For Bohn, the move will make it much harder to do the research she’s been planning. “It’s a real hassle,” she tells WIRED. “Right now, I would like to have it tested for additional safety studies, and I can’t have it made, I can’t ship it, I can’t touch it. I can’t do anything.”
For drug users who hope to use it to wean off opioids—despite the lack of clinical evidence that the drug is effective in humans—it’s the removal of a potential off-ramp for their addictions.
Jim Bates has been hooked on various opioids, including prescription pills, heroin, and fentanyl, since he was 25. About two years ago, the 53-year-old Duncan, Oklahoma, kitchen manager got addicted to 7-OH, a concentrated compound found in kratom that activates the brain’s opioid receptors. “That shit blew my head off,” he says, noting he was introduced to it at a vape shop. “It was a whole lot like heroin.”
He eventually graduated to a similar chemical, called MGM-15, which felt more like oxycodone—the effect he prefers. (The DEA placed both 7-OH and MGM-15 in Schedule I over the summer.)
It got to the point where MGM-15 was “all I was thinking about,” Bates says. About 11 months ago, he started scouring the Discord and Telegram groups he was in for advice on how to quit.
“I got introduced to SR-17, which was a freaking miracle,” he says, using a common shorthand for the chemical. It took him about three weeks to taper off MGM-15, using SR-17018.
Previous attempts to get off 7-OH had caused him “anxiety like you wouldn’t believe” along with restless legs during withdrawal, he says. But with SR-17018, he didn’t experience any physical withdrawal symptoms. “They’ve never created anything like this,” he says, adding that he didn’t experience a high or “euphoria” from taking it.
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