Members of the American Kratom Association (AKA) and the Holistic Alternative Recovery Trust (HART) will debate the controversial alkaloid 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH) and the 7-OH-abundant products that have become available to consumers in the past 2 years.
Billed as “The 7-OH Fault Line”, the debate will take place at the Las Vegas Convention Center 3150 Paradise Rd, at 3:00pm PT on Friday July 25. The event will take place at the same times as the summer CHAMPS Trade Show, popular with kratom vendors, is ongoing in Las Vegas.
The debate will reflect ongoing online debates taking place in the kratom community. Some believe 7-OH products are too strong and habit-forming to be sold freely on the marketplace and therefore a threat to the legality of kratom, while others see it as a wellness tool that can be managed like any kratom product. The organizations involved are also influenced by vendor sponsorships, which sometimes causes confusion, especially when science is being interpreted in light of regulatory motivations.
The AKA is a nonprofit advocacy group founded in 2014 to protect consumer access to kratom and promote responsible regulation, including restrictions on the amount of 7-OH that should be in products on the market. The AKA has lobbied for the Kratom Consumer Protection Act that effectively makes products containing 7-OH at more than 2% of the alkaloid makeup illegal to sell in the states where the act has passed. AKA has urged the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to crack down on companies who sell 7-OH products, and has praised recent FDA warning letters sent to those companies. AKA released a consumer alert on July 18, taking issue with these products being marketed as “kratom” and claiming 7-OH is a “full opioid agonist” (though studies have shown it to be a partial agonist with high binding affinity at the mu opioid receptor).
AKA is sponsored by donations from both kratom advocates and Platinum, Gold, and Silver vendor donors mentioned on its website who sell a range of products, from plain leaf kratom to highly concentrated liquid extract shots.
HART is an advocacy group seeking 501c(4) status formed in 2023 to promote plant-based alternatives for addiction recovery in response to the opioid crisis. It focuses on consumer education, legislative advocacy, and pushing for responsible regulation of herbal compounds like kratom and 7-OH, saying in a statement that it is “committed to advancing a regulated 7-OH industry that places consumer health and well-being first while maintaining product safety and quality”. HART would like to maintain legal access to 7-OH products, and accuses another (unnamed) kratom advocacy group in its “Statement on 7-OH” of viewing 7-OH products “as a threat to its market share”. HART also accuses scientists of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the group to make “to make broad policy pronouncements based on very preliminary research and theory”.
HART mentions “member companies” but does not list them by name on its website. HART’s board of directors includes Vince Sanders, founder of a company that sells primarily CBD, but also 7-OH and other products.
The science on kratom is not advanced, and the science on 7-OH is in its infancy. 7-OH is a metabolite of mitragynine that occurs naturally in the human body any time kratom or mitragynine is ingested. While 7-OH is a partial opioid agonist at mu opioid receptors (MOR), animal studies have shown 7-OH’s MOR binding affinity to be much stronger than that of mitragynine, suggesting that it might be more habit forming than standard, mitragynine-abundant kratom, and that “7-HMG, but not MG, substituted for morphine self-administration in a dose-dependent manner in the rat self-administration paradigm”.
However, animal studies don’t automatically translate to how a substance will affect humans, and without human clinical trials, nothing can be certain about 7-OH’s short and long term effects.
Leaf kratom, however, has a centuries-old history of use. Traditional use of kratom is the ingestion of mostly fresh leaf preparations where it grows naturally in Southeast Asia. Traditional use does not include 7-OH products, nor the highly-concentrated, mitragynine-abundant kratom alkaloid extract products approved by the AKA. Some kratom advocates have called out liquid extract shots and the wild-west marketing style behind them as contributing to dependency and toxicity issues and harming access to kratom as a whole.
Another point of contention has been a recent study in dogs funded by HART. According to HART’s July 7 press release:
a new 2025 pilot study, by East Tennessee Clinical Research gave dogs extremely high doses of 7-OH (up to 10 times the typical human dose). The results:
- No cardiac, neurological, or behavioral harm
- The only observed effect was mild, temporary drooling, even at the highest dose
- All animals fully recovered with no lasting impact
In addition to the K-9 study, scientists also tested 7-OH and a related compound called MGP on different types of human cells, from the lungs, kidneys, and blood. Here’s what they found:
- 7-OH was not toxic to the cells, even at high doses.
- It caused fewer problems with important systems in the body, like the heart and kidneys, compared to regular kratom (mitragynine).
The Global Kratom Coalition’s (GKC, an organization funded heavily by a vendor of kratom/kava drinks) Kratom Consumer Advisory Council (KCAC) countered this report with a position statement criticizing HART’s claims about the study. Among other criticisms, KCAC accused HART of being disingenuous about dosing claims.
the original dose protocol was 10 mg twice daily for 7 days, 20 mg twice daily for 7 days, and then 40 mg twice daily for 7 days. However, when they gave the first beagle the very first 10 mg dose, the beagle had severe neurological issues (severe central nervous system excitation followed by severe central nervous system depression). The adverse event was severe enough that they scrapped the entire original dosing protocol and rewrote it to give the beagles only 1/20th the total daily dose
…Even the 10 mg dose they intended to give (but could not because of the severe neurological issue) would have only been the equivalent of a 32 mg dose in humans.
There are products with 30 mg of 7-OH per serving in them now, and it is common to find 10–15 mg products. As such, the 1 mg, 2 mg, and 4 mg doses that they used are actually 3–5 times lower or similar to what is typically used in humans and clearly not 10x the human dose.
The AKA will also be holding a press conference earlier in the day on Friday, July 25 at 10:00am PT, featuring medicinal chemist and kratom expert Dr. Chris McCurdy, located at Chairman Room – 2nd Floor, Renaissance Las Vegas Hotel, 3400 Paradise Rd. They invite all members of the media to attend.
Both the press conference and debate will be streamed on AKA’s YouTube channel.