entries has been removed.
If you can point us to a later decision that changes any of this, write to editorial@wikikratom.com and we will update the page and credit the correction.