7-OH: A New Drug, A Big Decision

There’s a new, popular drug that some people use for health and others for recreation. People can become addicted to it, so there’s certainly potential for harm.

What do we do with it?

This is the question before us with a product commonly called “7-OH.” Although it’s been on the market for less than two years, consumers nationwide spent an estimated $2 billion on 500 million doses in 2024.

So what do we do with 7-OH?

There is obviously significant demand for 7-OH, but also significant pushback, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., holding a press conference encouraging the DEA to schedule it as Schedule 1 under the Controlled Substances Act.

Schedule 1 is reserved for drugs with high abuse potential and no accepted medical benefit. Categorizing a drug as Schedule 1 effectively bans manufacture, sale, and use, and makes research nearly impossible.

But is banning 7-OH the best path forward, even if it can be harmful? Or could regulating a legal market for it actually lead to less harm?

Since most people report using it for pain management and relief from opioid withdrawals, it’s important that we get 7-OH right. Life and health are on the line.

What is 7-OH?

7-hydroxymytragynine is a natural compound found in kratom leaves. It’s then concentrated to a higher potency than naturally occurs, and is packaged into over-the-counter supplements and sold as 7-OH.

Why do people use 7-OH?

Certainly some people use it recreationally, but the nonprofit 7 Hope Alliance conducted surveys where 87% of consumers reported using it for relief from opioid withdrawal symptoms. Many others reported using it for pain management or to manage their health in other ways.

Where is 7-OH sold?

7-OH suffers from some of the same challenges that natural leaf kratom (much lower potency) does, in that there is no federal regulation of it. So in many states today, it can be sold in gas stations, and there are no age restrictions or testing requirements. This is a unique opportunity to pause and consider the potential outcomes of banning a substance versus regulating it.

Let's say 7-OH is banned nationwide. What happens?

1. More Crime

There’s already a huge consumer market for 7-OH, so it won’t disappear if it’s banned. It will just move underground, handing yet another lucrative drug market to anyone willing to break the law to get the consumer cash. Remember, there’s already $2 billion to be made annually. Where there is demand, there will always be supply. Banning 7-OH nationwide will financially incentivize crime.

2. More Contamination

If 7-OH is pushed underground, all regulation goes out the window. If you think it’s the wild west now, just wait until there’s no regulation at all – no potency or purity guidelines, no testing, no age gates. Banning 7-OH will ensure that it becomes contaminated (yet another drug to add fentanyl to) and far more harmful to people’s health.

3. More Incarceration

If we arrest people for possessing 7-OH, we will be risking the destabilization of families, jobs, housing, etc. Whether a person is using 7-OH recreationally, medically to treat a health condition, or because they’ve become addicted to it, arrest and incarceration tend to accelerate a downward spiral.

Let's say 7-OH is legally regulated nationwide. What happens?

1. Market Control

A legal market allows for manufacturing and sale to be regulated and taxed. It’s the only way to control where it’s sold and who can sell it, along with packaging, labeling, and testing requirements.

2. Product Control

A legal market is the only way to have quality control over the products people consume. It’s the only way to keep fentanyl out of 7-OH.

3. Consumer Control

A legal market is the only way to set age restrictions so youth can’t purchase 7-OH. It also ensures that adults won’t be arrested just because they’re using it, while continuing to enforce laws against harming other people.

There are people who claim 7-OH has helped them break free from opioid addiction, people who claim it has finally given them freedom from chronic pain, and people who claim it has destroyed their lives. I believe all of them.

So What’s the Answer?

The question isn’t whether or not a drug can be harmful. The question is how we can best reduce the potential for harm.

The legal gray area 7-OH resides in right now is not good. You can see why here. Just keep asking yourself how prohibition fixes these problems. It doesn’t.

Regulation is what imposes law and order and gives us a measure of control.

What are your thoughts?

We would really like to hear what you think we should do with 7-OH. If you’ve been impacted by it in some way, we’d be honored to hear your story. Just contact us at our webform here.

Which path should we take?

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The Givers That Keep on Giving

When Carlie Brockmann was 15 years old, her family became a foster family. That was the first time Carlie had been exposed to people struggling with addiction.

Although she had grown up thinking of people who use drugs as bad people, she saw in the parents of some of her foster siblings people who loved their children very much but couldn’t figure out how to stop using drugs.

It helped her rethink her assumptions and feel compassion for the deeper pain behind a person’s substance use.

A few years passed, she went to college, and she met Ethan. They got married ten years ago, the same year we met Joanne. A few years after that, they attended one of our local events, and Carlie remembers:

“It was the first time I’d seen anyone doing work like this. Most people won’t have an experience in the foster care system. Once you see how [a punitive response to drugs and addiction] is playing out, it’s hard not to change your mind. We wanted to support End It For Good so more people could have that experience.”

Ethan and Carlie just celebrated FIVE YEARS of monthly giving to End It For Good! We are blown away!

Ethan took the mathematics degree he earned at Mississippi State University and put it to work in IT Data Science, while Carlie spends her days pouring into their three young daughters.

In many ways, they’re a typical young family with all the stresses and commitments that come with that. But they made a choice to invest in this cause – to pay an experience forward – and make a choice every month to continue.

Would you join them?

Click here to set up a recurring donation by selecting “Monthly” under the “Frequency” heading. Even small amounts make a big impact, especially when you blink and five years of faithful giving has flown by!

One of the resources that was most helpful on Ethan’s learning journey was the book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. It was also a significant part of and End It For Good’s launch.

And we've got a free copy for you!

When you sign up to become a monthly donor at any amount, we’ll send you a free print copy of Chasing the Scream.

We’re in this together, growing this movement person by person, heart by heart, mind by mind.

Will you join them by helping more people have the opportunity to learn?

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Recovery Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All

A message came in last week from a mom who is, in her own words, “desperate for a good resource” for help for her son who struggles with addiction. He’s been to treatment numerous times in multiple states but hasn’t found a path that has worked for him yet.

There are so many families in this situation.

We often tell people that the very first goal is helping a loved one stay alive. If that’s all they do, that’s a huge win with the overdose crisis from contaminated drugs still raging. But if a person is alive and open to help, what’s next? It might be medication, Neuro-Electric Therapy, psychedelic therapy, or just a free mutual aid group.

About mutual aid groups...

When people hear “mutual aid group,” most assume that means Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s understandable because they’re celebrating their 90th anniversary this year! But AA is actually just one of many free mutual aid groups available. Here are a few others:

  • Women for Sobriety – Only open to women, focused on helping them overcome addiction by becoming the 4 Cs – Capable, Competent, Caring, and Compassionate.

  • SMART Recovery – A secular option based on principles from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), and founded on the belief that individuals have the power within themselves to change. 

  • LifeRing Secular Recovery – It doesn’t include any component of higher power or faith, instead using a 3-S model, which stands for Sobriety, Secularity, and Self-help. 

A long-term study was done comparing success rates for AA as well as the 3 mutual aid groups above. What did it find?

All four groups had comparable outcomes. 

It wasn’t important which group a person chose. It didn’t matter if it was secular or faith-based, single-gender or co-ed, 12-step or not.

Faith can certainly be an important part of a person’s recovery journey, but it’s crucial that access to health and recovery support isn’t dependent on it. People can find recovery in a secular context just like they can in a faith-based one.

Why does this matter?

Because people struggling with addiction are real people, with personalities, belief systems, past experiences, and preferences. 

If someone is not interested in faith but thinks their only option is faith-based recovery, then letting them know about SMART or LifeRing could be the difference between sobriety and death. 

If they’re a woman who feels crushed by introducing themselves in a group meeting as “an addict,” they might find a path to healing through Women for Sobriety, where attendees introduce themselves instead as “a competent woman.”

A healthy community is not built with just one tool for recovery. We need a full toolkit and people like you and me sharing all the options so that more people can find the one that works for them.

We need less focus on which tools people use and more encouragement for them to try what might help them the most.

Where we've been...

A few weeks ago at the Pro-Life Mississippi Summit, Christina Dent led a session on helping pregnant women struggling with addiction. She shared about multiple pathways to recovery and how offering more tools and less fear around medical care is far more likely to help moms and babies be healthy.

Be part of the solution…

If you’re curious about other ways to support someone you love who’s struggling, check out our latest episode of the End It For Good podcast with author and national recovery advocate Caroline Beidler. She turns the idea of “tough love” on its head, replacing it with “extravagant love” shown in ways you might not expect.

It’s unclear whether the woman who reached out last week has a strong support network where she lives, but she got connected to Pattie Vargas, who lives in the same state as her son and was on a recent podcast episode of ours.

This is the beauty of getting to see some of the outcomes of this work. As people are connected to each other and new ideas, resources are shared. Tools spread. Hope grows.

If you know someone who needs to know about more free options for recovery groups, send them this blog post.

If you're not yet a supporter of End It For Good, would you join this movement of life and health?

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How do we keep kids safe from parental drug use?

Earlier this month, Christina Dent took a trip with her husband to celebrate 20 years of marriage. Just before she left, she spent an hour recording a podcast episode with Dr. Lisa Stanton, who holds a PhD in Social Psychology.

On the episode, Lisa is incredibly vulnerable about her struggle with alcohol addiction, among other drugs. Even though she had earned the nickname “blackout Lisa” among close friends, she hid her addiction from most people behind incredible professional success and accolades. She opens up about relapse, sobriety dates, and how her family responded when she admitted she hadn’t been honest with them.

If you’re questioning your own substance use or struggling to love someone through relapse, Lisa has encouragement for you.

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Two Big Questions About Drugs and Families

As Christina wrapped up on her last day of work before the trip, the very last email she opened before shutting her laptop down was from a woman she’ll call Charity. Charity had gotten a copy of Curious the day before and stayed up late to finish it.

Charity shared some of her story as a woman who grew up in the conservative Christian homeschooling community like Christina did, is a foster mom like Christina was, and has been on a journey of learning as well.

Then she asked two questions that are really crucial, and we think the answers might interest others too.

Charity’s first question was:

If we don’t criminalize drugs or criminalize people for possessing them, how do we keep children safe? Could we still check on them and intervene if there’s evidence of abuse or neglect because of their parents’ drug use?

A resounding yes. If there’s evidence of abuse or neglect, no matter if the parents are using drugs or not, we need to check on those kids.

In the same way that we don’t assume all parents who drink alcohol are abusing their kids, though some do, we shouldn’t assume that all parents who use other drugs are abusing their kids.

Nor should we assume that abstinent parents aren’t abusing their kids. Nothing that End It For Good advocates for would prevent the child welfare system from investigating evidence of abuse or neglect, full stop.

Charity’s second question was:

Should there be a line between drug use and actions as a result of drug use that endanger others?

Another resounding yes. Just like with alcohol use, we distinguish between a person’s choice to drink (legal) and their choice to put others at risk by drinking and driving (illegal). We need those same categories to extend to other drugs. Just because we don’t arrest someone for drug possession doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be arrested for public drug use, driving under the influence of drugs, assaulting someone, etc.

Charity closed her email by thanking Christina for giving her not just things to think about but things to do to be part of the solution.

If you’re close to Jackson or Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on Thursday nights, come to a local chapter meeting and be part of the solution in person!

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Why We Resist Addiction Treatments That Work

Christina Dent started on one end of the classroom and went down each row, giving every grad student a chance to share their thoughts on the presentation she had just given.

One student said something that she would never forget.

As the student shared what she had learned about the root causes of addiction and why incarceration tends to make it worse, she said, “It’s kind of like a child is holding a teddy bear and we’re beating them over the head for it.” Addictions of all kinds provide a way to feel better, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

Photo of students and Christina teaching
Christina giving her presentation to grad students

What that student was doing is something humans are desperate to do: connect something unfamiliar with something familiar.

As much as we might want to be open-minded, all of us tend to struggle with embracing new ideas.

Christina’s friend Lura Forcum has a Ph.D. in Consumer Psychology and writes a fantastic Substack called How to Human about why people think the way they do. Her most recent piece explains that the easier something is to understand, the more likely people are to believe it.

But addiction and recovery are complex, so we have to push past “simple” and look for “effective,” even if it means new and different.

It’s possible that the human tendency to resist new ideas is at the heart of why so few of us have heard of Neuro-Electric Therapy for addiction treatment. That’s why End It For Good chose to do a 4-part podcast series on it, interviewing:

  • Pattie Vargas, who crossed the country to find help for her daughter.
  • Jeff Lott, who works for NET Recovery.
  • Mark LaPalme, who brought NET into Isaiah House, the network of Christian treatment centers he founded in Kentucky.
  • Rebekah Mutch, Pattie’s daughter, who found sobriety through NET.

If you only have time for one, listen to Rebekah tell her story of new life. It’s incredibly inspiring.

The challenge is that NET is unfamiliar. And humans tend to resist unfamiliar things.

So, what do we do when we encounter unfamiliar ideas to overcome our natural tendency to discard them? Lura has some great next steps:

  • Spend some time thinking about whether it seems factually inaccurate versus unfamiliar.
  • Suspend judgment and spend some time getting familiar without making a ruling on good/bad, true/untrue, pleasing/displeasing.
  • Try to get some mental distance from the idea, for example, by imagining yourself looking back on it in a few years’ time (research shows this can make us less critical).

Sometimes we can link a new idea to something we’re already familiar with, like the way a teddy bear comforts a child. And sometimes we have to put in a little extra mental work and create new categories in our minds.

Additionally, you can check out more of Lura’s work at How to Human, share innovations in addiction treatment through this opinion piece by Christina Dent that was just published in The Clarion Ledger, or spend a little time listening to the 4-part series on NET on our podcast.

The only path to new ideas becoming mainstream is for more of us to push through the discomfort of the unfamiliar and:

  1. Become familiar
  2. Invite others to become familiar

What step will you take today?

Unprecedented drop in overdose deaths!

Shortly after writing our last blog post, the CDC released provisional data showing overdose deaths declining by almost 27% in 2024! For years, we lost more and more people every year, and now we’ve seen a significant drop, which is fantastic. What caused it?

The short answer is, we don’t have a clear picture yet. The longer answer is that numerous factors are working together, including expanded access to harm reduction tools.

The term “harm reduction” has become polarizing if you watch the news, but it’s helpful to remember that we all use harm reduction every single day in many areas of our lives.

Imagine taking a beach trip with your family, for example. Hopefully you’ll wear seat belts on the drive down. You might use sunscreen at the beach. If there’s a shark sighting, you’ll quickly get out of the water. Driving, sun exposure, and water are all risky activities. Instead of banning them all, society has embraced harm reduction for them.

Harm reduction is just reducing the risk of risky activities.

Fentanyl testing strips were thought, just a few years ago, to encourage drug use. Now it’s widely accepted that they’re a common-sense way to reduce harm, by allowing people to test the drugs they’re about to use. Strips save lives.

The opioid overdose reversal medication naloxone has saturated many areas now. You can even find it in Costco pharmacies in suburban Mississippi. Again, this doesn’t encourage drug use, it just offers a way to reduce harm and save lives.

Here in Mississippi and in other states, we’ve expanded access to Medication-Assisted Treatment, including telehealth options. Our State Health Officer, Dr. Dan Edney, just joined us on the End It For Good podcast to talk about harm reduction, MAT, and his commitment to these strategies because … they work. The benefit is in the name. They reduce harm.

Even while we’re celebrating the great news that far fewer people died of overdose last year, we still lost over 80,000 people. Eighty thousand families are grieving. Eighty thousand futures have been lost.

The day after the CDC released its provisional 2024 data on the decrease in overdose deaths, James Moore, a local businessman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, switched out the flag on his flagpole and flew a purple one at half mast in memory of a young woman in their community who lost her battle with addiction.

The work is far from over.

New drugs hit the streets all the time, and as long as we refuse to allow regulated markets for many popular drugs, they will be contaminated, potent, and sold with no age restrictions. We can celebrate what harm reduction is doing while still working to solve the root causes of the problem.

That means more people need to know why punitive approaches increase harm, and why health-centered ones can decrease it. We don’t want to just bring awareness to the problem of drug-related harm generally. People already know! What they don’t know is why that harm exists.

We all have the capacity to educate the people around us.

Come join us on Facebook or Instagram – we make it easy for you to share small snippets of hope with your circles of influence.

Thank you for being part of this movement! There is no quick fix, but there are solutions, and the only way to bring them about is one step at a time. It is an honor for our team to partner with you to take as many of those steps as we can, as quickly as possible, to protect more lives and families.

Learn. Share. Give. Together the movement grows.  

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The Episode that Flooded Our Inbox

You know that feeling – when you say or do something and then think, “Oh my, that was vulnerable…Maybe I should take it all back!!” 
 
It’s the feeling you have when you’ve gotten out on the skinny branches and your knees begin to knock together. Vulnerability is where connection and growth happen, but it’s scary!
 
Christina Dent has given many podcast interviews on behalf of End It For Good, but the episode she just did on the foster care-focused Forgotten Podcast ended with a vulnerability hangover.
 
If you know End It For Good’s origin story, you know that Christina was a foster parent for several years and was changed by Joanne, the mother of her foster son. If you missed the End It For Good podcast episode with Joanne as the guest, sharing her story, it’s beautiful.
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After The Forgotten Podcast aired, our inbox overflowed with feedback like this from listeners who range from curious to all-in on our message:

“I was just listening to your interview on The Forgotten Podcast and definitely sobbing hearing you talk about Joanne’s love for her son. Thank you for sharing that. It was a good reminder for me as we head back into visits for our foster baby.”
 
“Definitely needing this information and encouragement as we hope for reunification for our kiddos whose parents are struggling with addiction.”
 
“As a foster parent, I so appreciated all that was shared. The statistics, the beautiful stories, the encouragement.”
 
“As both a foster parent and foster care agency worker, this topic resonates deeply.”
 
“I am a foster/adoptive mama of a baby born with drug addiction and I love what you are doing. Such a powerful message.”
 
“I found this episode of the forgotten podcast so relatable to the current placement we have and relating and trying to support his parents!”
While the work of End It For Good is much broader than improving outcomes for children and families touched by child welfare because of drugs, it’s still an important part of our work. 
 
May is National Foster Care Month. In honor of that, do you know a foster parent, social worker, or someone who works with children touched by the child welfare system? 
 
Joanne’s story will bless them, and The Forgotten Podcast is part of The Forgotten Initiative, an incredible nonprofit with so many resources for people touched by that system. 
 
If we want better outcomes for vulnerable children, we absolutely must focus on better outcomes for their parents. Since the majority of children in foster care are there because of a drug-related removal, we have to engage on the issue of drugs and addiction.
 
The heartbeat of our mission is people, not drugs. If you care about people, you’re in the right place as we get curious, have respectful dialogue, and find a better path forward together. 

Learn. Share. Give. Together the movement grows.  

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Fentanyl is Not an Immigration Problem

Ten years ago, most Americans had never even heard of fentanyl. Today, it drives an overdose crisis that takes nearly 100,000 lives every year. We can do better. But only if we’re honest about the problem—and bold enough to change course.

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