So it’s rated as less dangerous than the “safer” drug (heroin) that was introduced to replace it?
That’s ironic.
ETA: I’ve been informed that heroin was intended to replace morphine rather than cocaine; still, as morphine is also a Schedule II drug, I think the irony remains intact.
I just read one of the foot-noted studies from the Wikipedia article. It seems that kratom is just another drug, worse than some, better than others. It’s not simply a harmless herbal supplement. Here’s the link, if you’re interested:
New Drugs of Abuse Authors Megan A. Rech, Elisabeth Donahey, Jacqueline M. Cappiello Dziedzic, Laura Oh, Elizabeth Greenhalgh First published: 4 December 2014
More research is certainly warranted, and the DEA’s ban is symptomatic of a much bigger problem in our country. But it’s important for people to recognize that kratom contains real chemicals that produce a variety of effects on the human body, and some of those effects may be undesirable or dangerous.
Diethyline glycol in drugs, radithor, hydroflouric acid, …
Important information from Andras Varadi, one of the lead researchers on a recent scientific study of kratom:
“As one of the lead authors on this manuscript (J. Med. Chem. 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00748), I would like to point out that mitragynine pseudoindoxyl, unlike morphine, did not show reward (addiction) in the conditioned place preference model in mice. We also observed that upon chronic dosing, it took mice 30 days to become tolerant to mitragynine pseudoindoxyl – that is approximately 6-times longer than it took to develop tolerance to morphine under the same conditions. And when mice finally became tolerant, we observed only mild withdrawal after giving a dose of the opioid antagonist naloxone. We believe the advantageous side effect profile of mitragynine pseudoindoxyl may be the result of the unique pharmacological attributes of the molecule. Firstly, it is an agonist on mu opioid receptors (very much like most of the opioids used in clinical practice) but at the same time, it antagonizes delta receptors. Secondly, mitragynine pseudoindoxyl acts as a G-protein biased agonist on mu receptors, recruiting no beta-arrestin-2 upon activation. Mu agonism/delta antagonism and G-protein bias have been shown to reduce the severity of opioid side effects, however, mitragynine pseudoindoxyl is the first compound known to exhibit the combination of these two effects.”
You can read the study at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00748?source=cen
I love (no I don’t) seeing the phrase ‘drug-free’ on natural-sourced supplements. Any compound, rigorously tested and verified as clinically effective (read: not by the manufacturer), is a drug. It might not be legally recognized as a drug, but it’s a drug. Anyone who wants to quibble with this, google ‘digitalis’.
The natural world has been an industrious synthesizer of what are now considered medically essential compounds. But no responsible clinician or clinical researcher believes that its creations are somehow safer than those synthesized in a lab. Every compound of clinical interest, regardless of source, must be tested for efficacy and safety.
The core problem with making M. speciosa Schedule I is that it introduces all sorts of red tape for researchers who want to learn more about the pharmacology of its components. If one of its opioids does, in fact, impose fewer (or less severe) side effects at the same dose equivalence of other opioid medications, that would be a great lead for pharmaceutical developers.
The more over-arching problem illustrated by this whole fiasco, however, is that we—as in modern society—need an effective, non-opioid medication, STAT.
In a way this is good news. (Sarcasm intended) It means that some bio-med company has been researching the plant for a while and is now at the point of trying to extract the useful compounds in a way that will allow them to patent their “invention” and release a new addiction recovery product. This is just their way of slamming the door on the competition.
And it better not let you have any fun at any dose because that’s an instant Schedule I.
I fully expect to have the following conversation when I’m ~70 years old:
Youth: So the doctors said you had…what again?
Me: ADD. Attention deficit disorder. An old-fashioned term. Today, you’d be diagnosed as having pre-frontal hypodopaminergia. Somewhat related.
Youth: [blank stare]
Me: [chuckles] Maybe not quite. It’s complicated. There are about twelves times as many brain cootie diagnoses these days.
Youth: So, how did they treat it?
Me: Well, at that time there wasn’t really any cure so they just prescribed maintenance therapy. Medication and counseling.
Youth: What kind of medication?
Me: Amphetamine, usually.
Youth: Wait, what?
Except if it’s alcohol, since alcohol must not be Scheduled, ever. Because that War on Drugs didn’t work, but this War on Drugs will end differently.
I used Kratom extract daily for a few months, after a work injury. It kept me going at work, relatively pain-free but not at all muddled mentally. And, I won’t lie, it did help me feel better about the shitty job I had.
I did find my brain looking for reasons to take more, it had a creeping possibly-habit-forming quality to it some days. But, as soon as I left that job, my desire for it just evaporated, which I’m sure would not have been the case if I had used pharma opiods all that time.
Just my experience…
I was thinking this too, also last night when the NPR reporter described it as a coffee relative. A friend listening with me replied to that “But it’s related to coffee! Why schedule it?”. I explained that the Rubiaceae are basically the Asteraceae of the tropics. Not sure that clarified things any.
Some of those drug free alternative medicines are exactly that. Nothing. It’s a bunch of random crap ground up into dust and served as medicine.
Homeopathic remedies advertise themselves as drug-free, which is probably the only instance of honesty you’ll get from that industry.
I am pretty sure heroin was invented to replace morphine, not cocaine, although morphine is also schedule II. The relevant phrase is “no accepted medical use” – that is the difference between schedule I and schedule II, which are both considered to have high potential for abuse. Until relatively recently, cocaine was still used medically with some frequency, although there are now usually better alternatives and there has been an effort to discourage its use and reclassify it as schedule I.
Thank you for the correction. I’ll edit my post to note that.
I am confident we are just a few more bans from winning this thing!
For people using this line of argument, I put it to them this way:
If is a cousin of [Y], then Charles “The Hammer” Martel is my uncle.
The real punchline is that my relation to Martel is, time-wise, still orders of magnitude tighter than that between M. speciosa and C. arabica.
So, though no real evidence either way exists, we are prohibiting a substance because it has no medical value.
NPR had an interesting story about Kratom yesterday. DEA says schedule 1 because deaths. Less than 20 of them. Automobiles kill more people in a day!
And where can we sign to petition the ban on the DEA’s war against humanity
