On September 21, two University of Mississippi students were found dead on the same day: 18-year-old freshman Aidan Hamilton was found in his dorm room in Stewart Hall, and 20-year-old junior Robert Strang was found dead at an off-campus residence. Investigators found the same product next to both of them — tablets labeled "SMAX Pseudo-DHM." According to the New York Post, court records show both had purchased the tablets in the days before they died, and the investigation has now been running for ten days.
Court documents released Monday detailed what the two were doing in the days before they died. Hamilton's purchase records show he bought SMAX tablets three times at Puffs Vape Tobacco and Beer in Oxford — on September 9, 14 and 20, the last trip the day before he was found dead. Strang bought the same product at Express Mart #7 in Yalobusha County on September 9 and 11. Investigators said Hamilton "could have died due to a pulmonary edema," a condition consistent with a drug overdose; Strang was found "cold to the touch" when first responders arrived. But the documents also stress a crucial caveat: toxicology tests are incomplete, and purchase records alone cannot prove either student took the tablets before death, let alone that the tablets caused it.
In a statement released Wednesday, the Lafayette County Metro Narcotics unit both called on state lawmakers to ban synthetic kratom and walked back its earlier warning. "That warning was not a declaration that kratom or any specific substance caused either death," the statement read. "It was a proactive effort to inform the public of a potential danger while investigators worked to determine the facts." In other words, the only conclusion officials can offer right now is that there is no conclusion yet: until the toxicology reports come back, no one can say what role SMAX played in the two deaths.
The details from the Puffs shop are striking. According to court documents, a confidential informant walked into the store and asked whether it sold "7-O kratom pills." A clerk pulled a package from a drawer beneath the register, told the informant to keep quiet about it, and warned them to be careful taking the pills — because "people were dying from them." In the raid that followed, police seized more than 500 units of kratom products along with THC cartridges, gummies and other suspected narcotics. Two employees, Yahya Mohamed Mosleh, 51, and Islam Mohamed, 18, were arrested and charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute. Notably, the shop's owner, Amer Alowdi, was indicted on narcotics trafficking charges in 2022 and fled the United States. Kratom has been banned for sale in Oxford since 2019 — a ban that plainly failed to keep these products off the shelves.
On September 29, the American Kratom Association issued a statement calling on every news outlet covering the story to "correct the record": SMAX Pseudo-DHM is not natural kratom. Publicly available marketing describes the product as a high-potency MGM-15 product. The Drug Enforcement Administration has placed MGM-15 and MGM-16 in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act; the Justice Department calls them highly potent opioid compounds presenting an "imminent hazard to public safety," and the Department of Health and Human Services has confirmed these compounds do not occur naturally in the kratom plant — they are chemically manipulated derivatives of 7-OH. "If law enforcement knew the specific product involved, Ole Miss students should have been warned what product they needed to be concerned about," said Mac Haddow, the association's senior fellow on public policy, "instead of being broadly warned about 'kratom' when the product was not kratom at all." A former prosecutor cited by Fox News added that selling synthetic opioids disguised as kratom is itself "unlawful."
The story is now stuck on two waits. The first is the toxicology reports — only they can answer whether SMAX was the killer. The second is legislation: the narcotics unit has publicly urged state lawmakers to ban synthetic kratom outright. For parents and students, the most practical warning may be the one caught on the record from that shop clerk: the colorfully named "herbal supplements" on gas-station and smoke-shop shelves may not be herbal at all.