A Brief History of Kratom: From Village Custom to Global Controversy

Kratom, the tropical tree known scientifically as Mitragyna speciosa, has been part of daily life in parts of Southeast Asia for generations — probably long before anyone wrote it down. A Dutch botanist gave it a formal name in 1839. Thailand banned it in 1943, mostly to protect government opium revenue, not to protect public health. It didn’t show up in Western markets in any real quantity until the early 2000s. In 2016, the DEA tried to place kratom in the strictest drug category and backed down after an outpouring of public objection. By 2021, the World Health Organization had reviewed the evidence and recommended against international scheduling. Today, US regulation happens state by state, with more states adopting consumer protection laws modeled on legislation from the American Kratom Association.

None of this happened because of careful pharmacological study. Kratom’s path from a working plant used by farmers and laborers to a subject of federal drug hearings was shaped by colonial record-keeping, wartime economics, an opioid epidemic, and the internet. Knowing that backstory helps explain why kratom products, laws, and research look the way they do now.

Where kratom comes from and how it was traditionally used

Mitragyna speciosa is an evergreen tree in the coffee family, native to Thailand, Malaysia, and parts of Indonesia, including Borneo and Sumatra. It grows wild in humid lowland forest and along riverbanks, usually below 500 meters in elevation.

For generations, people used it simply: fresh leaves chewed on the spot or brewed into a plain tea. Farmers and laborers in Thailand and Malaysia relied on it to get through long, physically demanding days — pushing back fatigue, easing soreness, keeping going. In some communities it also had a social role, offered to visitors as a gesture of hospitality, in much the way betel nut is used elsewhere in the region.

Traditional use looked quite different from how kratom is consumed today:

• Only fresh whole leaf — no powders, extracts, or concentrated products
• No standard dosing — people judged amounts based on experience, not measurement
• No strain names — labels like Maeng Da, Bali, or Borneo didn’t exist; those are modern marketing terms
• Not seen as a drug or supplement — it was simply an everyday plant, woven into daily routines
• Practices varied by region — Thai, Malaysian, and Indonesian communities didn’t all use it the same way

When Western science first took notice

Kratom entered the scientific record in 1839, when Dutch botanist Pieter Willem Korthals described and named the species while working in Borneo for the East India Company. He originally called it Stephegyne speciosa. A British botanist, George Daniel Haviland, reclassified it under the genus Mitragyna in the 1850s, grouping it with related plants based on shared physical traits — the name refers to the mitre-shaped flower parts.

Early European accounts of kratom were written through a colonial, administrative lens. Botanists were cataloguing plants of economic interest, noting local uses in passing, and slotting the species into existing classification systems. The deeper cultural picture — how kratom fit into labor, social life, and folk medicine — often got flattened or filtered through outsider assumptions.

The chemistry took much longer to catch up. Researchers isolated the first known kratom alkaloid in 1921, later named mitragynine. More thorough chemical analysis followed between the 1960s and 1980s as lab methods improved. The compound 7-hydroxymitragynine, which turns out to bind opioid receptors more strongly than mitragynine itself, wasn’t fully identified until the 1990s.

Why Thailand banned kratom in 1943

Thailand’s Kratom Act (officially the Kratom Act, B.E. 2486) passed in 1943 under Prime Minister Phibun Songkhram. To understand why, it helps to look at wartime drug economics rather than public health policy.

At the time, Thailand ran a legal, government-controlled opium trade, and taxing that trade brought in significant revenue. Kratom offered rural users some of the same practical benefits as opium — pain relief, help getting through withdrawal-related fatigue — but for free. That made it a direct threat to the state’s opium income. Records from parliamentary discussions at the time openly note that cutting kratom use would push more money toward the opium and heroin trade.

In other words, the ban wasn’t about protecting anyone from harm. It was a revenue-protection measure, and that same pattern — economics driving policy more than science — would repeat itself in other countries decades later. Enforcement in Thailand, for what it’s worth, stayed spotty for most of the rest of the century.

Other countries in the region took their own paths. Malaysia restricted mitragynine under its 1976 Poisons Act. Indonesia, now the world’s largest kratom exporter, has kept a murky, inconsistent regulatory stance. Thailand itself eventually reversed course: in 2021 it decriminalized kratom and dropped it from its narcotics list, openly acknowledging its economic and cultural value.

How kratom reached Western markets

Kratom didn’t travel to the West through old trade routes — it arrived through the internet. The first real Western exposure started in the late 1990s and early 2000s, driven largely by:

• Online ethnobotanical sellers — niche websites offering unusual plant products to hobbyists and researchers
• Early online communities — sites like Erowid and Bluelight, and later Reddit, where users swapped firsthand accounts
• Harm reduction circles — people managing opioid withdrawal began discussing kratom as a self-directed aid
• A handful of academic researchers — pharmacologists who started examining kratom’s alkaloids and receptor activity in the early 2000s

During this stretch, kratom sat in a legal gray area across most Western countries — unregulated, mostly unknown, and sold in inconsistent forms with no quality standards or testing.

The opioid crisis in the US, which worsened through the late 2000s and 2010s, gave kratom’s Western growth a real push. People trying to cut back on or quit opioids increasingly reported using kratom on their own to manage symptoms — a pattern captured in several surveys, including a 2007 clinical report by Boyer and colleagues, one of the earliest Western medical accounts of kratom being used this way.

How the modern kratom industry took shape

US commercialization of kratom accelerated through the 2010s, growing from a small ethnobotanical niche into a real consumer product category. That growth brought:

• Wider retail access — kratom moved beyond online sales into gas stations, smoke shops, and specialty retailers
• More product formats — beyond raw powder and capsules came liquid shots, tablets, gummies, and standardized extracts
• Strain branding — names like Maeng Da, Red Bali, and Green Malay were created by vendors as marketing labels, not based on any real botanical distinction
• Industry self-policing — the American Kratom Association, founded in 2014, built a Good Manufacturing Practice certification that became the closest thing the industry has to a quality benchmark

Key dates in modern kratom history

Where US regulation stands now

US kratom policy has followed a recurring pattern: an agency tries to restrict it, and pushback follows — from the public, Congress, or international bodies.

Kratom rules by state

FDA import alerts, 2012 to now

Starting in 2012, the FDA began seizing kratom shipments at the border, arguing it was being marketed as an unapproved drug. That action didn’t change the legal status of kratom already sold domestically, but it disrupted supply chains and signaled the agency’s ongoing opposition to the product.

The 2016 DEA reversal

In August 2016, the DEA announced it planned to emergency-schedule mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine as Schedule I substances — the same category as heroin, meaning officially “no accepted medical use.” The backlash was immediate and large: more than 50 members of Congress signed bipartisan letters of objection, roughly 140,000 public comments poured in, and kratom users and researchers organized in protest. Fifty-one days later, the DEA withdrew the notice — the first time in the agency’s history that public pressure had reversed an emergency scheduling decision.

The WHO’s 2021 review

In 2021, the World Health Organization’s Expert Committee on Drug Dependence completed a formal review of kratom and recommended against scheduling it under international drug treaties, concluding the evidence of harm wasn’t strong enough to justify it. That decision mattered because it removed one of the main pressures that could have pushed the US toward federal scheduling.

State-level consumer protection laws

With no federal action forthcoming, the American Kratom Association has focused on state legislatures, pushing model Kratom Consumer Protection Acts that set age limits (usually 21+), labeling rules, and testing requirements — without banning the product outright. By 2024, a number of states had passed some version of this law, while a handful of states and cities chose outright bans instead. Estimates put the US kratom-using population somewhere between 10 and 15 million adults, a number large enough to make the case for clearer, more consistent regulation.

Why this history explains today’s confusing market

A lot of what seems odd about kratom today makes more sense once you know the backstory:

• Strain names aren’t real botanical categories. “Maeng Da,” “Bali,” and “Borneo” are marketing terms invented by sellers, not scientifically defined varieties.
• No FDA approval exists for kratom, for anything. It has never gone through the FDA’s drug approval process, and its status as a dietary supplement remains disputed — it sits in a regulatory gray zone.
• Product quality varies a lot. Fast commercial growth without a regulatory framework produced a market where quality differs wildly between brands. AKA’s GMP certification is the best available quality signal, but it’s voluntary, not government-required.
• Research is thin and recent. Most clinical work on kratom dates from after 2015. Without FDA approval, no drug company has funded large clinical trials, so what exists is mostly surveys, case reports, animal studies, and a handful of studies on how the body processes it.
• Public debate tends to be polarized. With the FDA taking an adversarial stance and a large, vocal community of users pushing back, measured, evidence-based conversation about kratom can be hard to find.