Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Kratom prohibited in Norway and Sweden

Caving to pressure from pharmaceutical companies, kratom is now prohibited in Norway and Sweden. The governments acknowledged that kratom was not a problem but it was prohibited to prevent kratom from ever becoming a problem.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Herbal highs discussed in UK Newspaper

Here is an article published in The Guardian discussing a potential UK ban for Spice Gold. In the US, Spice Gold has already been banned de facto because its contents are presumed to be illegal under the Federal Analog Act. The UK does not have a similar law and it appears that they are considering a ban of Spice itself. This seems like a very odd approach compared to banning the constitutent ingredient, JWH-018. The list of substances at the end of the blog, "plant products such as Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, Kava and Kratom, unusual stimulants, ecstasy-style drugs such as BZP," also reeks of shoddy journalism by classifying dissimilar substances together. In the USA at least, Kava is a registered supplement. You can buy it at Whole Foods.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

New mitragyna speciosa research paper

Thai researchers published a paper on kratom in the Songklanakarin Journal of Science and Technology. There are also library listings for this paper. They specifically study methanol extracts of mitragyna speciosa showing that the methanol extract of kratom and the alkaloidal extract of kratom both have analgesic effects in mice. They calculated the 50% lethal dose (LD50) of these extracts, which were 4.90 g/kg for the methanol extract and 173.20 mg/kg for the alkaloidal extract. They conclude that there are little or no behavioral effects caused by the mitragyna speciosa

This can function as a replication of the analgesic action of mitragyna speciosa, but I believe the action of mitragyna speciosa has already been replicated several times. I get the impression that these researchers made some mistakes with their alkaloidal extract, perhaps not having the right proportion of 7-hydroxymitragynine involved which compromises their results.

Contributors