MAHA Furious as Kennedy Moves to Ban Their Medicine: Gas Station Heroin [View all]

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.