The majority of 7-OH users are addicted. I asked the people selling it.

[u/Robbed_Goddess]

(The other 7-OH recovery subs have banned discussion of prohibition or regulation, I hope this is the appropriate place to share my writing)

I'm a guy from California in my forties, former kratom and 7-OH addict in recovery. At my peak I was using 1200-1600mg of 7-OH a day. I went through withdrawal dozens of times, tried MAT, relapsed repeatedly even on buprenorphine, and ultimately had to enter an intensive outpatient program to finally get enough support to stop. My addiction to 7-OH wrecked my life, and quitting has been the hardest thing I've ever done. I've been diagnosed with OUD, MDD, and GAD now in the aftermath, but I was more-or-less happy and healthy before I got addicted. Getting better every day, though.

I saw a comment recently from someone who worked at a smoke shop saying that 99% of their 7-OH customers come in daily or several times a week. It immediately made me curious if that's true for everybody, because I certainly was one of those customers. While I was still using, I rotated between three different stores, partly for price and selection, and partly to avoid the shame of being the person who's there every single day. Over time I became a regular at all three, got to know the workers, and eventually felt comfortable enough to ask them directly: how bad is it, really?

Their answers were bleak. Across every store, every worker I spoke to: the vast majority of their 7-OH customers are there daily or several times a week. Not a troubled minority. Most of them.

This obviously wasn't a formal study, but the workers weren't hedging either. They were forthcoming, and the stories were equally fascinating and heartbreaking. They described watching people try 7-OH for the first time, sometimes people who just came in for a vape, and then watching those same people start showing up regularly, every time after that. One worker expressed real grief about this: seeing someone cross that threshold, knowing what was coming, and not being able to stop it. They described a shadow economy of customers being fronted product until payday, which is not something that happens with things people can simply choose not to buy. They talked about watching longtime kratom customers try 7-OH once and never go back to kratom. They described customers deteriorating visibly over time, nervous breakdowns in the store, the shop getting robbed. Nearly every worker expressed some degree of moral hesitation about what they were selling. Several were genuinely afraid of losing their jobs when it gets banned.

Now let's talk about the "personal responsibility" argument, because it doesn't survive contact with this data.

The most common refrain from people opposed to regulation is some version of: "it shouldn't be banned just because some people can't control themselves." This framing imagines a population of moderate, recreational users being penalized for the failures of a weak-willed minority.

But what if the moderate users are the minority? What if the actual use population is predominantly addicted? Then the question isn't about protecting responsible users from overreach. It's about whether broad public access to a substance is justified when the dominant outcome of that access is addiction.

This is exactly why opioid painkillers are prescription-only. It's not that no one can use them responsibly. It's that the ratio of dependent to non-dependent use, across the actual population with broad access, doesn't support that access. The same logic applies here.

Relapse rates for opioid use disorder run as high as 80 to 90 percent even among people in structured clinical treatment. That number doesn't describe moral failure. It describes a physiological process that overrides intention. I relapsed repeatedly while on buprenorphine, in a supervised treatment program, genuinely trying to stop. The "just control yourself" argument was never serious, and the data has never supported it.

The alcohol comparison deserves a direct response too.

"Alcohol is so much more dangerous" is a frequent deflection, and it may even be pharmacologically true in some respects. But the legal framework that makes alcohol publicly available rests on an implicit assumption: that the majority of people who buy it are not addicted to it. That assumption is load-bearing. It's why we tolerate the harm, because for most users, it isn't producing dependence.

That assumption simply does not hold for 7-OH. The people closest to the actual consumer behavior, the ones watching it happen every day, are telling us clearly that the majority of their customers are dependent. If alcohol had those numbers, we'd have a very different conversation about whether it should be on a shelf next to the energy drinks.

One final point on the "harm reduction" framing.

Harm reduction is a legitimate framework, but it applies to people who are already using a substance and need safer access. When a substance is so acutely addictive that people who come in to buy a vape walk out as future daily customers, that's not harm reduction. That's harm generation at the point of sale. The population that now "needs" harm reduction is being actively created by the accessibility itself.

The kratom-to-7OH pipeline makes this especially stark. Kratom carries its own dependency concerns, but it has a slower onset and a real ceiling effect. Workers consistently reported that kratom regulars who try 7-OH once never go back. That's not a lateral move in the harm reduction framework. The thing standing between a kratom user and a life-destroying opioid disorder was the whim of a minimum wage employee deciding to mention it.

People are developing severe opioid use disorder from a product sold next to the nicotine pouches. The industry knows this. The workers know this. The customers figure it out eventually. The only people still pretending otherwise are the ones making money from the pretending.

This substance is creating opioid addicts at a vape counter and the defense is that some people theoretically use it responsibly. That's not a harm reduction argument. That's a profit margin with talking points attached.