Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer, and researcher, Nick Pell. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Chapter 2: What is Kratom and why is it controversial?
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Today on the show, a single mom walks into a gas station and buys a small bag of green powder in a foil pouch labeled, not for human consumption. She's stressed, overworked, and looking for a way to get through her next 12-hour shift. Last night, she searched Google for herbal Adderall and found out about this new miracle drug you can buy just about anywhere.
She's buying the same thing that her neighbor, a recovering opioid addict, swears saved his life. He wasn't looking for an upper to help empower through a long shift. He was looking to finally kick his pill habit with something that would take the edge off his withdrawal symptoms.
Yet a third person is using the very same thing as a way to relax, unwind, and maybe even get a little high after work. Someone else is using it to manage anxiety symptoms, and another person is using it to get energy and focus for their morning lifting session. They're all using the same thing, with wildly different effects depending on the dose.
It's called Kratom, and while lots of people love it for varying reasons, the FDA and the DEA desperately want to ban it. Why don't they? Because every time they float a trial balloon, there's a big public backlash, so there it continues to sit next to the energy drinks and CBD gummies at the gas station.
What is kratom, and why is it a hit with people looking for a legal way to get high and people looking to wean themselves off of hard drugs? Here today to help me leaf through the facts is writer and researcher Nick Pell. Nick, since you're my friend who does weird drugs, I have to ask, kratom? Nope, never, and I'm super glad I never did. Really?
I expected you to tell me you were, I don't know, pounding it daily for three years before the gym or something.
I thought about it for its legal high purposes, but the cashier told me it was super addictive. So I passed. The cashier. OK, is it super addictive? Well, that's complicated and we'll get into it later.
OK, well, for the members of my audience who aren't fluent in weird legal ways to get high, what exactly is Kratom?
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Chapter 3: How does Kratom affect users differently based on dosage?
In the cases of people who are using more hardcore recreational drugs,
opioids like fentanyl or what have you i think training those in for something far less likely to kill them is probably a good thing i think living people are preferable to dead people so how does kratom work you said it was in the coffee family i don't know anybody who's ever sat on the couch half asleep drooling on themselves vibing out to heavy metal or whatever it is on four cups of coffee
So kratom is mostly made up of mitragynine, but there's another alkaloid called 7-hydroxymitragynine, which is where it's getting most of its effects. These interact with two, possibly three receptors in the brain.
First, the opioid receptors, but they don't activate the opioid receptors to full capacity, which is, this is why it causes drowsiness, dopiness, pain relief with limited respiratory depression, which is the main Danger factor when you're talking about opioids is respiratory depression. Next, there's adrenergic receptors. These are where it gets its stimulating properties.
There's also some impact on the dopamine and serotonin receptors, but it's very poorly understood. So what's it doing there? We don't really know.
Adrenergic receptor. These are complicated words, but they make sense if you sort of write them down, right? Adrenergic adrenaline, maybe. I don't know. So why does it have such radically different, seemingly contradictory effects, right? If I drink one cup of coffee, I'm not like really tired and then I have two and then I'm really hyper and then I have three and I'm hallucinating, right?
That's just weird.
Well, at lower doses, it binds to the adrenergic receptors more. Once you start taking higher doses, it's going to bind to the opioid receptors more. There's actually a sweet spot where you can get it hitting both. Takes about half an hour to kick in, lasts about four to six hours, maybe more if you took a lot. What's considered a lot? More than 15 grams, I guess, is what I read.
Again, I've never done this, so this is a totally academic exercise for me.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential addiction risks associated with Kratom?
And if it does, whether the manufacturer is telling you the truth about the content of their wares. How big of a market is this?
I'm always curious how much money there is in anything like this.
It's a little over $2 billion a year in the United States. Now, that sounds like a lot, but by comparison, legal weed is a $20 billion a year industry. So this is just an absolute puppy dog in terms of market share compared to something like weed. Wow. The total illegal drug market is estimated to be anywhere between $100 billion and $150 billion every year.
Some people claim to be using it therapeutically, but the question for me is always, how much of this is cope? Like, are you just saying that you're using it to manage chronic pain or anxiety, but... Really, you just enjoy getting high. And to circle back to the guy who spoke to me at the gym, like nothing about him struck me as being deceptive about it.
I think he's got chronic back pain and he doesn't want to do opioids for all the reasons people don't want to do opioids. I'm sure that he's not the only person on earth that this is true of. I'm equally certain that right now there's a guy taking a handful of kratom gummies and saying it's for his back pain when really he wants to drool on himself and stare at the ceiling for the next four hours.
So are these people who say they're using it to manage anxiety or chronic pain, are they really using it for that, or do they just like getting high and they have a ready-made excuse for it?
You know you're in trouble when your pharmacy also sells Slim Jims and vape juice. Speaking of dangerous addictions, hopefully this show is one of them, because unlike Gas Station Kratom, the Jordan Harbinger Show has proven to boost alertness, focus, and smugness during water cooler debates. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Superpower Health.
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Chapter 5: How does Kratom compare to other opioid alternatives?
Some 275,000 to 310,000 Cambodians. 20,000 to 62,000 Laotians. Okay, and then 250,000 people left what was called Indochina and perished at sea, which is horrifying to even think about. My God. I just wanted to clarify that so that people aren't like, you know, the only people that died in Vietnam were not just Americans, because I know that's a that's kind of a valid, a valid gripe.
And to those people like I am also of the mindset that like it's kind of weird when we're like it's only like 5000 people that died in Iraq. It's like, yeah, if you don't count the million Iraqis that died. Right. It was a lot of people and it was a lot of people in Vietnam. So I'm glad that we did address that.
With regard to the fentanyl overdosing, carry Narcan, get your gym, grocery store, coffee shop, or whatever to have it in their first aid kit. And if you do drugs, test them because these are not all people who signed up to do fentanyl. There are people who got cocaine or molly.
There was a band in Los Angeles, I want to say like two years ago now, and I don't remember the name of the band, but it was three guys and they all died from fentanyl. And I believe it was from Tainted Supply, but I could be wrong about that.
Right. So they thought they were going to do cocaine and they got fentanyl and died.
Or whatever. Yeah. And like, I think it's nuts that people do street drugs in the age of fentanyl. But if you do, test strips are really easy to come by and you should definitely get some if you're going to do drugs.
I also agree. I've got friends who operate in the black market and stuff. And like, I don't know, they do this stuff. And I was like, hey, how are you not worried about overdosing, you know, on this? And they're like, oh, I have.
They've got like a whole laboratory worth of safety equipment in their house where they'll like break it down, test it, reconstitute it because it's your life you're playing with. Also, it's bad for business to kill your customers. A lot of drug dealers don't care about that. But like, you don't want to go to prison for murder.
But the upscale guys that you know do. Yeah. They're just businessmen fulfilling a market need, you know?
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Chapter 6: What does the current research say about Kratom's safety?
The claims being made here aren't fantastical. You know, like if somebody if tons of people report that they're being grabbed by aliens in the middle of the night and taken on hyperspace journeys like that's a fantastical claim. This is not really a fantastical claim. It's not a giant leap to say that a partial opioid antagonist could help people to get off of opioids.
And you might say, well, they're still doing drugs, but who cares? They're doing drugs that are way less likely to kill them and perhaps allow them to function better. I mean, this is the anecdotal case of the guy at the gym. Like I see this guy at the gym like five days a week. You know, he's up and he's around, he's doing stuff.
He's not sitting in a dark room staring at his shoes while he drools. To me, that's a win for these people.
Yeah, right. I think the difference in risk is significant, especially given that almost all the overdoses involve other drugs. But I'm curious what other drugs people are using with Kratom. If it's people smoking weed and doing Kratom and then ODing, obviously it's not the weed that's making them OD.
I think really we just need more and better research into kratom, and that's going to be hard coming because the CDC and the FDA are both pretty hostile towards it.
I know there's been a lot of drama around the regulation of kratom, so what's the story there?
So in 2012, we first see the DEA list kratom as a drug of concern, which doesn't actually really mean anything specific. There's kind of a, I don't know if it's a spike, but there's a rising tide of
poison control center calls about kratom but given the number of overdoses we have even with multiple drug use i mean i've seen a video of a guy calling a poison control center because he thinks he's overdosing on weed so somebody calling a poison control center doesn't really mean much of anything i mean i called a poison control center once because i accidentally made toxic chlorine gas okay there's a story there i would like to hear it
All right. So I lived off grid for several years and I had a composting toilet for part of that time. And basically the way a composting toilet is set up is, you know, there's a big vat for number two and there's a little jug for number one. And they're all set up in a toilet like enclosure, but everything's separate. And the number one jug gets kind of crusty.
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Chapter 7: How is Kratom regulated and what are the implications?
But they always say, like, it elevates mood. which is more subjective and doesn't directly reference major depressive disorder. And it could be like, this elevates mood because placebo effect elevates mood when we tell you that this pill elevates mood. It could be full of air, and it will still elevate mood if we tell you statistically that it does, because that's how placebo effect works.
Right, it's happy air.
Take the happy air. Yeah, happy air, to be specific, exactly.
The FDA can't just ban supplements without a reason. It has to wait until it receives reports of harm or suspicion that something is being mislabeled or is adulterated or dangerous. And even then, the burden of proof is on the government, not on the manufacturer, which isn't terribly surprising as this is the bedrock of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence since forever.
You know, you have to prove your accusation against somebody rather than them proving their innocence. There's not really any kind of potency, purity, or consistency standards with supplements, which is why you shouldn't just buy any random brand of supplement in general, not just Kratom.
Another problem with Kratom, I'd suspect, is the naturalism fallacy or the appeal to nature. The idea that just because something is natural, that makes it somehow safe or safer than synthetic alternatives, which is, you know, not true at all. There are tons of natural things that can harm or kill you, including water, cyanide, etc.
Yeah, the current legal status of Kratom is in this weird gray area where the FDA hasn't approved it at all for anything, but they also haven't banned it.
So you can get away with quite a lot by just slapping a sticker that says not for human consumption on the packaging and then pretending like your company has done everything required to make clear that this is not something any government body has said is okay for people to consume.
How is this process different for prescription drugs? What bar are they meeting that Kratom doesn't?
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Chapter 8: What are the personal anecdotes surrounding Kratom use?
Thanks, Nick, for the straight dope on Kratom. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn.
And this show, it's created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Tata Sidlowskis, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. And yes, I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we of course try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact-checked.
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