About 10 years ago, when it was less well-known, you could find better raw leaf powder and it was helping people get off actual opiates.

IIRC there's an effect where the actual chemicals get stronger for older leaves. The bigger market has caused the harvest period to shorten, making the powder worse quality, and creating room for the concentrated extracts and stuff like 7-Oh.

Tragedy of the commons I guess. I knew people who started taking way too much, but also people who were able to use it responsibly. People say "let doctors prescribe", but that ignores how in order for that to happen, a pharma company will need something they can patent, pay for the years of testing, get sole control over it for a period, and years later a generic can come about. All when you can dry a leaf and use it as-is. There should be room for plants to be consumed. Screw it, enjoy poppy, cannabis, kratom, tobacco, etc.

It probably shouldn't be sold in gas stations but it probably also shouldn't be outright banned, as we'll just get new, more dangerous analogues.

This time AKA is lobbying FOR this ban, as 7oh gives kratom a really bad name.

Fun fact, this is one of two """temporary""" opioid schedulings happening right now. The DEA is also banning 5,6-Dichloro Desmethylchlorphine (SR-17018), which has minimal to no recreational value and is the current most promising breakthrough therapy for opioid withdrawals. It is hard for me to read the combination of these two bans as anything but active malice.

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/07/01/2026-13...

So I felt a little adventurous and I headed down to the "head shop" on the corner, and I picked up a pocket scale, and a bag of the Kratom variety that was touted as alleviating pain. The Kratom itself was powdered and unmeasured, so I also picked up a batch of "dime bags" and I carefully weighed out the Kratom in 500mg packets, so that each dose would be precise.

So I started taking it, and sadly my pain was never mitigated or alleviated. In fact, I began suffering some really unwholesome adverse effects, but I continued taking the Kratom, in a spirit of experimentation, and surely it would eventually hit me, the way my body was trained to react to smoking cannabis.

But that never happened. So I discontinued it. Looking more deeply into the Kratom section of my new book, I discovered that I had probably got the wrong variety of Kratom, the one that had only adverse and undesirable effects. Even though I had been careful to discern what type was being sold.

So, I suspect that it was mislabeled. And I suspect that that was not an accident. And I did not churn through the other varieties, hoping to find the one that would "work on me" because I suspect that it was all a trap, for naïve student types. They probably didn't carry "the good kind" at all.

So I left a bad review for the "head shop" and I've never returned. The pocket scale worked pretty good for weighing letters and other small mailpieces, though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLObpcBR2yw

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/public-health-focus/fda-and-...

I’m not fully cognizant of the interaction between FDA and DEA, but I would’ve thought that following FDA’s announcement last year, kratom had already been outlawed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on:_The_Professional

I mean, considering that drugs and the war on drugs was only tangential to the storyline of this film, Besson succeeded in catching all viewers in a morally conflicted web. Can anyone identify the "good side" or innocents in this story?

Then, fuck all the kratom vendors that absolutely irresponsibly market their products.

I've used kratom for 10 years for pain management and it was my best option at the time.

Drugs should not be illegal -- they should be regulated, for purity and for truth in advertising (in the case of kratom making it crystal clear that addiction is inevitable with regular constant use.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRZqHzDG_c8

Downvoters must not know that when the DEA says they're temporarily banning something they mean permanently