Is Kratom Legal in Louisiana?

What law bans kratom in Louisiana?

Act 41 of the 2025 regular session, which began as Senate Bill 154. Senator Jay Morris filed it, the Senate passed it 26 to 11, the House passed it 89 to 5, and Governor Jeff Landry signed it on June 4, 2025.

The act did four things in three pages.

It added 7-hydroxymitragynine and mitragynine to Schedule I of the Uniform Controlled Dangerous Substances Law.

It created a new section, R.S. 40:966.1, headed unlawful possession, production, or distribution of kratom. That section exists for kratom and for nothing else.

It added the Mitragyna speciosa tree to the state’s list of prohibited plants at R.S. 40:989.2, so growing it is covered alongside having it.

It repealed R.S. 40:989.3, the older provision that made it a crime to distribute kratom to a minor. Distribution is now a crime whoever it goes to.

Where did Louisiana put kratom in its drug schedule?

Under Miscellaneous, which is a heading no other banned state used.

Louisiana’s Schedule I is broken into lettered groups, and kratom’s two main alkaloids went into group G. Before Act 41 that group held exactly one substance, tianeptine. It now holds three: 7-hydroxymitragynine, mitragynine and tianeptine, in that order.

The heading was not the first plan. As Senator Morris filed it, the bill would have added kratom to group E, Stimulants, which is where Wisconsin files its two alkaloids. The Senate committee moved it to Miscellaneous before the bill was engrossed.

That’s worth sitting with, because banned states do not agree on what kind of substance kratom is. Arkansas files both alkaloids as opium derivatives, in the same short list as heroin. Kansas files them as opiates. Wisconsin files them as stimulants. Vermont files them as hallucinogenic drugs. Louisiana declined to answer the question at all.

In most states the answer decides the penalty. In Louisiana it decides nothing, because the legislature wrote a penalty section of its own rather than routing kratom into the general Schedule I penalties. The next section is that statute.

What does the ban cover?

The plant and the two compounds, and either half is enough on its own.

R.S. 40:966.1 defines kratom as any substance derived from the leaves of the Mitragyna speciosa tree, or any substance containing 7-hydroxymitragynine or mitragynine. Powder, capsules, tablets, extracts, drinks and tea are inside both halves of that definition.

Compare it to Arkansas or Kansas, where the schedule names the compounds and reaches the leaf through them. People read those lists, notice the plant is absent, and conclude the leaf is fine. Louisiana closed that door in one sentence and then closed it again by putting the tree on the prohibited plant list.

The Schedule I entry carries one carve-out and it is narrow. The listing does not reach a substance contained in a pharmaceutical product approved by the Food and Drug Administration. No such product exists.

What are the penalties for kratom in Louisiana?

Every amount is a crime. What the amount changes is what the crime costs you.

Possession of twenty grams or less carries a fine of not more than one hundred dollars and no jail. It is a criminal conviction all the same. Above twenty grams, a first conviction carries a fine of not more than five hundred dollars, up to six months in the parish jail, or both. A second or later conviction doubles the fine ceiling and keeps the six months.

Production, distribution, and possession with intent to distribute are graded by aggregate weight. Under five hundred grams carries one to three years, with or without hard labor, and a fine of up to fifty thousand dollars. Five hundred grams or more carries one to five years and the same fifty thousand ceiling.

Two things in that section are worth reading twice. The distribution range starts at one year rather than at zero, so a minimum is attached to it. And the possession line sits at twenty grams, which is under an ounce, so the smallest powder bag we sell is already over it.

You’ll see up to five years in prison reported as the penalty for kratom in Louisiana. That figure is the ceiling for distributing five hundred grams or more. It is not what possession carries.

There’s a business layer as well. The Louisiana Department of Revenue announced that establishments licensed by the state’s Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control may not sell or store kratom on their premises. That reaches a great many of the shops that were selling it.

How did Louisiana get here?

In three moves across six years, and the middle one is the move nobody writes about.

In 2019 the legislature scheduled kratom’s two main alkaloids on a condition. They would become controlled substances if and when the federal Drug Enforcement Administration classified them. The agency never did, so nothing happened for four years.

In 2023 Senate Bill 94 repealed that conditional listing outright. As it left the Senate, the bill would have put a flat Schedule I listing in place of the condition, which is to say a ban two years early. The House took that out. What passed instead, as Act 416, made it a crime to sell kratom to anyone under twenty-one and created a Part of the law titled the Local Option for Mitragynine Speciosa, giving any parish or municipality express authority to prohibit or restrict kratom for itself.

So for two years Louisiana ran an age limit at the state level and left everything past it to local governments, which is closer to how most states handle kratom than to how banned states do. Then Act 41 put a statewide crime in place of the patchwork.

Could Louisiana’s ban change?

A bill to narrow it has been filed, and it has not moved.

House Bill 778 of the 2026 regular session would have reopened both the Schedule I entry and R.S. 40:966.1 and rewritten the prohibition around synthesized kratom rather than the plant, with chemical limits and a two-gram line. Representative Beryl Amedee prefiled it on February 27, 2026. It was referred to the House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice on March 9 and was never taken up. The session adjourned on June 1, 2026 with the bill sitting in committee.

Amedee had tried once before. She offered a floor amendment when the ban itself was on the House floor in 2025, and it was rejected.

Louisiana has never had a Kratom Consumer Protection Act. The next regular session convenes at noon on April 12, 2027. If a bill moves then, the legislature’s own site shows it first. Not a store’s website. Ours included.

Can you order kratom online in Louisiana?

No. The law applies where you are, not where the seller is. Once a package crosses the state line, Louisiana law is what applies to it.

We do not ship to Louisiana. No kratom company that follows the law does.

Is kratom legal in the states around Louisiana?

In two of the three. Texas and Mississippi allow it at the state level. Arkansas does not, and has not since 2016.

That makes the drive east out of Texas the one that catches people out. Kratom is legal in Texas and it’s a crime in Lake Charles, and a state line is the only thing between the two.

Crossing into Louisiana with a lawful purchase is possession in Louisiana. The law reaches you where you are, not where you bought it. Traveling with kratom covers what that means on a drive and in an airport.

Can a parish or city in Louisiana make it legal?

No, and Louisiana is the clearest case in the country of why not.

The Local Option for Mitragynine Speciosa remains on the books at R.S. 40:1300.61 and following. It gives parishes and municipalities express statutory authority to act on kratom. Read on its own, that looks like local control.

It runs one direction only. The authority it grants is the authority to prohibit kratom, or to regulate it more strictly than state law does. There’s no version of it that permits what the state forbids. A parish that wanted kratom back would need the legislature, the same as everybody else.

There’s no reliable way to track every local rule in the country, and we are not going to pretend there is. If you’re reading this from another state, check your own city and county first.