Since the Federal Register notices published on 6 July 2026, the shelf space that concentrated 7-hydroxymitragynine products occupied has been filled mainly by four things: Cat's Claw-labelled products, kava, kanna, and functional mushrooms — plus a fifth category that is best described as the same supply chain wearing new packaging. This is a description of what appeared, based on what we see in wholesale catalogues, retailer listings and the certificates suppliers send us.
To be unambiguous about the framing: nothing in this article is presented as a substitute for anything. We are not claiming these products do what 7-OH products did, or that they are comparable in any functional sense. They are different plants with different chemistry, and a claim of equivalence would be one we have no basis to make. What they have in common is that they moved into the same retail space at the same time.
Quick answer: the shelf, before and after
| What appeared | Plant or organism | Typical formats | Documentation quality we have seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cat's Claw products | Uncaria tomentosa | Flavoured tablets, sachets, shots, chews | Highly variable — from full purity panels to alkaloid-only certificates |
| Kava | Piper methysticum | Capsules, liquid extracts, root powder | Reasonable in the mainstream herbal channel; thin in the kava-bar supply channel |
| Kanna | Sceletium tortuosum | Capsules, tablets, powders | Good for one branded standardised ingredient; poor for generic extracts |
| Functional mushrooms | Lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, chaga, turkey tail, maitake | Capsules, powders, tinctures, gummies | The clearest testing standards of the four, where brands publish them |
| Rebranded kratom-derivative lines | Mitragyna speciosa derivatives | Tablets, shots — often the same formats | Frequently the weakest, and the category to watch hardest |
What actually changed, and when
On 1 July 2026 the DEA filed two Notices of Intent to temporarily schedule under 21 U.S.C. 811(h). Both published in the Federal Register on 6 July 2026.
- FR Doc 2026-13580 — 7-hydroxymitragynine above a threshold of 0.050% w/w, or 1.00 mg per article.
- FR Doc 2026-13581 — mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15 (dihydro-7-hydroxymitragynine) and MGM-16 (9-fluoro-dihydro-7-hydroxymitragynine), with no threshold. Any detectable amount.
The orders take effect on or after 5 August 2026, on the date the order itself publishes. They run for two years, extendable by one. A temporary scheduling order of this kind is not subject to judicial review. There is no grace period and no sell-through provision — retail sale of a Schedule I substance to the public is not permitted, and a holder without the relevant registration must surrender stock. We cover the mechanics in our scheduling explainer, the threshold arithmetic in the 7-OH threshold breakdown, and the inventory question in what happens to 7-OH brands.
The important timing detail: the market moved on the notice, not the order. As of today, 30 July 2026, the effective date has not arrived. But distributors reprice and reallocate on announcement, not on effect, so the shelf reorganisation has been running for roughly three weeks and is largely complete in the wholesale channel.
1. Cat's Claw-labelled products
This is the most visible new arrival, and the most uneven. Uncaria tomentosa is a different plant from Mitragyna speciosa — an Amazonian woody vine harvested for its inner bark — and it is not named in either Federal Register notice. Products arrive in the same formats the outgoing category used: flavoured tablets, sachets, chews and liquid shots.
The documentation range is enormous. At the good end we have seen per-flavour, batch-level certificates from named laboratories with digital signatures, sample IDs, unit weights and an affirmative marker result — one supplier certificate in our files reports isorhynchophylline, an Uncaria oxindole alkaloid, at 0.28% or 2.82 mg/g for that lot. At the other end we have seen certificates that report Total Alkaloids 0.00 with mitraphylline non-detect, meaning no Uncaria marker alkaloid was found in that batch at all, alongside product listings describing a proprietary indole alkaloid from the Cat's Claw plant. Where a brand describes its own product that way, we report it as the brand's claim. We do not repeat it in our own voice.
A second pattern worth naming: alkaloid-only certificates. Several of the new entrants publish an alkaloid panel with heavy metals, microbials and residual solvents marked "not tested." For an Amazonian bark extract, heavy metals are not an optional line item. What we hold, gaps included, is on our COA page, the document-by-document walkthrough is in how to read a COA, and the current lineup is in the Cat's Claw collection.
2. Kava
Kava's legal position is the settled one in this group. It is not controlled under the Controlled Substances Act, and FDA treats it as a lawful dietary ingredient that is the subject of a safety communication about liver injury rather than one the agency has concluded is unlawful. No state bans it.
The conditions are where sellers diverge sharply. FDA's position splits by product category: kava in a sealed, properly labelled dietary supplement is permitted, while kava added to a conventional food or beverage has been treated as an unapproved food additive. Essentially every embargo, enforcement action and closure we could trace landed on the food-and-beverage side, or on health claims the seller made for the product. Ready-to-drink kava shots and sodas have appeared in the post-July reshuffle, and that is the segment carrying the enforcement history.
There is also a liver-safety discussion attached to kava that responsible sellers address on the label whether or not any rule compels it. There is no federally mandated kava liver warning; the industry-standard warning exists anyway, and its absence from a package tells you something about the seller.
3. Kanna
Kanna is not federally scheduled, and we can find no FDA enforcement action against it.
The open question is legal basis. Whether kanna qualifies as a lawful dietary ingredient depends on either pre-DSHEA marketing history or a successful New Dietary Ingredient notification, and neither is verifiable from public records. Exactly one NDI notification for a kanna article appears in the public record, and FDA has not posted its response letter. Published accounts actively disagree about how it resolved: the ingredient owner's materials describe the process as completed, while trade coverage has reported the notification as unsuccessful, with the ingredient entering the market on self-affirmed GRAS instead. We treat obtaining that response letter as a buying gate rather than a detail.
There is also a documented potency problem. A substantial share of kanna-labelled products has been found to contain no kanna or only trace amounts. Generic "10:1 kanna extract" with no disclosed alkaloid profile is the format to be most sceptical of.
4. Functional mushrooms
The cleanest of the four. Lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, chaga, turkey tail and maitake are ordinary dietary ingredients with no scheduling question, no adverse listing, and nothing for payment processors to treat as a psychoactive-category risk.
The risk here is commercial fraud rather than law: mycelium-grown-on-grain products sold at fruiting-body prices can be substantially rice or oat starch, with single-digit beta-glucan content. The discriminating test is a certificate that quantifies beta-glucan and alpha-glucan separately — alpha-glucan being the starch. Very few brands publish that split. The ones that do are self-selecting for the kind of documentation this category needs.
5. The same shelf with new names
This is the category most surveys leave out, and the one a buyer should watch hardest.
Several brands that appeared on the kratom-free shelf after 6 July share corporate parents, addresses or manufacturing with 7-OH or MGM-15 product lines that are still listed in wholesale catalogues. That is not an accusation about any particular product's contents — it is an observable fact about who is selling what, and it is the sort of thing that should raise the documentation bar rather than settle a question either way.
Two other patterns we have logged since the notices: brands with no traceable corporate existence at all — no state registration, no facility registration, no locatable contact — and products whose label arithmetic does not reconcile with the measured unit weight on their own certificate. Both are ordinary consequences of a category reshuffling at speed.
What we declined to stock
Amanita muscaria. It is being pushed hard into the functional-mushroom channel. FDA has affirmatively concluded that it is a new dietary ingredient that does not meet the safety standard at FFDCA 402(f)(1)(B), and the agency has acted publicly against products containing it. Some states also restrict it under hallucinogenic-plant statutes. We screen every mushroom supplier for it.
Blue lotus. No New Dietary Ingredient notification has ever been filed for Nymphaea caerulea; it is not generally recognised as safe; and forensic testing of seized products sold as blue lotus has repeatedly found synthetic cannabinoids in the material. A kratom-derivative panel would not detect that adulterant class. We decline the category outright rather than pilot it.
Kava-plus-kratom combination products. Hard exclusion, no case-by-case review.
What the reshuffle did not fix
Changing the plant on the label does not change the analytical panel behind it, and the panels have not kept pace. The supplier certificates we hold substantiate three statements about the batches tested and no more: no kratom, no mitragynine, no 7-OH, at the reporting limits the laboratory used. Those results are real and we stand behind them.
Those same panels do not test for mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15, MGM-16 or corynoxine B. Three of those four are named in FR Doc 2026-13581, the notice with no threshold. A certificate cannot clear a compound it never looked for, so we do not describe anything we carry as free of them — and when you see "contains no scheduled substances" on a competitor's page, that is the sentence to check the panel against.
The right response to a category-wide analyte gap is to commission testing that closes it, not to write around it. That is the work in front of everyone selling on this shelf, us included. The broader map of the category is in our anchor guide to botanical blends, and the composition comparison is in botanical blends vs kratom.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did anything replace 7-OH functionally?
We are not in a position to answer that and would not, because it would require claims about effects for products with no comparative human evidence behind them. What we can describe is which categories moved into the retail space, and that is what this article does.
Are the new products legal?
Legality attaches to what is in a specific finished product under federal and state law, not to the plant on the front of the package. Uncaria tomentosa, Piper methysticum and Sceletium tortuosum are not named in either Federal Register notice. A product labelled with any of them that contained a scheduled compound would still be a scheduled product.
Why did the shelf change before the order took effect?
Because distribution runs ahead of enforcement. There is no sell-through provision in a temporary scheduling order, so holding stock through the effective date creates a disposal problem rather than a sales opportunity. Wholesalers reallocated on the 6 July publication rather than waiting for 5 August.
What single question separates a good new entrant from a bad one?
"Which analytes are on your panel?" Not "is it tested" — every brand says yes. The analyte list, the accreditation status of each line item, and whether the batch number on the certificate matches the package are the three things that actually vary.
Will the scheduling order be overturned?
A temporary scheduling order of this kind is not subject to judicial review. It runs two years and may be extended by one while permanent scheduling is considered. Planning on reversal is not a strategy.
These statements have not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. For adults 21+. Consult a qualified healthcare professional before use. Legality of any given product depends on its specific formulation and on applicable federal, state, and local law. Nothing here is legal advice.