The Czech Republic is, as of 8 October 2026, the only country in Europe that this site has read where kratom can be sold lawfully to adults under a licence. It got there by building a new legal category, “psychomodulatory substances”, that sits between food and controlled drugs. Kratom is the only plant on it.
Less than a year after kratom was listed, the government now in office has turned against the arrangement. On 14 September 2026 it approved a bill that would raise the minimum buying age from 18 to 21, end online sale, and add an excise duty with tax stamps. The bill is proposed, not law. According to the Ministry of Finance it now goes to parliament; we have not located its parliamentary print, so we cannot say where it stands as of 8 October 2026. When the ministry presented the draft on 17 June 2026 it gave 1 January 2027 as the start date; the releases on the government’s approval give no date.
The rules a person must follow today are read line by line on our Czech Republic legal page. This piece covers why the category was built, what the European Commission changed on the way in, and what the government now says about it.
The problem the law was written to solve
The Czech Government Office set out the original reasons in February 2025, a month after the law took effect. It described a “grey zone” of psychoactive products sold for years with no adequate control, usually labelled as “collector’s items” so they could not be regulated as food. Banning a substance, it said, had very limited effect, because a replacement appeared on the market almost at once, one that was less studied and often more dangerous. Many such products could be sold to anyone, children included, from vending machines or as sweets.
The Czech answer was Act 321/2024, which amended the country’s Addictive Substances Act (167/1998) and took effect on 1 January 2025. It created two new lists.
Two lists, pointing in opposite directions
The first is for scheduled psychoactive substances, which the Government Office calls a quarantine list for unknown substances that newly appear on the market. Once a substance is on it, it may only be researched. It may not be made or sold. Holding a small amount for personal use falls outside the dealings the Act prohibits (section 33j(2)), and the Government Office says it will not be a criminal offence.
The second is for psychomodulatory substances, and it is the one kratom is on. The Act defines them as new psychoactive substances and other substances with a psychoactive effect “which do not pose a serious risk to public health or a risk of serious social impacts on the individual and society”, and which the government has placed on its list by regulation. The definition borrows the EU’s own definition of a new psychoactive substance, from Council Framework Decision 2004/757/JHA.
According to the Government Office, an expert group under the Ministry of Health, the National Institute of Public Health and the Government Office assesses a substance, and the government decides whether to list it. The Office’s explainer also states that substances already under international control, its examples being cocaine and ecstasy, cannot be placed on the list.
What being on the list means today
Being listed does not make a substance free to sell. It makes it sellable under licence.
- A licence for any business. Producing, importing, distributing or selling a psychomodulatory substance needs a permit from the Ministry of Health, issued only to a company or a registered trader (sections 33a to 33c of the Act). Any other dealing in these substances is prohibited by section 33a(5).
- Not for the individual buyer. Holding a psychomodulatory substance for personal use is expressly outside the activities that need a licence (section 33a(3)). An individual who deals in more than a small amount without authorisation commits an administrative offence under section 39(2)(j).
- Sale in specialised shops. The Act on health protection against addictive substances (65/2017, section 16a) bans sale outside a shop specialising in psychomodulatory substances, bars anyone under 18 from entering one, bans sale to anyone under 18, and bans vending machines. Sale is also barred in food businesses, schools, health facilities, at events for under-18s and in airport transit zones, among other places.
- Distance sale, for now, with an identity check. Only a seller that also runs a licensed shop may sell at a distance, through a channel dedicated to these substances. The buyer’s age must be verified through a qualified electronic identity system and the parcel handed over into the buyer’s own hands (section 16c). Cross-border distance sale is prohibited outright (section 16c(13)). The September bill would end distance sale altogether.
The criminal law was changed alongside. The Criminal Code now treats psychomodulatory substances as addictive substances for all of its purposes (section 130(2)), which is the basis for the Government Office’s statement that driving under their influence is a crime, as it is with alcohol. A new section 251a makes unauthorised dealing “on a larger scale” punishable by up to two years in prison, six months to five years where it causes substantial damage or serious harm or brings substantial profit, and two to eight years where it causes damage on a large scale, serious harm to at least two people or death, or brings profit on a large scale. Selling or giving a psychomodulatory substance to a child repeatedly or on a larger scale carries up to one year, or six months to five years if the child is under fifteen (section 204), the same offence that covers alcohol. A business that deals in a psychomodulatory substance without a licence commits an administrative offence carrying a fine of up to 10,000,000 koruna (sections 36(1)(a) and 37(1)(c)). Licence holders’ regulatory breaches, such as selling a batch without a laboratory certificate, carry fines of up to 500,000 koruna, or 1,000,000 koruna for breaching the export ban (section 37(2)).
The product limits are in Decree 448/2025: kratom leaf at most 50 grams a package and kratom extract at most 10 grams or 10 millilitres, each capped at 1,250 milligrams of mitragynine. The legal page covers the rest.
The list was meant to hold four entries, and holds two
A national rule that affects goods traded in the single market has to be notified to the European Commission in draft under Directive (EU) 2015/1535, and the state then has to wait before adopting it. Act 321/2024 records that it was notified. So was the list.
The Czech draft regulation reached the Commission on 17 February 2025 as notification 2025/0093/CZ. Its summary in the Commission’s database says it “adds 4 substances in the list of psychomodulatory substances … namely kratom, kratom extract, cannabis up to 1% THC and cannabis extract and tincture up to 1% THC”, on the ground that, “on the basis of current scientific knowledge”, the four do not pose a serious public-health or social risk.
The European Commission issued a detailed opinion on it. Under Article 6 of the Directive that is an opinion “to the effect that the measure envisaged may create obstacles to the free movement of goods within the internal market”. It lengthens the period in which the state must hold off adopting the measure from three months to six, and the record shows the standstill moving from 19 May 2025 to 18 August 2025.
The Czech reply, dated 18 June 2025 and published in the same database, thanks the Commission “for your detailed opinion of 12 May 2025” and states: “Following internal consultations and in light of the notification process, the Czech Republic has decided to remove cannabis with THC content up to 1% and related extracts and tinctures from the revised version of the draft regulation …” On 23 June the Commission answered that it “considers the response of the Czech authorities satisfactory”.
The regulation the government signed on 3 September 2025, number 456/2025, lists two substances: kratom, defined as the plant material from the leaves of Mitragyna speciosa containing mitragynine or 7-hydroxymitragynine, and kratom extract. It was promulgated on 11 November 2025 and took effect the next day.
We have not read the Commission’s opinion itself. A June 2026 viewpoint in eClinicalMedicine by three researchers says the Commission “argued that cannabis is an internationally controlled narcotic regardless of its origin or THC content”. That is their description, not the Commission’s text. It fits the Government Office’s statement that internationally controlled substances cannot be listed. According to the EU Drugs Agency, neither Mitragyna speciosa nor any of its alkaloids is listed in the schedules of the UN drug conventions, so the same objection could not have applied to kratom.
What the government now says about it
Act 321/2024 is signed by the previous prime minister, Petr Fiala. The statements below come from the government of Andrej Babiš. On 1 June 2026 the Government Office published the first results of an inter-ministerial working group set up by government resolution on 27 April 2026. Its release calls the earlier legislation “mistaken legislative decisions” that made psychomodulatory substances, kratom above all, available to the general public, and says that kratom intoxications have been rising, that hundreds of people are hospitalised each year, and that many are children and adolescents. The interior minister is quoted saying three quarters of those hospitalised after intoxication with kratom or synthetic cannabinoids are under 18. The same release reports three shops closed, 25 online shops blocked and almost 86,000 products and 155 kilograms of kratom seized in the inspections.
On 14 September 2026 the government approved an amendment to the Addictive Substances Act and eight related acts. Its release says the bill responds to an inspection campaign, KORUND, that “revealed massive breaches” of the existing rules, and to the number of intoxications in children and adolescents. As described by the Government Office and the Ministry of Finance, it would:
- raise the minimum age to buy from 18 to 21;
- end online sale;
- tighten the rules for specialised shops and for the composition, quality and testing of products;
- add an excise duty with tax stamps: 2 koruna per gram or millilitre for ordinary kratom, 10 for concentrated products such as extracts, and a top rate of 20 for illegal, unstamped kratom;
- move kratom products from the reduced 12 percent VAT rate to the standard 21 percent.
These are the government’s descriptions of a bill. We have not read the bill’s text, and none of it is in force.
These are official statements by the government that inherited the regime. They are not an independent evaluation, and the hospitalisation figures are given in a press release without the underlying data. We did not find a published independent evaluation of the regime’s effect in Europe PMC or in the Government Office’s releases.
Is it a model?
Its early advocates presented it as one. A 2024 paper in the International Journal of Drug Policy, describing the framework before it took effect, calls it “a paradigm shift from the prevailing repressive approach” and “a viable alternative to the UN’s prohibition framework”. We could read only that paper’s abstract. The eClinicalMedicine authors call the model innovative because it creates “a dynamic legal pathway between full prohibition and full legalisation” and lets substances be moved between categories by government regulation rather than by a new act of parliament.
Three limits come from the documents themselves. The Government Office says the category is closed to internationally controlled substances, and kratom is not one; the Czech reply to the Commission gives no reason for withdrawing cannabis beyond the notification process itself. It is a separate national licensing regime and does not make kratom a food; across the European Union, no kratom product appears on the Union list of authorised novel foods (Implementing Regulation (EU) 2017/2470; see our European Union page). And it stops at the border: cross-border distance selling is banned, so the regime gives nothing to a reader elsewhere in Europe, where kratom is mostly a controlled drug or a product that cannot lawfully be sold as food. Our legal pages set out each country.
The fourth limit is the newest. The same mechanism that lets a government list a substance by regulation lets a later government restrict it, and the Czech one is now proposing to.
How we checked this
We read Act 321/2024 as promulgated, and in their consolidated versions the Addictive Substances Act and Criminal Code (both in force from 1 January 2026), Act 65/2017 (from 1 July 2025), Government Regulation 456/2025 and Decree 448/2025, all from the Czech statute collection. The notification record and the Czech and Commission messages of June 2025 were read from the European Commission’s TRIS database. The Government Office releases of 6 February 2025, 1 June 2026 and 14 September 2026 and the Ministry of Finance releases of 17 June and 14 September 2026 were read on the ministries’ own sites. Article 6 of Directive (EU) 2015/1535 and the EUDA’s kratom profile were read for what a detailed opinion is and for kratom’s international status. The eClinicalMedicine viewpoint was read in full; the International Journal of Drug Policy paper at abstract level only. We have not read the text of the September 2026 bill or of the Commission’s detailed opinion. All reading was done on 8 October 2026.