Kratom is not a controlled dangerous substance in Maryland. Possessing it is not an offence. Selling it is regulated by a 2024 statute that sets an age limit of 21, caps 7-hydroxymitragynine at 2% of a product’s alkaloid fraction, requires several things on the label and restricts advertising in unusual detail.
Two things make Maryland harder to summarise than most states. The 2024 statute contains a subsection that, read as it is written, prohibits the sale of every kratom product in the state. And a 2026 act built a seizure and forfeiture regime on top of it, on the assumption that a kratom product can comply.
The statute
The Kratom Consumer Protection Act was passed as House Bill 1229 and became chapter 748 of the 2024 Laws of Maryland. The Governor approved it on 16 May 2024 and it took effect on 1 October 2024. It sits in the Health-General article at sections 21-2E-01 to 21-2E-04.
A kratom product is defined at 21-2E-01(b) as a product marketed for human consumption containing any part of the leaf of the plant Mitragyna speciosa. A retailer is defined very broadly at 21-2E-01(c): anyone who sells, prepares or maintains kratom products, or advertises or holds themselves out as doing so, and the definition expressly includes manufacturers, wholesalers, restaurants, hotels, supermarkets, convenience stores, petrol stations and food or drink companies.
What a retailer may not do
Section 21-2E-02(b)(1) prohibits preparing, distributing, selling or exposing for sale:
- a kratom product adulterated with a dangerous substance other than kratom;
- a kratom product contaminated with a dangerous substance other than kratom;
- a kratom product containing more than 2% 7-hydroxymitragynine in the alkaloid fraction, measured against the alkaloid composition of the product;
- a kratom product containing a synthetic alkaloid, including synthetic mitragynine, synthetic 7-hydroxymitragynine or any other synthetically derived compound of the plant; and
- a product containing kratom whose package or label does not state the amount of mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine in it.
The statute defines its own two adulteration terms rather than leaving them to argument. A product is adulterated under 21-2E-02(b)(2)(i) if it is mixed or packed with a substance other than kratom and that substance affects the quality or strength of the product enough to render it injurious to a consumer. It is contaminated under (b)(2)(ii) if it contains a poisonous or otherwise deleterious ingredient other than kratom, including any drug designated a controlled dangerous substance under Title 5 of the Criminal Law article.
Section 21-2E-02(c) prohibits distributing, selling or exposing a kratom product for sale to anyone under 21.
The clause nobody has reconciled
Section 21-2E-02(a) has two parts. The first requires a retailer that prepares, distributes, sells or exposes for sale a kratom product to disclose on the label the factual basis on which the representation is made. The second says a retailer may not prepare, distribute, sell or expose for sale a kratom product that:
(i) Does not comply with the disclosure requirement established under paragraph (1) of this subsection; or
(ii) Has not been recognized as a dietary ingredient or approved drug by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA has recognised no kratom product as a dietary ingredient and has approved no kratom drug. Its published position is that kratom is not lawfully marketed in the United States as a drug product, a dietary supplement or a food additive. On the face of limb (ii), no kratom product may lawfully be sold in Maryland at all.
That reading is hard to reconcile with the rest of the subtitle. If nothing may be sold, the age limit, the 2% ceiling and the labelling rules regulate a market the same statute has abolished. Courts generally avoid readings that make surrounding provisions pointless.
And the General Assembly has since legislated as though compliance were possible. Section 1-323(d) of the Alcoholic Beverages and Cannabis article, added in 2026, says a seized product is presumed contraband unless the person it was seized from shows it is “(1) if applicable, in compliance with Title 21, Subtitle 2E of the Health - General Article; or (2) authorized for sale and distribution for the purposes of human consumption by (i) the Maryland Department of Health; or (ii) the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” Subtitle 2E compliance and FDA authorisation are set out there as alternatives. Section 2 of the same act requires the Department of Health to tell the enforcement commission within 30 days of any change in the regulatory or approval status of kratom products, which again presupposes a status that is not simply “prohibited”.
We do not know how Maryland resolves this. We have found no reported decision, enforcement action, Attorney General opinion or departmental guidance addressing limb (ii), and no regulation made under section 21-2E-04, which requires the Department to adopt regulations to carry out the subtitle. We are not going to supply an answer the sources do not contain.
Limb (ii) is why this page is labelled as a restriction on sale rather than as a regulated market. Anyone selling kratom in Maryland, or relying on being able to buy it there, needs a Maryland lawyer rather than this page.
The 2026 act, and why it matters more than the 2024 one
Chapter 354 of the 2026 Laws of Maryland, House Bill 1523, was approved by the Governor on 12 May 2026 and took effect on 1 July 2026. Its identical cross-file is chapter 355. It repealed and reenacted sections 21-2E-02 and 21-2E-03 with amendments, and added a new section 1-323 to the Alcoholic Beverages and Cannabis article.
Section 1-323 defines an unauthorized consumable product to include a kratom product that does not comply with Title 21, Subtitle 2E, alongside tianeptine and phenibut products and anything containing a poisonous or deleterious substance that the Secretary of Health designates.
A retailer may not distribute, sell, expose for sale or advertise for sale one.
The Executive Director of the Alcohol, Tobacco and Cannabis Commission may seize, confiscate or destroy an unauthorized consumable product offered, advertised or displayed for sale, and separately may seize anything labelled, advertised, represented or offered for sale as containing 7-hydroxymitragynine in an amount greater than the 2% permitted under 21-2E-02(b)(1)(iii), or greater than 1 milligram per serving. That per-serving figure appears nowhere in the 2024 Act and is a second ceiling running alongside the percentage.
A seized product is presumed contraband and subject to summary forfeiture unless the alternatives in subsection (d) above are shown. A retailer that breaches the prohibition is guilty of a misdemeanour with a fine of up to $5,000. The District Court may in addition order a licence suspended or revoked and the product destroyed, and the retailer is liable for civil damages.
Advertising
Section 21-2E-03 is unusually detailed for a US kratom statute, and its first line is the one most likely to catch a seller out.
A retailer may not directly or indirectly advertise a therapeutic benefit of kratom. There is no qualification and no evidence standard. A claim that kratom helps with anything is prohibited advertising.
A retailer may not advertise or market kratom products to minors. Doing any of the following in advertising, promotion, packaging or labelling is a violation: a cartoon, a superhero, a video game reference, an image of a food product primarily intended for minors, a trademark imitating one advertised primarily to minors, a symbol or celebrity primarily associated with minors, an image of a person who appears to be under 27 years old, and, added in 2026, other images or graphics popularly used to advertise to children, including neon colours, signs or other brightly coloured displays, animals, mascots, and statements, artwork or designs that could reasonably mislead someone into believing the package contains anything other than a kratom product.
It is also a violation to advertise in a publication or at an event where under-21s make up 15% or more of the audience as measured by competent and reliable survey evidence.
The billboard rule was replaced in 2026 and is now far wider. It used to prohibit an outdoor billboard or sign board within 500 feet of a school. That text was struck. In its place, it is a violation to advertise kratom “on the side of a building or another publicly visible location of any form, including a sign, a poster, a placard, a device, a graphic display, an outdoor billboard, or a freestanding signboard”. There is no distance element and no school element left.
And breaching the advertising section is now a crime. Chapter 354 added subsection (e): a retailer that violates section 21-2E-03 is guilty of a misdemeanour and on conviction is subject to a fine not exceeding $5,000, imprisonment for not more than 90 days, or both. Before 1 July 2026 the section carried no penalty of its own.
Penalties under the 2024 Act, and a defence
Breaching the label disclosure requirement in 21-2E-02(a)(1) carries a civil penalty of up to $1,000 for a first violation and $2,000 for each subsequent one.
Breaching 21-2E-02(a)(2), (b) or (c) is a misdemeanour, punishable on conviction by a fine of up to $5,000, imprisonment for up to 90 days, or both. A retailer who violates the section is additionally liable for any civil damages the individual sustained.
The section also carries a defence, and chapter 354 changed it. The Department of Legislative Services’ fiscal note for House Bill 1523 records that the bill “modifies provisions regarding the defense of violations related to the sale of kratom and phenibut products by specifying that it is a rebuttable defense that the defendant relied on the representations on the manufacturer’s label”. Before that, the defence was reliance in good faith on the representations of a manufacturer, processor, packer or distributor.
We report that from the fiscal note rather than from the statute because we could not resolve it from the statute. See below.
Kratom is not scheduled, and the reason is worth reading
Maryland’s Schedule I is not a list of substances. Criminal Law section 5-402(a) says Schedule I consists of controlled dangerous substance analogues, substances added by the Department under section 5-202(b), and substances designated Schedule I by the federal government unless the Department objects under section 5-202(f).
Section 5-202(f)(1) puts it plainly: a new substance designated as a controlled substance under federal law is a similarly controlled dangerous substance under Maryland law unless the Department objects, publishes its reasons and holds a hearing.
Kratom leaf, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine are not in the federal schedules, so none of them reaches Maryland through that route. The Department’s own additions are collected in COMAR 10.19.03.20, adopted with effect from 14 October 2024, and that regulation names no kratom compound. We read it and confirmed it renders its substances, which it does: it lists methedrone in Schedule I and two preparations in Schedule III.
One check could not be run on it. The house rule for trusting an absence is two greps, one for a substance you know is there and one for something recent enough to prove the text is current. The first passes. The second cannot: the regulation contains nothing obviously post-2015, so its currency rests on its adoption date of 14 October 2024 rather than on anything in it. That is a weaker proof than we would like and it is stated rather than glossed over.
Three other compounds are a different question. On 26 August 2026 the DEA published a temporary scheduling order placing mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15 and MGM-16 in federal Schedule I, effective that day until 26 August 2028. On the face of section 5-202(f)(1) that appears to reach Maryland unless the Department objects. Whether it has, and what a temporary federal order does under a provision written for permanent designations, is a legal conclusion about a live question and it is not ours to reach. Ask the Department.
Looking it up is harder than it should be
Three traps sit in front of anyone checking this themselves, and we fell into two of them before catching them.
The codified text on the General Assembly’s own site is not current. The URLs of the form
mgaleg.maryland.gov/{year}RS/Statute_Web/... serve the code as it stood at the start of that
session, not as amended by it. So 2026RS returns sections 21-2E-02 and 21-2E-03 as they read
before 1 July 2026, and 2027RS returns nothing for them at all. We re-checked the 2027RS path
on 2 September 2026 and it still returns HTTP 404, so the only current text of those two sections
remains the chapter law. We cite the pre-2026 URLs above and say what they are.
The same portal does serve the new Alcoholic Beverages and Cannabis section 1-323 under 2027RS,
which is why that one is quoted here from clean codified text and the Health-General sections are
not.
The chapter law prints its amendments, and a text extraction cannot always separate the layers. Deletions appear in square brackets and insertions in capitals. That works well enough on section 21-2E-03, where the struck billboard clause and the inserted replacement are both legible. It does not work on the defence in 21-2E-02, where the extracted text carries a deletion bracket spanning the whole subsection and inserted words inside it at the same time. We could not tell from the printed page whether the defence survives in amended form or was removed, so we take it from the fiscal note, which is a Department of Legislative Services document and says it was modified rather than repealed. A reader who needs certainty should read the printed chapter.
The same trap sits on the 2024 chapter, where a figure such as “$500 $1,000” is a struck value beside its replacement. The penalties above come from the codified sections, which carry only the surviving numbers.
The Act was enacted as Subtitle 2D and is codified as Subtitle 2E. Chapter 748 says on its face that it adds sections 21-2D-01 to 21-2D-04 under a new “Subtitle 2D. Kratom Consumer Protection Act”. Subtitle 2D in the code is about tianeptine, an unrelated substance regulated by a companion act of the same session, which was approved three weeks earlier. A search for 21-2D-01 returns a tianeptine definition that mentions no kratom at all.
Chapter 748 also required the Department, working with the Maryland Hospital Association, to report to the General Assembly by 31 December 2025 on adverse health events after use of opioid-like substances including kratom and tianeptine. That report exists: the fiscal note for House Bill 1523 summarises it, recording 59 reported kratom incidents in fiscal 2025 against 12 for tianeptine and 7 for phenibut, and the Department’s advice that monitoring is warranted given kratom’s presence in fatal toxicology alongside illicitly manufactured fentanyl. We could not find the report document itself published at any URL.
How we checked this
We read sections 21-2E-01, 21-2E-02 and 21-2E-03 in the pre-2026 codified text, chapter 748 of the 2024 Laws of Maryland and chapter 354 of the 2026 Laws of Maryland as approved, the codified text of Alcoholic Beverages and Cannabis section 1-323, and the Department of Legislative Services fiscal note for House Bill 1523.
We read Criminal Law sections 5-402 and 5-202, and COMAR 10.19.03.20, to establish that kratom is not scheduled rather than assuming it.
If a later act, regulation or opinion changes any of this, write to editorial@wikikratom.com and we will update the page and credit the correction.