Kratom has hundreds of years of safe human use. The reason is that it contains both a partial opioid agonist and a full antagonist, so it has a built in ceiling effect. I’ve seen several people use it to kick dope, and it’s cheaper and safer than buprenorphine.
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Many substances are considered safe until they’re not. There used to be folk remedies based on tobacco.
In the countries that traditionally used Krakom, the life expectancy has increased by 50% or more in the last half-century. (In PNG that expectancy was just over 30 in 1950!) Even if this isn’t due to replacement of folk remedies like Kratom with safe and effective modern medicine, it does mean that for most of those “hundreds of years” people didn’t live long enough for the drug’s harm to fully reveal itself.
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Sorry. There are I few things I need to address:
‘Anaphylactic’
LD50 refers to the dosage that will kill 50% of the population in which the substance is being tested.
Plants in the US and worldwide can and are trademarked. The ENTIRE ornamental horticulture industry is ruled by who holds the breeding patent and collects the royalties.
I’m not a medical professional, just a horticulturist and all of these topics were covered in my undergrad studies.
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Hit and run spammer I guess
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spamming the idea of kratom is kinda meta, probably someone who walks wheelchair to the vans and does a lot of kratom with a superiority complex
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Sorry for the late reply!
I probably shouldn’t have commented at all, because I don’t know how to talk about this without getting into several related conversations about structural issues and I’m frankly exhausted at the prospect. Suffice it to say that there are several well-staked positions around kratom and they’re all populated by people who are incentivized to emphasize certain aspects and gloss over others. The upshot, for me, is that it’s saving the lives of desperate, vulnerable people who are being squeezed between late capitalism and the carceral state.
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Just to be clear, you came on this widely-read forum, identified yourself as a certified expert (“medical professional”), and made assertions about the safety of a substance which are, if false, very dangerous assertions indeed. Several of us wondered what “medical professional” means, you haven’t answered that, which suggests that it is a misleading identification. The published scientific literature, available to anyone through pubmed, supports the probability that Kratom is dangerous, but you dismiss that literature with the word “incentivized”, a tired rhetorical cudgel wielded by faith healers and supplement merchants when attacking science-based medicine.
Meanwhile, like so many “natural medicines” Kratom is far from inexpensive, and the peddlers of this ophidian lubrication are surely “incentivized” to downplay its dangers and exaggerate its benefits.
Now, it might be the case that for some people some dose of Kratom, given under a doctor’s supervision, might be better than whatever they would otherwise be taking. It would certainly be cheaper and safer than buying it from a head shop or health food store store. I’m not a big fan of banning botanicals, even though so many of them are really quite dangerous despite being “natural”. However, the current channels through which this stuff is sold have no regulation at all, and frankly the I’m pretty impressed that “evil big pharma” manages to get so many medicines to me, complete with scientific study and governmental regulation, for so much less than a questionable supplement from GNC or Herbs R Us.
You’re making a lot of assumptions. I am by no means a medical expert.
I was specifically trying to avoid this morass of already well worn debates - among the pantheon of BB! saints, I’m closer to Robert Anton Wilson than Terence McKenna, if that clarifies anything - in order to specifically talk about kratom as it looks in the day to day lives of people who use it.
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