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Fourteen Months Of Federal Action Did Not Stop This Company. A Scheduling Order Did It In Two Days.

By The Kratom Council ·

Rows of sealed cardboard cartons on steel warehouse shelving under a single lamp, with an empty wooden pallet on the concrete floor.

When the Drug Enforcement Administration placed mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, MGM-15 and MGM-16 into Schedule I on August 26, this publication reported what the order covered and what it did not. Two days later the largest known producer of one of those compounds destroyed roughly 10 million dollars of product.

CBD American Shaman, based in Kansas City, confirmed the destruction. Its owner, Vince Sanders, told reporters that his company produces the majority of the mitragynine pseudoindoxyl sold in the United States.

What makes the two days worth examining is what preceded them. This was not a company that federal regulators had failed to notice. It had been under escalating federal action for fourteen months, and had continued producing throughout.

The Federal Record Before August 26

The sequence, by date, as reported and as recorded in public federal documents:

On June 25, 2025, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to Stephen Vincent Sanders II, chief executive of Shaman Botanicals LLC, an affiliate of CBD American Shaman. The letter concerned chewable tablet products marketed as containing 7-OH. One of the products named in it was labeled as containing pseudoindoxyl, fourteen months before that compound entered Schedule I. The agency's position was that these compounds cannot lawfully be added to dietary supplements or conventional foods.

A voluntary nationwide recall of one of the tablet lines followed.

In November 2025, FDA investigators made unannounced visits to two facilities in the Kansas City area.

In December 2025, the United States Marshals Service, working with the FDA and the Justice Department, seized roughly 73,000 units of 7-OH products valued at about 1 million dollars from three Missouri warehouses, including facilities operated by Sanders. The seizure complaints, filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, alleged that two Kansas City area firms had continued distributing the products after being warned by the FDA that they were unlawful. Those are allegations in a civil forfeiture proceeding and have not been established as findings.

Only then did the state arrive. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway sued American Shaman in March 2026, directing the filing particularly at 7-OH products, which she described as hazardous opioids. That characterization is the state's, made in litigation, and this publication reports it as the allegation it is rather than adopting it. By early June the company had agreed to suspend sales of 7-OH within Missouri.

The federal scheduling order came on August 26, 2026. The destruction followed within days.

Which Instrument Actually Moved The Inventory

Laid out that way, the sequence answers a question the trade has been arguing about all year.

The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act route ran for fourteen months. It produced a warning letter, a recall, unannounced inspections, and a seven-figure seizure executed by federal marshals. Production continued through all of it. Whatever those actions accomplished, they did not close the operation.

The Controlled Substances Act route produced roughly 10 million dollars of destroyed inventory inside a week of taking effect.

This publication has reported that the next enforcement cycle looks like an FDA matter rather than a DEA one, because the agency has rejected the research-use disclaimer that shielded four previous waves, and no molecular change routes around that rejection. This case does not overturn that, but it qualifies it in a way worth stating plainly. On the evidence here, the FDA route is the one that reaches conduct a scheduling order cannot, and the scheduling order is the one that stops a production line. They are not substitutes, and the second is considerably faster.

That distinction matters for what happens when the 7-OH threshold order publishes. It has been pending since July. When it lands it will convert a large number of products that are currently the subject of warning letters into products that are the subject of a controlled-substances prohibition, and the record here suggests that changes behavior on a different timescale.

What Concentration Means Here

This publication has traced the twenty-year pattern that produced 7-OH: a controlled substance is scheduled, chemists adjust the molecule, and a new product reaches the same shelves under a new name. That cycle worked in the Spice era in part because supply was distributed. Many small manufacturers sourced research compounds from many suppliers, and no single enforcement action reached more than a fraction of them.

A market where one company says it makes most of a compound does not behave that way. A single scheduling action reaches most of the supply at once, and the decision about what happens next sits with a small number of people rather than dozens of independent operators. That is a materially different enforcement posture from the one the trade spent two decades learning to route around.

The market-share claim is Sanders' own, made to reporters. This publication has not verified it and has no way to measure the pseudoindoxyl market independently. It should be read as what the largest known producer says about his own position, which is useful and is not the same as an established figure.

Destroyed, Not Diverted

The destruction is the second documented instance this publication has recorded of a company leaving the category in an orderly way rather than quietly moving product. The first was the retailer notice covered in our report from the CHAMPS trade show, in which a seller told customers directly that a product had been withdrawn because the compound in it had entered Schedule I. This is the same shape at manufacturing scale, with a number attached.

What it does not establish is what the company does next. Destroying inventory of a newly scheduled compound is the lawful course and says nothing about whether a business intends to reformulate, exit, or contest the scheduling. Any of those remains available. This report records what happened to the inventory and does not extend it into a prediction.

What The Federal Order Says It Is Aimed At

The Justice Department stated when the order issued that the action was directed at deliberately manufactured and concentrated opioid products rather than at traditional botanical kratom. That framing has been consistent across the federal actions this publication has covered since July, and the August order's structure matches it: it reached three manufactured compounds and did not reach 7-OH itself, which remains federally unscheduled while the separate threshold order waits.

The manufacturer disputes the premise. Sanders has publicly defended pseudoindoxyl's medical value and disputed how readily it produces dependence. Those are claims made by the producer of a compound now in Schedule I, they have not been evaluated by any regulator, and this publication does not reproduce or endorse them. They are noted because a report on this company would be incomplete without recording that its owner contests the characterization the scheduling rests on.

Allegations, Not Findings

The companies are named here because every matter described is public: an FDA warning letter published by the agency, a recall notice, civil seizure complaints filed in federal court, a state attorney general's filed action, and the company's own statements to reporters.

None of it has been established as a finding of wrongdoing in a court. A warning letter is the agency's stated position and not an adjudication. A civil forfeiture complaint contains allegations that remain to be proven. An agreement to suspend sales in one state is not an admission. The August scheduling order is a scheduling action rather than an enforcement proceeding against any company, and this publication is not aware of any federal criminal charge against this one.

The Number Is The Point

Ten million dollars is the first hard figure this publication has been able to attach to the August 26 order, and it arrived from the company itself within two days.

Scheduling actions are normally reported in terms of what they prohibit, because that is what the document says. What they cost, and to whom, usually surfaces later and in fragments, if at all. Here the cost surfaced immediately, and it is roughly ten times the value of what federal marshals carried out of three warehouses nine months earlier.

That ratio is the most concrete thing in this story. The same government, acting against the same operation under two different statutes, produced a seven-figure seizure that did not halt production and an eight-figure write-off that did.

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