Two sentences we will state once and not repeat. Kratom is not a treatment for opioid use disorder and it is not a treatment for opioid or kratom withdrawal; the medicines with an evidence base behind them are buprenorphine, methadone and naltrexone. And we sell botanical products for a living, so every clinical question raised below belongs with a clinician rather than with us, or with the person on your counter.
Listen to this article
Read by an AI voice. All ten questions and their search volumes are read aloud; the ranking table itself is on the page.
Your customers ask Google before they ask you, and Google keeps the receipts. Pull the question queries containing the word kratom, sort them by monthly US search volume, collapse the duplicates, and the top ten is the list of what walks up to your counter. This piece is that list, with the one sentence answer for each and the document that sentence rests on, because the second half of the counter script we published in September was the instruction not to improvise, and an instruction not to improvise is worthless without the lines.
A rule before the list. Every answer below has been written so that it is true, short enough to say while ringing someone up, and defensible if the person asking turns out to be a regulator, a journalist or a plaintiff's lawyer. Everything said at a counter is a record. Train the sentence, not the vibe.
Federal status on that date. Botanical kratom and mitragynine are not controlled substances under federal law. State and local law decide what you can sell. If that changes, this box changes first.
Sources. The NIDA kratom research page, March 2026. The DEA drug fact sheet, April 2020. FDA and Kratom, December 2025. The CDC overdose report, April 2019. Smith and colleagues, Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2022, and Journal of Addiction Medicine, 2024. The WHO Expert Committee on Drug Dependence, October 2021. The American Kratom Association, September 2026, for its own count.
The list, ranked
| # | The question, as searched | US searches a month |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is kratom | 99,000 |
| 2 | Is kratom addictive | 7,200 |
| 3 | Is kratom an opioid | 5,100 |
| 4 | Does kratom show up on a drug test | 3,300 |
| 5 | Is kratom legal | 2,800, plus a long tail of state versions |
| 6 | How long does kratom stay in your system | 2,800 |
| 7 | Is kratom safe | 2,300 |
| 8 | How long does kratom last | 1,900 |
| 9 | Can you overdose on kratom | 1,700 |
| 10 | Does kratom get you high | 1,400 |
Two things jump out. The first question is fourteen times the size of the second, which means most people arriving at your shelf for the first time do not know what the product is, and the person on the register is their first explainer. And six of the ten are safety questions in one form or another. Nobody searches "is coffee addictive" at that volume. Your customers are nervous about this category before they walk in, and the answers below are built for a nervous person who deserves a straight one.
1. What is kratom? (99,000)
What they mean: is this a drug, a tea, a supplement, or what. The DEA fact sheet gives you the opening line and it is a neutral one: "Kratom is a tropical tree native to Southeast Asia. Consumption of its leaves produces both stimulant effects (in low doses) and sedative effects (in high doses)". The active alkaloid that every certificate measures is mitragynine.
Why the last clause is in there: FDA's own page says "kratom is not lawfully marketed in the U.S. as a drug product, a dietary supplement, or a food additive in conventional food", and a shop that leaves that out and calls it a supplement has just made a marketing claim the agency says is unlawful. Say "not approved" and you have said the true thing.
2. Is kratom addictive? (7,200)
What they mean: am I going to get hooked on this. The reflex answer in this trade is no, and the reflex is wrong. The DEA fact sheet says "Kratom consumption can lead to addiction." The federal research institute is more careful and still does not say no: "Preliminary data from anonymous surveys of people who use kratom suggest a minority of people report experiencing kratom-related withdrawal symptoms and a smaller minority report experiencing substance use disorder symptoms related to kratom use." Regular daily use, tolerance, withdrawal on stopping, in a minority whose size is still being measured. That is the record.
The staff member who says "no, it's natural" has just given a health assurance they cannot support and the shop now owns it. The one who says "it can be" has quoted the DEA.
3. Is kratom an opioid? (5,100)
What they mean: is this the same thing as the stuff on the news. The honest answer has two halves and both are in government documents. NIDA: the main kratom compounds "activate mu-opioid receptors (specific molecular structures on the surface of nerve cells), but the resulting effects only partially compare to those of opioids like heroin or oxycodone." The CDC, in its overdose surveillance, writes: "Although kratom is not an opioid, overdose deaths involving kratom (including nonopioid overdose deaths) are included in SUDORS." Acts on opioid receptors; is not an opiate; effects only partly compare.
4. Does kratom show up on a drug test? (3,300)
What they mean: will I lose my job. This is the question where a shop most wants to be reassuring and most needs not to be. There is no primary source we can hand you that describes what an employer's panel screens for, because panels differ, and the one government line we have on detection is from the CDC's 2019 overdose report: "Identification of kratom is method-dependent". A test finds mitragynine if it is built to look for mitragynine. Whether a given employer's test is built that way is not knowable from behind a counter.
5. Is kratom legal? (2,800, plus every state)
What they mean: am I allowed to have this here. The search volume for this one is spread across dozens of "is kratom legal in" state queries, each of them small and together larger than anything except question one. The federal half is stable: the DEA fact sheet says "Kratom is not controlled under the Controlled Substances Act; however, there may be some state regulations or prohibitions against the possession and use of kratom", and as of the date in the box above that remains the position on the plant itself. The state half is where your license lives. The American Kratom Association, which is the trade body and counts for its own side, said on 11 September 2026 that "Delaware becomes the 22nd state to enact kratom consumer protections", and those acts carry labeling and age rules you are bound by. Several states have banned it outright; we wrote up what a ban week looks like on the shop floor in the counter script, and the same state can move from legal to banned in a fortnight.
Note the word "today". A counter answer about legality carries a date whether you say one or not, and the staff member who learned the answer in March is repeating it in September. Put a dated note by the register and change it when the law changes.
6. How long does kratom stay in your system? (2,800)
What they mean: question four again, with a calendar. Here is the uncomfortable finding from researching this piece: we could not locate a primary source, a government page or a peer reviewed paper, that states a detection window for mitragynine in urine in a form we would put in your staff's mouths. The numbers that circulate on retail sites are unsourced or sourced to each other. The published surveys measure how long the effects are felt, which is a different question and is answered under number eight. So the counter answer here is a refusal, and it is the right one.
7. Is kratom safe? (2,300)
What they mean: tell me it is fine. No official body will, and neither should you. FDA says it "has warned consumers not to use kratom because of the risk of serious adverse events, including liver toxicity, seizures, and substance use disorder". NIDA says "Researchers have not proven kratom to be safe or effective for any medical purpose". The most favorable official document in existence is the World Health Organization expert committee's 2021 review, and even that only concluded that "there is insufficient evidence to recommend a critical review of kratom" and that it should "be kept under surveillance". Not banned internationally, not declared safe by anyone. The word "safe" should not leave your counter.
That answer moves the customer from a promise you cannot make to a document you can show, which is what the lab results page is for. A shop that cannot produce a certificate for what is on its shelf has no second sentence.
8. How long does kratom last? (1,900)
What they mean: when will I feel it and when will it stop. This one has a real answer. In the 2022 Frontiers in Pharmacology survey of 129 adults with regular use histories, "82.9% reported typically beginning to feel kratom's effects within minutes", and "Nearly all (91.5%) reported that they typically stopped feeling kratom's effects within hours". Minutes to start, hours to finish, for almost everyone who answered.
9. Can you overdose on kratom? (1,700)
What they mean: can this kill me. Do not say no, and do not say it kills people; both are wrong by the numbers. The CDC report cited above looked at 27,338 overdose deaths in 27 states over eighteen months and found kratom detected in 152 of them, listed as a cause in 91, and "the only substance to test positive" in seven, with the caveat that "the presence of additional substances cannot be ruled out". Fentanyl was listed as a cause in 65.1 percent of the kratom positive deaths. NIDA's framing: "fatal overdose from kratom use alone is extremely rare", and "nearly all cases involved other drugs or contaminants". The risk in the record is mixing, and the person mixing is usually mixing with an opioid.
10. Does kratom get you high? (1,400)
What they mean, depending on the customer: I hope so, or I hope not. The one study that measured it in a clinic is Smith and colleagues in the Journal of Addiction Medicine, January 2024: ten regular users took their usual morning dose under observation. On the question "Do you feel high?" the mean score was 15.2 out of 100 at 40 minutes; on "Do you feel intoxicated?" it was 4.8. Mild euphoria showed up in "at least" three of the ten, in the authors' own conclusion. "Psychomotor performance did not reliably improve or deteriorate post-dosing." A typical dose in a tolerant regular user, in other words, is not much of a high, and the study says nothing about a first timer or an extract.
The eleventh question, which they ask you in person
"How much kratom is too much in a day" is searched 700 times a month, which puts it just outside the ten, and it is the one your staff hear most because a person holding a product asks the person selling it. There is no published ceiling. The Frontiers authors write that "There is no peer-reviewed research about safe or effective dosing of kratom", and their own data found that the gap between a dose people called effective and one they called a bit too much averaged under two grams of leaf. A shop that prints a daily maximum has invented it, and a shop that says "as much as you want" has said something it will hear read back to it.
Three words that get a shop in trouble
Read back through the eleven answers and you will notice what none of them contains. "Safe": no regulator has approved this product and FDA warns against it, so the word is a claim you cannot back. "Non-addictive": the DEA says consumption "can lead to addiction", and a shop contradicting the DEA on a health point has picked a fight it loses in one email. "Treats", "cures", "helps with": FDA says kratom "is not lawfully marketed in the U.S. as a drug product", and every one of those verbs makes it one. The staff member who avoids those three and says the eleven sentences above has never made a health claim, never made a legal claim, and never promised anything the shop cannot produce a document for.
What to do with this
Print the eleven sentences on one sheet, put it by the register, and have every new hire read them aloud before their first shift, the same way you would a returns policy. Put a dated legality note beside it and change the date when the law changes. Keep the certificate for every SKU where it can be shown in under a minute, because three of the eleven answers end by pointing at it. Ours are on the lab results page for every batch we ship, and if you are looking at stocking the category, the wholesale application is where that starts; our earlier piece on wholesale kratom for retailers covers what to demand from any supplier, us included.
The reason to bother is not that the questions are hard. It is that each one arrives with a customer who has already searched it, already read a page that said "safe" or "non-addictive" or "totally legal", and is now asking you to confirm it. The shop that confirms it has adopted somebody else's sentence as its own. The shop that answers from the list above has said less, and every word of it is true.
Disclaimer: this article summarizes publicly available material as of 21 September 2026 and links to primary sources so you can check them. Search volumes are third party estimates and change monthly. It is general business information, not legal or medical advice, and no substitute for counsel in your jurisdiction or for a clinician. The counter answers are suggested wording; adapt them to your state's labeling and age rules. Statements about botanical products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and no product is intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
