The Drug Enforcement Administration placed O-desmethyltramadol in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act on 12 August 2026. The order is temporary. It runs for two years, until 12 August 2028, and the DEA may extend it by one further year while permanent scheduling is decided. That makes 12 August 2028 the earliest date the listing can lapse rather than a fixed expiry, and the DEA says it will publish a further document if the listing is extended or made permanent.
O-desmethyltramadol is not a kratom alkaloid. It is a synthetic opioid, an active metabolite of the prescription painkiller tramadol, and it appears here because of what it has been mixed with.
Kratom was not scheduled by this order, and neither was mitragynine. The amendatory text adds one paragraph to the schedules, and O-desmethyltramadol is the only substance in it.
What the order actually does
The notice is a temporary scheduling order made under the DEA’s power to act against what the statute calls an imminent hazard to public safety. It was published in the Federal Register at 91 FR 52013, under docket number DEA-1641, and it took effect on the day it was published rather than after a comment period. The action line describes it as a “temporary amendment; temporary scheduling order.”
The 7-hydroxymitragynine documents of 6 July are the same kind of instrument at an earlier stage: notices of intent under the same temporary scheduling power. This order had one too, published on 24 June 2026 at 91 FR 37822. Neither carries a comment period, because the DEA states the notice-and-comment requirements do not apply to a temporary scheduling action. The difference is that this one has now been made, and those have not.
Why a kratom publication is covering it
The DEA’s own factual case for scheduling names kratom repeatedly, and the reason is an adulteration problem the order traces back to deaths in 2009 and first law-enforcement encounters in 2011.
The agency reports 147 encounters with O-desmethyltramadol in which the substance was the only drug present in 118, or 80.2 per cent. In the remainder it was found alongside other substances, and the list in the order includes mitragynine, which it identifies as a kratom alkaloid, as well as heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine, bromazolam and cocaine.
More directly, the order records that O-desmethyltramadol “was found to be mixed with the kratom plant”, established by testing packaging material and by finding both compounds in toxicology results from the same individuals.
The order then sets out the case history. Between October 2009 and October 2010, Swedish forensic autopsies examined ten deaths involving both O-desmethyltramadol and mitragynine. Nine of those deaths were explained by O-desmethyltramadol intoxication. The people who died were between 22 and 35 years old, blood concentrations ranged from 0.4 to 4.3 micrograms per gram, and all died before reaching hospital. The reports describe significant lung congestion and fluid on the lungs following use of a product sold as “Krypton”, which the DEA describes as a mix of kratom and O-desmethyltramadol.
A German case from 2010 in the order points the same way. A woman who had previously been dependent on opioids gave urine samples that contained the kratom alkaloids mitragynine, speciociliatine, speciogynine, mitraciliatine and paynantheine, together with roughly 9 milligrams per litre of O-desmethyltramadol, and no tramadol at all. The absence of tramadol mattered, because it meant the O-desmethyltramadol had not come from a metabolised painkiller. She later said she had drunk three or four infusions of Krypton that week.
A Portuguese case from 2021 involved a 25-year-old man found dead in his room at a boarding house, with a spoon, a syringe and six bags of powder beside him. Every bag was labelled, and testing confirmed the labels were accurate, O-desmethyltramadol among them. The order reports no blood concentrations for him.
A fourth case, in Kansas City in 2021, is the one that shows both substances in the same bloodstream. A 19-year-old man was found dead after a roommate saw him lying on his bed, described as snoring and sweaty. Autopsy toxicology recorded O-desmethyltramadol at 10.9 nanograms per millilitre and mitragynine at 2.7 nanograms per millilitre, alongside the synthetic opioid 2-methyl-AP-237 at 379 nanograms per millilitre, the benzodiazepine metabolite 8-aminoclonazolam at 4.6, and cannabis. Several further drugs were identified but not quantified. Nothing in the order attributes his death to any one of them.
The European Union Drugs Agency has recorded the same pattern in its kratom profile for years: products sold in Germany and Sweden as enhanced kratom under the Krypton name turned out to contain caffeine and O-desmethyltramadol as adulterants. The agency says the O-desmethyltramadol was apparently added to mimic the sedative and narcotic effects of kratom itself.
What this changes, and what it does not
Inside the United States, O-desmethyltramadol is now a Schedule I substance for at least two years, with the possession, manufacture and distribution consequences that follow from that.
The status of kratom leaf is untouched by this order. So is the status of mitragynine. The separate DEA proposals of 6 July 2026, which would temporarily schedule 7-hydroxymitragynine above a specified threshold, and separately mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15 and MGM-16, are still notices of intent and have not been made. The Department of Health and Human Services ran a request for information on the 7-hydroxymitragynine threshold, and that closed on 31 July 2026. We wrote about those documents when they appeared, on our page about the 7-OH notices.
Three separate things are happening at once here, and they are easy to run together: one substance placed in Schedule I and in force, three substances proposed for Schedule I and not in force, and a plant that is in neither category.
What the case evidence is, and is not
The Swedish, German, Portuguese and Kansas City material is a forensic case series and three individual case reports. That is a low tier of evidence: it describes what analysts found in particular people, and it cannot establish how often the adulteration occurs or what any product on sale contains. In the Swedish series the investigators attributed nine of the ten deaths to O-desmethyltramadol intoxication. The DEA does not attribute a cause of death in the other three cases, and neither do we.
What the series does show is that people who believed they were taking a plant were in some instances taking a manufactured opioid.
Nothing in the DEA order tells you what is in any particular product on sale today. It describes what analysts found in seized material and in the blood of people who died. That is a record of a supply chain in which the label and the contents were not the same thing, and it is the reason a bag of leaf and a laboratory result are different kinds of evidence.