ATLANTA, Ga. — The fight over kratom is shaping up as one of the first big consumer-safety debates for Georgia’s incoming Legislature. A national trade group, the American Kratom Association, is lobbying lawmakers to regulate the plant-based products instead of outlawing nearly all of them.
The group argues that the natural kratom leaf is not the problem. In its view, the harm comes from concentrated and synthetic products sold under the kratom name. It wants Georgia to treat kratom like alcohol, tobacco and other age-restricted goods, write enforcement tools into state law, and add an excise tax on top of the regular sales tax.
That puts the industry at odds with Attorney General Chris Carr. He has proposed rewriting the Kratom Consumer Protection Act so that stores could not sell any kratom product the state had not signed off on first. Lawmakers would set a short public list of products that pass independent lab testing, carry accurate labels and have federal marketing authorization. Anything else would be treated as contraband that any law enforcement agency in Georgia could seize.
Carr has pointed to 7-hydroxymitragynine, known as 7-OH, an addictive, opioid-like compound he says is about 13 times stronger than morphine. Makers press it into tablets, gummies, shots and powders, and those items end up on gas station and smoke shop counters labeled as kratom. Current law already bans synthetic 7-OH, but officers must find a product, seize it, test it and prove what is in it before anything happens.
The Georgia Poison Center has handled about 543 kratom exposure cases since 2021, with cases rising 66 percent between 2022 and 2025, and most of those patients needed treatment at a health care facility.
Carr laid out his plan in October before a House study committee on youth exposure to kratom, where he also asked convenience stores to pull the products from their shelves right away. The state used a similar contraband approach years ago against gray-market and counterfeit-stamped cigarettes.
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