Charleston’s vape shops aren’t just selling flavored nicotine cartridges anymore. Kratom, a plant that historically has been used as a home-remedy painkiller, has exploded in popularity among smoke shops and other dens as a marketable, legal substitute for opium.
“Kratom is sinister,” said one Lowcountry professional who wished to remain unnamed to protect his family’s privacy. “I went on a personal crusade to announce to everybody that this is wrong.”
The plant contains several psychoactive compounds, including 7-OH, a powerful opioid that can be synthesized or concentrated. This compound is then often mixed into cocktails at local kava bars and smoke shops or added to gummies and sold at gas stations and convenience stores.
While 7-OH products offer a cheap and powerful opioid-like high, other low-dose extracts are less potent and safer, according to local smoke shop Airavata owner Kyle Domazalski.
“We know that being in this counter-culture industry, once people start messing with it, stupid things happen,” Domazalski told the Charleston City Paper. “All the manufacturing, distribution, abuse — we didn’t want any part of that. We’ve never sold concentrated 7-OH products, and we turn people away all the time who are looking specifically for it.”
But the way more powerful kratom products are marketed is particularly problematic, many say. Signs and posters blaze “KRATOM” in big, bright letters at stores from Mount Pleasant to Summerville. This emphatic marketing, the source said, combined with a lack of general knowledge from the community, poses a real threat.
“I spoke to four Mount Pleasant police officers and asked them about kratom,” he said. “None of them were aware of what it was.”
First-hand experiences
Donna Brunetti, a licensed mental health counselor who works with patients struggling with addiction, said 7-OH can be just as harmful as any opiate when abused. And its availability makes abuse very easy, she said.
“I work with a lot of people who have alcohol abuse problems, and one of the biggest challenges in their mind is that alcohol is legal. ‘I’m not doing anything bad,’ they say. ‘I’m not doing anything illegal.’ And this is the same principle.
“Knowing what people have gone through to break these addictions and knowing that this works in the same way as opiates do — it is so, so dangerous,” she said.
The unnamed source said his two children went from using electronic cigarettes — vaping — to drinking kratom cocktails at local smoke shops. After a falling out with his daughter, he decided he wanted to see for himself how the drug works.
“I went four times to the vaping shop,” he said. “I met some people who were surely regulars and got to know one of the bartenders real well. The first time I did it, I had a double shot with a particular cocktail mix that sounded real nice.
“The effects lasted about two hours,” he continued. “It relieves you of all pain, but the next day, the pain is worse. It messes with your sleep horribly. And it’s damn expensive.”
The source said his two kids spend hundreds of dollars per month on kratom alone. His son spends $350 per month, he said; his daughter wouldn’t tell him the number.
Local leaders sound alarm
Berkeley County Coroner Darnell D. Hartwell shared a public awareness warning on Facebook last month, telling people to “stay safe” after observing 7-OH in multiple cases at the coroner’s office. According to officials, the office has investigated two overdose cases and one motor vehicle accident with 7-OH involvement.
The Charleston County Coroner’s Office has recorded 28 cases where kratom was identified since 2023. Of those, 19 cases classified as “mixed-drug toxicity” specifically listed kratom as contributory in the cause of death.
“It’s ridiculous that it’s legal, and it’s in every gas station in Moncks Corner,” said Allison Bilton, a community outreach coordinator at the Berkeley County Coroner’s Office. “Legislation put an age limit on purchasing it, but that’s not good enough. We have to get it out of our stores completely.”
Bilton said South Carolina is known as the “gas-station heroin capital” of the nation, largely because the states surrounding South Carolina have all banned 7-OH. People cross the state border to pick up gummies, tablets and other products at gas stations, she said.
Domazalski said he supports a 7-OH ban, but outlawing kratom entirely would be a difficult sell.
“We were disappointed to see that the 7-OH got lobbied out of the last bill,” he said. “We’re fine with standard, understood regulations of any product. I don’t think kratom is going anywhere, but as far as 7-OH, we want it gone.
“The fact that we have liquor on the shelf doesn’t leave a lot of legs for anything else on the planet other than whatever the government deems as a drug.”
Jack O’Toole contributed to this story.
Kratom sales restricted this year by new S.C. law
By Jack O’Toole | Americans are spending about $1.5 billion a year on highly-concentrated kratom-infused products like energy drinks and gummies at vape shops and in convenience stores all across South Carolina and the nation — products that a growing number of industry critics are calling “gas station heroin.”
And public health officials are starting to sound the alarm — particularly with regard to products containing 7-OH, a powerful opioid compound that can be synthesized or concentrated from the plant.
“7-OH is an opioid that can be more potent than morphine,” U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary said July 29. “We need regulation and public education to prevent another wave of the opioid epidemic.”
Currently, kratom and its derivatives are lightly regulated under a patchwork of state laws. Here in S.C., for instance, kratom sales were restricted to adults 21 and older under a law that went into effect on July 11 of this year.
Meanwhile in response to a July FDA request, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is studying whether to classify 7-OH — or 7-hydroxymitragynine as it’s formally known — as a Schedule I drug like LSD or heroin, which would essentially make products containing the compound illegal under federal law.
University of Florida researcher Christopher McCurdy, who’s studied kratom for more than 20 years, told Statehouse Report that highly concentrated 7-OH-infused products amount to unregulated opioids.
“It’s essentially legal morphine,” he said.
To understand why, he said it helps to know a little more about kratom and its primary active agent, mitragynine.
Mitragynine is what chemists call an alkaloid, meaning that it’s an organic compound that has pronounced effects on the human body. At low doses, it acts as a mild stimulant. At higher doses, it becomes a sedative with pain-relieving qualities. It achieves those effects by binding lightly with opioid and serotonin receptors in the brain.
By contrast, 7-OH, an alkaloid that’s only found in trace amounts in dried kratom, binds tightly with opioid receptors, making it 10 to 20 times more potent than morphine, according to some animal studies.
“That molecule is one we’ve been very concerned about for many years now,” McCurdy said. “It’s very different from the whole leaf kratom.”
S.C.’s new law
S.C. Sen. Russell Ott, D-Calhoun, said he wasn’t familiar with kratom before receiving a call from a constituent a few years ago. But what he heard from that concerned family member kicked off a research project that eventually led him to introduce a bill to ban kratom products from S.C. store shelves.
“That didn’t go anywhere,” he told Statehouse Report this month. “It just wasn’t on anyone’s radar.”
So this year, he said, he came back with a narrower bill that took aim at what he saw as the industry’s worst practices — unrestricted sales to minors, poor labeling regarding ingredients and potency, and synthesized products like 7-OH.
Ott’s legislation passed in May — after a furious lobbying effort by the 7-OH industry that got the provision banning its products removed.
“It was still a heavy lift,” he said. “But I put as many guardrails around it as I possibly could.”
Beyond that, he said he’s pleased that the federal government is considering tougher action, because “for me, it’s not over.”
“I’ve made it clear to everybody that if I get an opportunity to vote on a bill to ban kratom, I probably will,” he said.
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