Philadelphia City Council on Thursday passed a pair of bills aiming to further tighten rules on smoke shops selling unregulated drugs.
One piece of legislation defines kratom and hemp-based THC as “intoxicating substances” requiring a special permit for retail sale in much of the city, while also implementing testing requirements and age restrictions.
A related bill empowers the city to penalize landlords who rent commercial space to smoke shops operators that lack proper licensing.
“For too long these illegal, unregulated, and harmful products, like kratom, have been sold in our city with little oversight or safeguards,” said Majority Leader Katherine Gilmore Richardson, who sponsored the bills.
The kratom-specific bill attracted fierce resistance from the makers of these drug products. The kratom industry flooded Council’s chambers in recent months with advocates, lobbyists, and public relations firms in an effort to thwart what amounts to a near-ban on the sale of the substance in Philadelphia.
In earlier hearings, these groups argued the bill improperly lumped in natural kratom — which is a plant native to Southeast Asia — with synthetic derivatives like 7-Hydroxymitragynine, also known as 7-OH or “gas station heroin” due to its addictive potential. They also questioned Council’s ability to regulate other substances in ways that may be superseded by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Both bills passed unanimously on Thursday after undergoing amendments to address some of the the concerns. The amendments removed topical products from the ban and created a framework for legal sales of certain products that gain FDA approval in the future.
Still, the final versions rankled kratom sellers.
Craig Katz, government relations and compliance manager for CBD Kratom, a retail chain that operates three stores in Philadelphia, criticized lawmakers for failing to sufficiently distinguish between heavily-synthesized 7-OH and so-called “natural leaf” kratom.
“I find it very disconcerting that the city of Philadelphia will ignore this kind of stuff,” he said. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Regulation is the way to go. A ban does not work.”
Katz noted that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week advanced efforts to authorize clinical trials examining the kratom-related alkaloid mitragynine as a potential therapy for opioid addiction.
Katz is among the kratom industry lobbyists who say they are fine with banning ultra-potent derivatives of the plant but have implored state and federal lawmakers to continue to allow the sale of naturally occurring products, citing medical and therapeutic benefits.
State lawmakers in Harrisburg are considering legislation that could ban or heavily regulate kratom-related products, while Congress has set a November date to ban many hemp-derived products.
The Philadelphia Police Department has focused enforcement efforts on illicit fentanyl and has neglected to intervene at smoke shops that openly sell illegal marijuana, kratom and other unregulated substances, like psilocybin.
The new legislation from city council is at least the eighth set of regulations Gilmore Richardson has introduced aimed at cracking down on the smoke shops that have blossomed around the city, sometimes in open defiance of city regulations and enforcement efforts. The companion bill that passed Thursday — targeting landlords who continuously rent to smoke shop operators — is a tacit acknowledgement of these frustrated efforts, which sometimes saw one smoke shop shuttered only for another to open in its place.
Gilmore Richardson said the latest bills aimed to close those gaps.
“With this legislation, we are taking meaningful steps to protect residents, increase accountability, and ensure that bad actors can no longer operate unchecked,” she said in a statement.
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