Hamilton Morris
Appearances
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
My name's Hamilton Morris. I am a chemist. I have a podcast that's about chemistry and pharmacology on Patreon. I made a documentary series about psychoactive drugs called Hamilton's Pharmacopia for many years, which you can watch. Watch for free on my Vimeo channel or a lot of other places. And I'm generally very interested in the chemistry and pharmacology of psychoactive drugs.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Yeah, so TNFD is an unusual substance. It's not chemically related to any of the botanical opioids or to fentanyl. It's kind of its own chemical structural class. It's a tricyclic that is closer to a lot of antidepressants. And that is actually... the area where it was developed.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So there's a French pharmaceutical company called Servier that was exploring these tricyclic antidepressant type structures. And this pharmaceutical company, Servier, had a bad reputation already. They were the major supplier of fenfluramine in Europe, which is a very cardiotoxic and potentially neurotoxic diet drug.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So the first time I tried TNF-TN was probably around the first time that I tried metragynine, probably around 2009, and I had to order a box of pharmaceutical Stablon tablets from France. And I had a kind of similar... I just have to say, you're a mailman.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
These are both, to this day, legal and certainly legal then. No one had ever even heard of this stuff really outside of, you know, people were really interested in this at that point. And it was a widely used antidepressant. And crucially, at that time, nobody knew that it was an opioid. So I took it and I thought, wow, this stuff makes you feel pretty good. This is interesting. I get it.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
This is a great antidepressant. I wonder. And so I followed TNAPT with interest after trying it. And What I noticed was an increasing number of reports of people abusing it, using massive, massive quantities, taking hundreds of these 12.5 milligram tablets. And there were some posts on various forums and Reddit with people saying these things like,
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I used to use heroin, and I swear that this stuff feels just like heroin to me. My pupils are pinpoints. I get this euphoric nodding effect. I really wonder if this stuff is an opioid.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The mechanism that was considered the explanation for its effect was that it was a serotonin reuptake
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
enhancer not inhibitor enhancer i even wrote an article for playboy years ago that described all of this like gee whiz isn't it strange that two drugs with diametrically opposed mechanisms one that enhances serotonin reuptake and one that uh inhibits serotonin reuptake are both antidepressants the brain sure is weird right right so there was something about this that was paradoxical.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And then more and more people kept taking higher and higher doses. The evidence that it seemed to exert some kind of opioid type effect was continuously accumulating. Then there was a medical case report of somebody that had overdosed on TNF team tablets and their overdose was reversed with naloxone, Narcan, the opioid blocking medication.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Yeah. So this was a kind of like, isn't that odd that this serotonin reuptake enhancer is blocked by an opioid blocker? Yeah. Like, what's the deal with that? So it was pretty clear that there was something going on, but no one had firmly established it.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And the answer was kind of the obvious answer that everybody expected, which is that it was a full agonist at the mu opioid receptor.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
For reasons that aren't fully understood, there are opioids that don't cause profound respiratory depression, relatively speaking. And for that reason, they... don't tend to cause fatal overdoses because that's the mechanism through which opioids exert their effect in terms of killing people is respiratory arrest.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I mean, I wouldn't want to make that claim. I wouldn't, you know, say, hey, if you're struggling with opioid dependence issues, transition onto TNF. That's not something that I'm saying. But conceivably, that would work. And that's also one of the things that Kratom is very popular for, is getting off of opioids.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Because when it comes to our methodology for treating opioid addiction in the United States— Pretty much the name of the game is simply replacement therapy. That's it. If you go to a doctor and you say, I have a problem using heroin, they'll give you methadone or they'll give you buprenorphine, both of which are opioids.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And the idea is just here is a safe, regular supply of an opioid that you can take every day that is considered to have a slightly lower abuse potential. But that's pretty much it.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Oh, certainly. Yeah, I think that's very much a possibility. One really important distinction that I want to make is that I think there is a huge difference between giving someone an opioid that they recognize is an opioid and providing something deceptively where they don't know what they are consuming. That is unacceptable. And unfortunately, it is incentivized by the existing legal framework.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So if you were to say, hey, this is an opioid and it has this or that risks associated with its use and you should use it in the following way, that would potentially make it impossible to sell.