I bought an opioid at the gas station, and it was legal. That’s a problem.

I walked into a gas station last week and bought an opioid. Not something “kind of like an opioid.” Not a supplement that makes you sleepy. An opioid, in the pharmacological sense, that hits the same receptor in your brain as oxycodone and fentanyl.

To be clear this product would not test like an opioid — which is a huge problem in and of itself. But our federal government explicitly refers to it as an “opioid,” and for good reason.

I made the purchase on purpose, because I wanted to see if I could. It took all of ninety seconds. The clerk rang it up between a coca cola and some beef jerky for my dog. He never even looked up.

I threw it in the trash in the parking lot — I am a statistician, not a drug-user. But I wanted to know what someone with twenty dollars and a curious afternoon could get his hands on. Now I know.

I must acknowledge that some people say that it is not an opioid, even though the FDA and the Secretary of HHS contradict this position. The FDA’s own scientific assessment classifies it as an opioid. You can decide for yourself.

7-OH — short for 7-hydroxymitragynine — is one of the dozens of alkaloids in kratom, a Southeast Asian tree whose leaves people have chewed for centuries. Japanese chemists identified it in the early 1990s. For about thirty years, nobody outside a pharmacology lab cared about it.

In the leaf, it exists in trace amounts — a fraction of a percent. But the stuff on gas station shelves is not the leaf. It is made by taking kratom extract and chemically oxidizing it. A compound the plant barely produces is now the main ingredient. Then it gets pressed into tablets and gummies and little drink shots, with packaging that looks like an energy drink had a baby with a candy bar.

In studies, 7-OH binds........

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