Plants of the Gods: S7E2. The Ethnobotany of Kratom with Dr. Chris McCurdy

I actually presented at our most recent world gathering of the top scientists in Kratom.

I was fortunate enough.

You mentioned Dennis McKenna.

He invited me to come to the COCA Summit in Peru earlier this year.

By the way, it's a little teaser.

Our lab is finalizing import permits for coca leaf research plants.

from South America now.

And we're going to start embarking on that path as well.

But I was invited there to speak about the issues that we've seen with Kratom research and the parallels that you just nicely made with coca leaf and cocaine.

And the fact that we're seeing a similar evolution of Kratom in the marketplace to the point now where we have one of the metabolites called 7-hydroxymitragynin being sold as an isolated or semi-synthetic product.

And this is actually a pure opioid.

It interacts only with opioid receptors.

I've never seen a compound more selective in all the years I've been doing opioid research, which goes all the way back to my time in pharmacy school, really in the early 90s.

But this is a scary and a cautionary tale I did as our sort of keynote talk at our symposia in February, just looking at the parallels.

And unfortunately, cocaine became a miracle drug, but it was associated with so much abuse and misuse and is a problem today.

And has created an incredible war on drugs that will never be won, never be solved, and has caused all kinds of troubles on both sides.

And what we're seeing now is the traditional Kratom being sort of – concentrated, purified, adulterated, if you will, because these semi-synthetic procedures are actual chemical reactions that are taking place with byproducts that are produced and then packaged in these tablets and liquids that are being sold without purification, without any kind of regulation, as we just alluded to in this slide.

this space.

And so it's quite frightening talking to some of my medical toxicologist friends and emergency physicians that they're starting to see people showing up with overdoses and whatnot from these 7-hydroxy products, which are completely and should not be called kratom products at all.

I mean, these are now totally divergent from what the plant was.

There's no trace back to the plant any longer.

Well, I'm struck by the oddness of the chemistry as I understand it because some of the activity seems obviously due to alkaloids and some of it seems obviously not due to alkaloids.

And I was reading one of your accounts where you talked about when they're making these aqueous extracts, these teas, and then after a couple hours it loses its potency.

And my understanding of alkaloids is they kind of live forever.

So there's some weird stuff going on there.