MAHA Furious as Kennedy Moves to Ban Their Medicine: Gas Station Heroin
The Make America Healthy Again movement is in meltdown after their figurehead, Robert F. Kennedy Jr initiated a crackdown on one of their favorite psychoactive drugs: kratom.
Disparagingly known as "gas station heroin," kratom is an herbal extract known for its opioid-like effects, namely relieving pain and inducing euphoric feelings. For now, it's sold completely legally in most states, and kratom supplements have become a billion-dollar industry in just a few years, remaining largely unregulated and embraced by the bro-y alternative medicine crowd who get their health advice from podcasts and Reddit. You can find them easily available as gummies, soft drinks, and pills at vape shops and gas stations, despite their long term effects on human health being unknown.
Now, Wired reports, the uncertainty around the drug's effects is causing a rift in the MAHA crowd, many of whom have championed kratom. Adding to the divisiveness of the debate is that pro-kratom figures often want to ban supplements that contain kratom's chief active ingredient, 7-hydroxymitragynine, or 7-OH. As their argument goes, many "kratom" products are really just 7-OH products that contain dangerous amounts of the substance, and that true kratom is safer.
"This is a chemically manipulated, full-blown opioid that is now in the marketplace," Mac Haddow, the senior public policy fellow at the American Kratom Association, a kratom industry lobby group, told Wired. "They masquerade as kratom products."
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/maha-furious-kennedy-moves-ban-164808522.html
Brain worm prefers the real thing.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and a touch of 7-OH, aka 7‑hydroxymitragynine. It's a little addictive if you take a lot of it, for along period of time. Not gonna lie.
But the "kratom products" referred to here, like gummies, drinks and pills, are made of *concentrated* 7OH. I don't even know if what's being sold in this form is even actually extracted from kratom itself to begin with. Maybe so, but it hardly makes a difference to your body either way.
7OH, no fucking joke, is literally every bit as euphoric, and addictive, as at LEAST hydrocodone, and maybe even oxycodone. And it's being sold in head shops and even gas stations across over half of US states, including plenty of blue ones. It's not even banned in CA (or AZ).
Mark my words: This is going to result in near-Sackler family level destruction wreaked upon the country. And the makers of this shit are probably all in the Far East, and nobody's going to be able to extract billions of dollars in damages like they did from Purdue. At least in the OC days, you couldn't just go buy it at the freaking gas station.
Personally I'd say leave Kratom LEAF alone. But 7OH? That ain't Kratom. It's a VERY tiny component of it, when used in its natural form. When concentrated, it becomes A HIGHLY addictive one. A fairly perfect analog here is coca leaf vs. cocaine. So, pretty much everyone in this article is speaking truth, and even Brainworm is kinda right (on this ONE thing), if he's seeking to ban concentrated "kratom products" like 7OH.
BTW, I think around 15 states have banned kratom (and by extension 7OH), to the point that in some, it's Schedule 1, and a felony to even possess. Alabama is one of them, funnily enough. Not like that state to be ahead of the curve 