American Shaman sold ‘gas station heroin’ 4 times more potent than advertised | Opinion
One of the first things you learn covering gas station drugs — as I have for the past year — is that there really aren’t any adults in the room making sure the stuff is safe. The regulatory barriers that govern almost every other consumable product simply don’t apply to these products.
The reason that drugs more potent than morphine can be sold at the corner store alongside beef jerky and batteries traces to a 1994 federal law called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act, or DSHEA, that allows products such as vitamins, herbal supplements and other compounds to be sold without the kind of premarket approval that’s required for prescription medications.
It is, in many ways, an open invitation for bad actors. Scammers, hucksters and sloppy operators thrive in this space because nobody is checking their work before it hits the shelf. There’s no routine testing required to ensure that the label on the package reflects what’s actually in the product.
So it was not exactly a surprise to learn that CBD American Shaman, the Kansas City-based company that has built a business around a potent kratom derivative known as 7-hydroxymitragynine or 7-OH, issued a voluntary recall of its products in February due to mislabeling. The feds have been looking closely at the company, as evidenced by their seizure of some of its products last fall.
More surprising were the details about that recall, which surfaced earlier this month in a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway.
Hanaway’s lawsuit seeks to stop the company from selling its 7-OH and related kratom products in Missouri. The state argues that American Shaman misled consumers about what it was selling. As one piece of evidence, it points to the February recall and provides numbers that weren’t included in the Food and Drug Administration’s public notice.
According to the AG, the company recalled about 112,835 units — more than 3.2 million pills — of its Advanced Alkaloids product, the 7-OH line sold at its retail shops.
The reason? Testing showed the tablets contained more 7-OH than advertised.
A lot more.
The label said 7.5 milligrams per tablet. The pills actually contained about 34 milligrams — more than four times as much, and more than double the maximum the company says a person should take in a day.
According to documents the company submitted to regulators, the recalled products were manufactured over nearly two years, from April 2024 to February 2026.
The attorney general’s office told me it obtained those figures from Shaman through records produced in response to a civil investigative demand issued last year.
7-OH and addiction
On its face, putting four times more of the active ingredient into a product than advertised might seem like bad business.
The compound itself is the active ingredient, so higher potency likely increases production costs. It also creates inconsistency — customers can’t reliably dose or predict effects — which is typically a problem for any consumer product. And for a company of Shaman’s size and scale, it leads to exactly what happened here: a large, expensive recall and legal exposure.
But there’s another, darker way to look at this.
Stronger pills produce stronger effects. With a substance like 7-OH that acts on opioid receptors, that can also mean faster tolerance and dependence. Users need more, sooner, to get the same result. A product that hits harder can speed that cycle and bring people back more quickly. Over time, that can translate into higher sales that outweigh the added cost of putting a little more 7-OH into each pill.
Only American Shaman founder Vince Sanders and a few employees at the company know how or why this mislabeling occurred. Maybe American Shaman is so incompetently run that it simply missed a major quality control failure for nearly two years. The company hasn’t said much beyond a blanket statement that it takes Hanaway’s lawsuit seriously, and its attorney didn’t respond Friday to questions about the recall.
On Tuesday, a judge will hear the state’s request for a preliminary injunction to prohibit American Shaman from selling its 7-OH products in Missouri while the case proceeds. If the state succeeds, Missourians won’t have to wonder whether Shaman’s pills match the label. They won’t be on the shelf.
