Nick Pell

Opioid addicts aren't exactly known for having tons of disposable income.

Unless they're one of these high functioning heroin addicts that we talked about on the rehab episode.

That's right.

Yeah, we do have those.

You know, kratom's unregulated, so it's easier to get.

Comes with zero strings attached.

It helps with cravings, has a low overdose potential, moderate addiction potential, which again, we'll get into the weeds of a bit.

later but some people have an inherent distrust of conventional medicine or just don't want to be in the system some people i'm sure avoid treatment because they don't want to get you know judgy looks or tones from the doctor that they seek treatment from and whether or not a doctor is actually going to do that is irrelevant they're avoiding treatment because they think that they're going to experience that and then they can just go and to the gas station and get kratom

I mean, I just don't want people dying.

So I would way rather see them using Kratom than fentanyl or Oxycontin or anything that comes with a very high overdose risk.

There have been some, but not a lot.

There's a serious lack of long-term, large-scale, high-quality studies on Kratom.

Most of them rely very heavily on self-reporting or animal studies, which animal studies are kind of better than nothing, but not much.

Or they just compile surveys.

There's not a single blind or double blind placebo study that we have out there.

They mostly say what we've said already, which is that it's sort of an opioid and there's some risk of addiction with long-term abuse.

The chances of overdose were established, but they're very slim, provided that you're only using Kratom.

How slim is slim?

So an FDA analysis of studies running from 2011 to 2017 found one death that was maybe Kratom only.

A CDC study that ran from 2016 to 2017 found 152 deaths from Kratom, but seven of these 152 deaths were from Kratom only.