I bought an opioid at the gas station, and it was legal. That’s a problem.

I walked into a gas station last week and bought an opioid. Not something “kind of like an opioid.” Not a supplement that makes you sleepy. An opioid, in the pharmacological sense, that hits the same receptor in your brain as oxycodone and fentanyl.

To be clear this product would not test like an opioid — which is a huge problem in and of itself. But our federal government explicitly refers to it as an “opioid,” and for good reason.

I made the purchase on purpose, because I wanted to see if I could. It took all of ninety seconds. The clerk rang it up between a coca cola and some beef jerky for my dog. He never even looked up.

I threw it in the trash in the parking lot — I am a statistician, not a drug-user. But I wanted to know what someone with twenty dollars and a curious afternoon could get his hands on. Now I know.

I must acknowledge that some people say that it is not an opioid, even though the FDA and the Secretary of HHS contradict this position. The FDA’s own scientific assessment classifies it as an opioid. You can decide for yourself.

7-OH — short for 7-hydroxymitragynine — is one of the dozens of alkaloids in kratom, a Southeast Asian tree whose leaves people have chewed for centuries. Japanese chemists identified it in the early 1990s. For about thirty years, nobody outside a pharmacology lab cared about it.

In the leaf, it exists in trace amounts — a fraction of a percent. But the stuff on gas station shelves is not the leaf. It is made by taking kratom extract and chemically oxidizing it. A compound the plant barely produces is now the main ingredient. Then it gets pressed into tablets and gummies and little drink shots, with packaging that looks like an energy drink had a baby with a candy bar.

In studies, 7-OH binds to the mu-opioid receptor with a potency reported at up to 13 times that of morphine . The FDA commissioner said that figure out loud in July 2025. That is not “sort of” an opioid. That is a very serious opioid, and it is being sold in cherry flavor next to the chewing gum.

First, whoever figured out that you could take a 30-year-old footnote in the chemistry literature, concentrate it, put it in a gummy, and sell it legally in 40-some states deserves some kind of dark genius award. Because that is exactly what happened.

Around 2023, the products started appearing. By 2024, they were in convenience stores across the country. Poison control calls spiked. Nobody had to smuggle anything across a border — they just put it on a shelf. And just as importantly, while it is an opioid in the pharmacological sense, it doesn’t test like one. If you take a drug test and are taking this substance, it won’t show up . Standard opioid drug panels don’t screen for it. For anyone who has to take a drug test for work, you can be as high as a kite and work will never know.

Second — and this is the part that actually makes me upset — look at what we did to everyone else. For a decade, this country has treated prescription opioids like radioactive waste. We built prescription monitoring databases. We capped pill counts. We made doctors so frightened of writing prescriptions that people fresh out of surgery — people with cancer — are told to take ibuprofen and stop complaining. I have written about this before, and the emails I got from readers were heartbreaking.

And the data are clear: Prescription opioids are not what is driving the overdose crisis today. Illicit fentanyl is. We built an entire enforcement machine to fight this.

Meanwhile, an unregulated opioid walked in the front door of nearly every gas station in America, and nobody was watching, because it wasn’t a pill from a pharmacy. It was a “botanical.” It had a leaf on the label.

Let me repeat that: A surgeon cannot give a patient three days of pain relief without creating a paper trail, but anyone can buy a substance 13 times as strong as morphine along with their breakfast taquito.

Why? Because we regulated opioids by where they come from instead of what they do. If it comes from a doctor, it is presumed to be nefarious. But if it comes from a smoke shop with a cartoon on it, then it is presumed to be for wellness.

At least the federal government has noticed — sort of. The FDA formally recommended on July 29, 2025 that it be made a Schedule I drug. But the actual rule — the one that would take the tablets off the shelf, is still pending — more than a year later. In 14 months the FDA has gone from “this is a dangerous opioid” to “still thinking about it.”

Whereas surgeons have been all but forced to implement a no-opioid policy overnight. the DEA takes more than a year to remove candy-flavored opioids from gas stations in a year.

A handful of states got tired of waiting. Florida issued an emergency rule in 2025. Tennessee’s ban kicked in this July. Massachusetts, Kansas and North Dakota have also acted. But most states have not. Idaho, one of the only states that still bans marijuana for virtually all purposes, has no rules about it 7-OH at all.

The DEA should issue the scheduling order today — not tomorrow. It has had the FDA’s science for more than a year. There is nothing left to learn. Every state that has not acted should follow Florida rather than wait on Congress, which has a bill just sitting in committee.

The tablets I bought are in a trash can at a gas station, but the rest of the box is still on the shelf, right where I found it, under the fluorescent lights, between the energy shots and the phone chargers. Somebody is going to buy it tonight — probably somebody young.

I went in just to find out how easy it was. Here is the answer: It is easier to buy a 13-times-morphine opioid in this country than it is to buy a box of Sudafed. Figure that one out.

Liberty Vittert Capito is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation.