Congress isn’t just considering banning it “just because”. There’s certainly a ton a lobbying money (ie bribes) by big pharma to make sure this un-patentable drug can’t cut into their own profits on painkillers. Kratom simply doesn’t have the lobbying power to make it a legal drug.
I wonder how much of its effectiveness in moderating addiction comes from the fact that the active ingredients have not been isolated and available in concentrated form. Already, people seem to be studying different strains. Is it only a matter of time before it becomes abused?
Having no first-hand experience with addiction, opioids, or kratom, I am skeptical since many of the article's subjects remain daily kratom users, often with increasing supply. Keeping it affordable with more socially mild symptoms allows these people to live functional lives. But it seems that the goal is not to attempt abstinence. Why?
Abstinence for its own sake is frankly not all that useful to society. Harm reduction is a much more important goal.
Millions of Americans are hooked on coffee and have withdrawals if they don't drink it, but nobody's up in arms about our caffeine dependence, precisely because it has very little in the way of social harms associated with it. If we can convert drug use with huge social harms (e.g. heroin, oxycontin) into drug use with negligible social harms (e.g. kratom), that would basically solve the opiate crisis.
In my mind the goal isn't to stop people from using opiates-- it's to stop them from dying, committing crimes, and running their lives into the ground due to opiates.
A positive step, to be sure. It sounds like further study is warranted, especially once the active ingredients in kratom are isolated and concentrated. The coca leaf was used for millennia, but became socially harmful in its concentrated form.
Well, and uh, the part where it's an opioid that can be addictive that is wholly unregulated and being sold by any number of vendors online that are sourcing the product from god only knows where and selling it as a safe supplement.
You are absolutely right. If they do ban it, isn't it just going to go the way of pot and be grown in basements, etc.? I don't know if this is harder to grow than pot or not.
