On August 30, 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced its intent to place the active compounds of the kratom plant into Schedule I — the most restrictive classification in American drug law, reserved for substances with "no currently accepted medical use." Six weeks later, in an almost unheard-of reversal, the agency pulled the proposal. Kratom is today a legal botanical sold in every state without a specific ban, and an industry that did not exist a generation ago now moves products through retail channels ranging from gas stations to wellness apps.
This did not happen by accident. It was the result of a specific set of moves, executed in a specific order, by a specific coalition of users, researchers, and lawmakers. The moves are documented. The timeline is public. The playbook is sitting there, in the regulatory record, for anyone willing to study it.
We believe the coca leaf is the next plant that playbook applies to. Here is what actually happened, and here is why it matters.
The plant nobody had heard of
Mitragyna speciosa — kratom — is a tropical evergreen tree native to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Laborers in those countries have chewed the leaves for generations as a stimulant for fieldwork, as a pain reliever, and as a home remedy for diarrhea and cough. Its active alkaloids, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, bind to opioid receptors but with a pharmacological profile meaningfully different from classical opioids like morphine.
For most of the twentieth century, kratom was unknown outside Southeast Asia. It began appearing in American specialty shops and online vendors in the early 2000s, initially as a curiosity marketed to ethnobotanical hobbyists. By the early 2010s, something unexpected was happening. People in the middle of the American opioid crisis — many of them trying to step down from prescription painkillers or heroin — were using kratom as a self-directed tapering tool. Others took it for chronic pain that their doctors either would not or could not treat. Others still used it as a mild stimulant, in the same way the original Southeast Asian laborers had.
An informal market emerged. It was unregulated, inconsistent, and sometimes problematic. But it was also, by the mid-2010s, supporting the daily use of several million Americans.
August 2016: the scheduling notice
On August 30, 2016, the DEA filed a notice of intent to temporarily schedule the two principal kratom alkaloids as Schedule I controlled substances. Temporary scheduling is a mechanism that allows the agency to bypass the normal public comment period and place a substance into the most restrictive legal category almost immediately.
The reasoning offered was familiar to anyone who has read a drug war press release: kratom was a "drug of concern," there had been reports of adverse events, and the agency was acting to protect public health. The announcement gave a target date of September 30 for the new scheduling to take effect.
The announcement landed like a bomb, but not in the direction the DEA expected.
The scheduling notice assumed kratom users were invisible. Within days, it became clear they were not. The miscalculation
The revolt nobody planned
What followed was one of the most effective grassroots responses to a federal drug scheduling proposal in the history of American drug policy. It was not organized by a single advocacy group. It was not funded by a pharmaceutical company. It was assembled in real time, by ordinary users, across a handful of specific channels.
Within hours of the announcement, kratom users were filling Reddit threads, Facebook groups, and comment sections with detailed personal accounts — people explaining, in their own words, what the plant had done for them. Veterans with PTSD. Chronic pain patients cut off from opioid prescriptions. Recovering addicts who credited kratom with keeping them off heroin. Office workers using it as a milder alternative to stimulant medications. Mothers. Nurses. Software engineers. A remarkable cross-section of the country showed up, essentially all at once, and said: this plant matters to us.
A White House petition calling for the DEA to withdraw the proposal crossed 100,000 signatures in under two weeks. Scientists who had been quietly studying kratom's alkaloids came forward to argue that Schedule I placement would foreclose legitimate research into what looked like a genuinely interesting compound class. And then — decisively — members of Congress got involved.
A bipartisan group of U.S. Representatives and Senators sent letters to the DEA questioning the scheduling decision and requesting that the agency take public comment before acting. These were not marginal figures. They included members of both parties and of influential committees. The message was unmistakable: the DEA had moved without political cover, and the political cover was refusing to appear.
October 2016: the withdrawal
On October 12, 2016, the DEA did something it almost never does. It withdrew its notice of intent and opened a public comment period. The public comment period received tens of thousands of submissions, the overwhelming majority of them opposed to scheduling. The substance was referred for further FDA review rather than placed into Schedule I.
Kratom remained federally legal. State-by-state battles would follow, and a handful of states did pass their own bans. But the federal scheduling — the move that would have ended the industry overnight — never happened. It has not happened in the years since.
Instead, something else happened: the kratom industry grew up.
From scheduling threat to consumer market
In the years after the 2016 withdrawal, kratom went through a quiet transformation. The products became more professional. Vendors adopted voluntary Good Manufacturing Practice standards. Trade associations formed, with the American Kratom Association lobbying state legislatures for consumer protection laws rather than prohibitions. Lab testing and product labeling became industry norms. Several states passed Kratom Consumer Protection Acts — laws that did not ban the plant but instead regulated it: age restrictions, purity standards, labeling requirements, prohibitions on dangerous adulterants.
This is an important distinction. The kratom movement did not argue that kratom was harmless. It argued that kratom was a substance that belonged in a regulatory framework rather than a criminal one — and then it did the work to build that framework, state by state, with the cooperation of legislators who might otherwise have voted to ban it.
By the end of the decade, kratom was being sold openly in smoke shops, specialty retailers, gas stations, and online. Liquid extracts, capsules, powders, and concentrated shots all appeared on shelves. Estimates of the U.S. kratom market vary widely depending on methodology, but every credible estimate puts it in the billions of dollars annually, with several million regular consumers.
A plant the DEA tried to schedule as having "no accepted medical use" is now, in functional terms, one of the most widely consumed botanical supplements in America.
The playbook, extracted
Strip the kratom story down to its essential moves and what remains is a repeatable sequence. It looks like this:
The kratom playbook
- Anchor the identity. Users need to be visible, specific, and sympathetic. Not abstract statistics — actual people with names and stories. Veterans, nurses, parents, pain patients, recovering addicts. The opposite of the faceless "addict" stereotype the drug war has spent sixty years constructing.
- Separate the plant from the panic. The public conversation must distinguish, clearly and repeatedly, between the plant in its traditional form and the worst-case extracted derivative. Kratom advocates did this by naming the alkaloids and explaining what they did. Coca advocates will have to do the same.
- Mobilize fast. Scheduling proposals are designed to move before opposition can organize. The kratom community responded within days because it was already connected through online communities. Infrastructure built before a scheduling crisis is what makes survival possible during one.
- Recruit the scientists. A single credible researcher willing to speak publicly about the legitimate therapeutic questions is worth more than a thousand anonymous comments. Kratom had that. Coca will need it.
- Find the bipartisan lawmakers. Drug policy reform does not break cleanly along left/right lines. Libertarian skepticism of federal scheduling, progressive concern about criminalization, and constituent pressure from unexpected districts can produce coalitions that surprise everyone.
- Propose the alternative. "Don't ban it" is not a position. "Regulate it like this, with these specific consumer protections" is. Kratom advocates did not ask for a free-for-all. They asked for a framework — and then they wrote the framework themselves.
- Build the industry responsibly. Once the scheduling threat is off the table, the work begins. Voluntary standards, lab testing, labeling, age restrictions, and bad-actor enforcement are what turned kratom from a regulatory target into a legitimate category.
Where coca is different — and where it isn't
The parallels are strong, but they are not perfect. It is worth being honest about where the coca story diverges from the kratom story, because the differences will shape the strategy.
What's the same
Traditional use. Both plants have centuries or millennia of documented traditional use among the populations that cultivate them. Both have well-characterized active alkaloids. Both are pharmacologically distinct from their refined, concentrated derivatives.
The distinction argument. The core intellectual move — "the leaf is not the powder" — works for coca in the same way "the leaf is not the extract" worked for kratom. It is the single most important point to communicate, and it is supported by real pharmacology rather than wishful thinking.
An existing user base. Millions of people in the Andes use coca daily and openly. This is not a hypothetical constituency. It already exists; it simply exists outside the borders of the countries that write the scheduling rules.
What's different
The international treaty layer. Kratom's fight was almost entirely domestic. Coca is regulated by a 1961 UN treaty that sits above any individual country's drug policy. Bolivia has shown that the treaty can be modified country-by-country with specific reservations, but the treaty itself is a structural obstacle kratom never had to overcome.
The cocaine shadow. Kratom did not have a refined derivative that had been the target of a forty-year drug war. Coca does. Every conversation about the leaf has to start by clearing the cocaine-shaped confusion out of the room before the actual argument can be made. This is a communications burden kratom advocates were spared.
The source country question. Kratom is grown in Southeast Asia but the regulatory battle was fought in the United States. Coca is grown in the Andes and the regulatory battle will have to be fought in multiple places at once — in Bogotá, in Washington, at the UN, and in the boardrooms of any pharmaceutical or wellness company considering a coca-derived product line. This is harder. It is also, potentially, a much larger opportunity.
Kratom's international ceiling is relatively low because the plant is legal at the consumer level in most of its major markets. Coca's ceiling is higher precisely because the treaty framework is so restrictive — once it breaks, the entire global therapeutics space opens at once. The barriers to entry that make coca reform difficult are the same barriers that would make the resulting market defensible.
What Colombia can do now
The kratom playbook does not have to be followed in a crisis. It can be followed preemptively, which is actually the better way to do it. Colombia is uniquely positioned to do exactly that.
The country has pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure. It has universities capable of running clinical trials. It has a current policy environment more open to rethinking drug classification than any of its neighbors. It has the agricultural base. And it has, sitting in its own constitution and in recent jurisprudence from its highest courts, a growing recognition that indigenous coca traditions deserve legal protection.
The move is not to wait for international permission. The move is to start building the inside of the regulatory house while the outside walls are still being negotiated. Standardized extracts. Published research. Quality-control standards. Clinical data. A transparent, honest, harm-reduction-centered consumer category that exists first within Colombia, then within the wider Andean region, and then — on the strength of its own credibility — internationally.
Kratom got from scheduling notice to consumer category in less than a decade. It did it with no state support, no pharmaceutical backing, and a starting budget of roughly zero. A plant with 8,000 years of traditional use, an entire country's manufacturing infrastructure, and a government willing to engage seriously with the science should be able to do better than that.
The playbook exists. The question is who picks it up.