Kratom Industry Paid Lobbyists While DEA Scheduling Notice Died in Congress

A 501(c)(4) funded by anonymous kratom vendors mobilized 51 House members and 9 senators in 2016, and the DEA's emergency scheduling action — never before reversed on political grounds — was...

The single most documented fact in the federal kratom file is this: on August 31, 2016, the Drug Enforcement Administration published notice in the Federal Register — 81 Fed. Reg. 59929, Docket No. DEA-442 — announcing emergency placement of kratom's two active alkaloids, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, into Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, effective September 30, 2016. Forty-three days later, on October 13, 2016, DEA withdrew that notice. 81 Fed. Reg. 70652. DEA has used its emergency scheduling authority dozens of times across decades of drug enforcement. A reversal of that magnitude, on explicitly political grounds, was, by the agency's own standards, virtually without precedent.

What happened in those 43 days is documented, partially, in public records. The American Kratom Association — a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization founded in 2014 and headquartered in Haymarket, Virginia — coordinated a congressional letter campaign. On September 13, 2016, 51 Members of Congress, led by Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ), sent a letter to DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg demanding withdrawal of the scheduling notice and a public comment period. On October 12, 2016, nine U.S. Senators, led by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), sent a parallel letter. Both letters are reproduced in AKA press releases and were reported by Roll Call and The Washington Post respectively. DEA cited those congressional concerns the following day when it withdrew the notice.

The financial architecture behind that congressional mobilization is where the public record becomes thinner but not invisible. The American Kratom Association is organized as a 501(c)(4), a structure that under current IRS rules does not require disclosure of donor identities. Its senior fellow on public policy, Mac Haddow, is a former Department of Health and Human Services official who has appeared as a registered federal lobbyist in multiple filing periods, searchable at lda.senate.gov under 'Haddow, Mac.' AKA's IRS Form 990 filings, available through ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, show estimated revenues of approximately $1.2 million in 2016 rising to approximately $2.1 million in 2017 — the two years bracketing the DEA reversal — though this publication notes these figures are estimates derived from available public filings and should be treated as approximations pending full document verification. Precise donor-level sourcing of those funds is legally shielded by the 501(c)(4) designation.

The industry whose existence those lobbying dollars protected is substantial by any measure. The American Kratom Association, citing its own market research, claims 10 to 16 million regular U.S. kratom users as of 2023-2024 and annual market revenues of $1.3 billion to over $2 billion. No independent peer-reviewed market audit of those figures exists — a circularity this publication flags explicitly, because the same figures are used by AKA to argue economic harm from regulation and to justify lobbying investment levels. What is not in dispute is that federal scheduling of kratom would render the entire commercial enterprise federally illegal, exposing manufacturers and distributors to criminal liability under the Controlled Substances Act. The financial motivation to prevent scheduling is, in dollar terms, the size of the industry itself.

The Food and Drug Administration's position has been consistent and documented in the public record. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb issued a formal public statement on February 6, 2018 — available at fda.gov under 'FDA and Kratom' — affirming that kratom is an opioid by receptor-binding analysis and calling on DEA to proceed with scheduling. FDA had transmitted an eight-factor scheduling analysis to DEA in 2016 recommending Schedule I placement; that document was not made public until 2018 following press inquiries, as reported by Stat News on February 6, 2018. FDA has since issued multiple import alerts, mandatory recalls — including a February 2018 recall of Pharma-Tech Industry kratom products citing Salmonella contamination — and warning letters to vendors marketing kratom as a treatment for opioid withdrawal or pain. The FDA warning letters database at fda.gov documents recipients including Kratom Spot and Gaia Ethnobotanical, among others. None of these enforcement actions has resolved the central regulatory question, because DEA, not FDA, holds scheduling authority under the CSA.

AKA's central legislative strategy has run in parallel: promotion of the Kratom Consumer Protection Act, which would establish FDA-regulated good manufacturing practice standards for kratom products while explicitly preventing scheduling. At the state level, versions of this legislation have been enacted in Utah, Georgia, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Nevada, among others. At the federal level, advocacy aligned with Rep. Pocan's office and others produced discussions across the 115th through 118th Congresses, but as of 2025, no federal kratom consumer protection legislation has been enacted and no DEA final scheduling rule has been issued. The 2016 withdrawal has been followed by nine years of sustained federal inaction. The industry, by its own revenue estimates, has continued to operate across that entire period.

A New York Post investigation published in 2025 found kratom products — including products containing tianeptine, a synthetic opioid antidepressant not approved in the United States and sometimes called 'gas station heroin' — sold openly in New York City smoke shops. Tianeptine has been separately banned in multiple states. The co-presence of kratom and tianeptine in unregulated retail environments is a direct consequence of the federal scheduling gap this report has traced. The FDA's Import Alert 54-15, first issued in 2012 and updated multiple times through 2023, authorizes detention of kratom shipments at the border but does not regulate domestic retail sales. State-level enforcement varies. The result is a patchwork in which products sold under the kratom label may contain substances that are separately prohibited, with no federal point-of-sale verification requirement in place.

What remains hidden is substantial and specific. The identity of the vendors who funded AKA's operations across the 2016 campaign and subsequent years is legally shielded by the 501(c)(4) structure and cannot be determined from currently available public records. The precise contact logs from AKA lobbyists' congressional meetings in September and October 2016 — the conversations that preceded 60 congressional signatories — are not subject to mandatory public disclosure under the Lobbying Disclosure Act at the level of individual meeting records. DEA's internal deliberations on why no final scheduling rule has been issued in the nine years since the 2016 withdrawal are not publicly available. Three instruments could close these gaps: a Government Accountability Office audit of DEA's kratom scheduling timeline and the factual record of congressional contacts received; an IRS examination of AKA's 501(c)(4) donor disclosure obligations relative to its industry-protective activities; and a congressional subpoena of AKA's internal communications from August through October 2016. None of those instruments has been deployed.