It was about a year ago that Jonathan Paolini, a nurse practitioner and director of medical operations with Crossroads Treatment Centers, first started noticing patients coming in seeking help for addictions to kratom and its synthetic derivative, 7-OH — and, since then, that population has only grown.
While it’s unclear how many people nationally are using both substances — estimates for use of the herbal substance kratom from over a million to as many as 20 million people, while the Food and Drug Administration notes that 7-OH is too new for reliable estimates — clinicians have noticed growing mentions by patients, and a recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that kratom-related poison control calls were about 13 times higher in 2025 than in 2015.