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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
$45 upfront payment required, equivalent to 15 bucks a month, new customers on first three-month plan only, speeds slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan, additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Welcome back to the show. I really don't like asking questions when I suspect I already know their answers. And at first, this seemed like one of those instances.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
What I knew was a guy got hooked on a shady new substance from a vape shop, got hooked on another, and ended up in detox. It felt pretty obvious to me that this was a situation crying out for serious government intervention. Why would this be remotely okay? Then I'd learn a bit. Then I'd learn a bit more. And I'd discover something pretty complicated.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Something that has fundamentally tweaked how I think about drug policy in America. But let's start at the beginning. The first place I looked to try to understand Kratom is the place I imagine Chris would have looked. Online. The internet of 2024, we know, is a very decayed place, by which I mean reliable information about anything is pretty hard to find.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
You're trying to eat right in a world that's all just street hot dogs. If you're old, like me, you now tend to go to Reddit for answers, which isn't great. If you're young, you go to TikTok, which doesn't seem much better. So, Kratom. Kratom.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
If you want to find information that will tell you Kratom is safe, fun, and even useful, you will probably wind up at Reddit's board r slash Kratom, a community fervently behind this drug. On the sidebar, a basic Kratom introduction, facts about Kratom's evolving legality, academic studies on its use. When I visited one day in September, somebody was, typically, singing Kratom's praises.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Quote, I can't believe how great it works for me. I don't care if I have to sometimes take tolerance breaks. I don't care if I become addicted. Life is objectively better with Kratom. It does what I've always wanted a drug to do. It lets me calm down, think rationally, be in a better mood, state of gratitude, you name it. End quote. This is like how meditation people talk about silent retreats.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
On the other hand, if you're Kratom suspicious, there's an internet for you too. On Reddit, you'll probably land on r slash Kratom withdrawal, almost exclusively devoted to horror stories. Somebody says, quote, I've been a 30 gram per day user for about six months. I've lost half my hair. So depressing. I had gorgeous hair. Almost like this stuff is eating me from the inside out.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
A few weeks ago, I talked to a search engine listener with a question. At the time, I wasn't sure whether he'd want to be anonymous or not. Okay, so first of all, do you want to just say your name, like how you want to identify yourself for the purposes of this recording?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And TikTok and YouTube as well have tons of videos of people speaking on the horrors of their Kratom experiences.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Had I been standing in a vape shop, phone in hand, browsing these two internets while contemplating my purchase of Kratom, I would have been confused. I would have had that familiar feeling of asking a question and in response, stepping not into an answer, but an argument, one that had been roiling for years. I wanted to talk not to the internet, but to a human being. And so I called one.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
First things first, I just need you to introduce yourself. Can you say your name and what you do professionally?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I'd done a lot of reading about Kratom since I'd spoken to our listener, Chris, and I kept running into references to and citations of Dr. Grunman's work. He's been studying Kratom for nearly a decade. So just like brass tacks, what exactly is kratom?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I just want to say, nearly everyone I spoke to pronounced this differently, which is maybe just a comment on how early we are in our understanding of this drug in America. For this story, I decided to just mirror the pronunciation of whoever I was speaking to, Kratom.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And so my understanding of kratom is that depending on the dose, it can either produce like stimulant effects or euphoric effects, is that correct?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So kratom, at a low dose feels like a stimulant, but at a higher dose feels euphoric, offers opioid-like effects, opioid-like effects. Those three words, in a way, our entire story lives in those three words. And so I wanna dive into them for a moment. Opiates are drugs derived from the poppy plant, heroin, morphine.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
When we talk about opioids, we're talking about drugs that mimic those effects in our body, but which are not necessarily derived from the poppy. Potent drugs like Oxycontin, Percocet, and Vicodin are opioids. But technically speaking, we can call any drug that interacts with our opioid receptors an opioid. I ended up talking to Dr. Grunman about Imodium, the diarrhea drug.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I knew from our fentanyl episode that the same chemist had formulated both Imodium and fentanyl, but I hadn't known that both those drugs are opioids. Dr. Grunman told me Imodium is an opioid. Some opioid addicts use it to get high. Others have taken so much Imodium, they've actually overdosed and died.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Kratom contains chemicals, alkaloids, which act on our opioid receptors, which means literally Kratom is an opioid. And yet, people shy away from the term. You are not allowed, for instance, on the Kratom subreddit to use the O word. That's because nearly everyone associates opioids with drugs that are highly addictive and can kill you by stopping your breathing.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Calling a drug an opioid is like hitting a big red button that summons a ton of cultural fear, as well as the presence of American regulators. Kratom leaves contain at least two different alkaloids that interact with their opioid receptors, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymetragynine.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
7-hydroxymetragynine is very strong, more than 10 times more potent than morphine, but there's not very much of it in a kratom leaf. Metragynine, which is much weaker, is responsible for most of the effect kratom users feel. And what is your understanding of, like, kratom is used in a specific way in America right now.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The reason I was being a little cautious here was that Chris had written to us about an experience he'd had with addiction. Addiction to a kind of drug that neither of us was sure you were even supposed to call a drug. It was hard to know how to talk about any of this. But I'd wanted to speak to him because the substance in question and Chris's questions about it.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
In sort of like, you know, the hundreds of years before today, what were the uses? What did people think about?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
We're going to come back to this later, this idea of kratom leaves as a natural substitute for opiate users. But kratom's story in the United States, that begins much more recently. So recently that in 2016, Dr. Grinderman, one of our foremost kratom experts, had never heard of the drug.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
What happened was that one of his students also worked in a South Florida crime lab, and the student had come across a case where a person was found intoxicated at the scene of a car accident. The cops found kratom on the guy. So the crime lab student comes into school and asks Dr. Grundman, what's kratom? Dr. Grundman didn't know.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But Dr. Grundman had a background in naturally occurring substances that affect our minds, so he was excited to learn about a new one, this drug which had arrived in the U.S. from Southeast Asia. He decided to try to figure out how popular this new-to-him drug was, and so he designed a survey. And how were you conducting the survey? How were you finding the users?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The survey showed that people were using kratom to treat a comically vast range of American maladies. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, chronic pain. And not just that, kratom is a substitute for people trying to break their relationships to other drugs.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
In the past year, a bunch of my friends had taken me aside privately with similar questions. So you wrote us an email, and all the emails go to my phone, and I read them all, but yours I read quicker than most because it had the word. It's pronounced Kratom, right? I really don't know. I've heard Kratom with a long A. You hear Kratom. You've heard more Kratom than Kratom. Yeah.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
To alcohol, to fentanyl, to heroin, to benzos like Xanax, stimulants like Adderall, kratom was even being used by people who just wanted to wean themselves off antidepressants. Dr. Grundman's survey offered a peek at kratom's quiet, behind-the-scenes role in America, a substance a lot of people self-medicate with because either they don't trust or can't access our traditional medical system.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Acknowledging this is not the same as saying kratom is an effective remedy. That's actually been the question Dr. Grundman's work has investigated for almost a decade. But with this first survey, he knew that, effective or not, safe or not, kratom had become popular. And at almost the exact same time that Dr. Grundman was sending out his first survey, a U.S.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
government agency was squinting at Kratom. The Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, in America decides how much a potentially dangerous drug should be restricted. Whether you need a doctor's prescription to use it, like a prescription painkiller, or whether it's used by citizens is completely illegal. In 2016, when the DEA looked at Kratom, they wanted to know, how addictive is it?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
How dangerous is it to the user and to the people around the user? And does it have a legitimate medical use? What did those internal deliberations sound like? It's unclear. The DEA did not respond to Sertangent's request for comment. But we can guess at what the agency thought by what it did next.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
All this hubbub, a surprise to Dr. Grunman, a researcher just trying to collect some survey data about a new substance he'd just learned of.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Kratom researchers were concerned. Kratom users were incensed.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
A petition saying broadly there are very few good options for opioid addicts, that this seemed to be helping some of them, and that they didn't want it taken away.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
so your team's words lead to results and they can take on the next task, no matter where you're communicating. Grammarly helps you improve the substance, not just the style of your writing, by identifying exactly what's missing. For example, a call to action or an executive summary. This helps you move faster by reducing unnecessary back and forth.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
All right, let's proceed with Kratom. It had the word Kratom in the subject, which piqued my interest because we have been talking about Kratom for like a year in the office. Okay. Can you just like tell me... the story of how Kratom crossed your radar?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
This video particularly struck me from this YouTuber Trey Crowder, a.k.a. The Liberal Redneck. He's speaking from his porch in a sleeveless shirt over a chorus of cicadas. At first, I thought the video was a parody. Crowder's a comedian. But he quickly moves into this argument for kratom. At one point, he holds up a little green mason jar of kratom tea.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I don't have to tell you that there are a lot of trade crowders in America, people whose families have been ravaged by opioid addiction. Enough of them demanded the government back off here that the DEA actually flinched.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
51 U.S. Representatives, 22 of them Republicans, banded together and wrote a letter saying the DEA should do more research before scheduling this drug. They cited work by scientists, including one of Dr. Grundemann's colleagues, and surprisingly, their argument really mirrored the liberal rednecks.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
They did not call the people who worked at pharma companies lizards, but they said the government should not hastily ban a drug that might help in any way with our massive overdose crisis. Because while kratom is an opioid, or if you prefer, exhibits opioid-like effects, overdoses from the drug are pretty rare. From 2011 to 2017, 13 users died. 11 of them had other drugs in their system.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
During that same time, over 200,000 users of other opioids died. The Kratom ban was to take effect in September 2016. Instead, that October, the DEA posts this very unusual letter into the Federal Register. It was titled, quote, Those are the two predominant psychoactive ingredients in kratom, both opioids. This letter is government speak for my bad.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
As a person who studies drugs, how unusual is this for the DEA to back off of a decision like this?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
After 2016, when the DEA backed off, regulation of kratom was left to the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration. We asked the FDA if kratom was legal now to sell in the United States. A spokesperson for that agency told Search Engine that kratom is not approved for any medical use, it is an unsafe food additive, and it is not appropriate in dietary supplements.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Which is a very funny way of saying, yes, it is legal to sell in the United States. as long as you follow a few rules. In some states, the ingredients in your Kratom product have to match the ingredients advertised, and technically, you're not supposed to make medical claims, a rule as respected in vape shops as horn honking laws are in New York City.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The world these policies have created is one in which our listener, Chris, would walk into a store and see Kratom sold in various forms and under various brand names. K-Shots, MIT-45 Super K, Ohm's Advanced Kratom Alkaloids. Occasionally, the packaging is sedate, like painkillers you'd get at Rite Aid.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But usually, it's designed to look like illicit drugs, like Trucker Speed, or at least one brand I saw packaged like a large bag of heroin with just the word train wreck written on it in marker font. The FDA pointed out to us that kratom is locally restricted or regulated in many states, which is totally true.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But federally, there are no rules about how much kratom a person can buy, how old that person has to be, or rules placing limits on how strong kratom can be if it is going to be sold. It's funny. It's like, for a moment, the federal government treated kratom as if it were too dangerous to tolerate, and then it treated it as something that it mostly just didn't want to think about.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
For someone like Chris, standing in the vape shop aisle, he could buy Kratom, he could use it, but in a fundamental way, he would not know what he was taking. And the questions the government had said it wanted to answer, was the drug lethal? Was it addictive? Could it be useful? Those remained, for most people, open questions. I'm curious, like, as a substance, how addictive is Kratom?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So Dr. Grunman's research suggests that withdrawal from kratom looks like headaches, anxiety, and occasional GI distress, which basically sounds like my Monday, or like what Chris was experiencing before he started taking that other drug, TNMT. Of course, when anybody, me, you, the federal government, is evaluating the riskiness of a drug like Kratom, they're not just asking how addictive is it?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
They're also asking how easily can this thing kill you?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
In other words, Dr. Grundman says it's unclear how someone would take enough kratom to die from it. Nearly every compound has something called LD50, lethal dose 50, the dose at which half of the lab rats died after taking the substance. Alcohol has an LD50, so does salt, so does water.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The LD50 for mitragynine, the star alkaloid of kratom, is high enough that people should not be able to get that much into their blood by taking kratom any of the ways we know that they take kratom. And yet, there have been dozens of deaths in which the only substance found in the person's blood was high levels of mitragynine. So, this is kind of a mystery.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
One theory for what might be happening here is that in an unregulated gray market, Kratom manufacturers are incentivized to make stronger and stronger formulations of the drug because there will be customers who want a stronger effect and there's no rule stopping them.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So it's possible that the people who are dying of kratom overdoses are taking kratom capsules somehow formulated to give them a way higher potency opioid high than the norm.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
What's interesting here, and quite sad, is that kratom leaf has been used internationally for hundreds of years, but it appears that it's only when the drug reached America that we discovered how to make it, in some instances, lethal.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
It's funny. I mean, it's sort of, to me, what it reminds me of a little bit is the current gray market cannabis system we're in where people both, like broadly speaking, socially, we've agreed that cannabis has social upsides and that its criminalization has real social downsides.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But because it's a bit of a patchwork, people who are buying cannabis products can't entirely be sure that they, I mean, at least in the state in which I live, like they don't necessarily know that they are buying cannabis what is being advertised. And there's this market incentive for higher and higher and higher concentrations, which can be a really different drug experience.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
There's a word for that in recovery circles. It's like a garbage head. Yep. Which I'm not trying to be pejorative. It's just a friend of mine who's a recovery person said that to me once.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So let's return to our listener, Chris. Here is part of what I think went wrong for him. The first time in your life you try a drug, whether it's your first cup of coffee or your first sip of wine, you probably have a conversation with somebody about what to expect and what the risks are. Chris did not have as full a conversation about kratom as he might have wished he'd had before he dove in.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But if he'd had that conversation, what we now know he might have learned is that kratom is an opioid, but it's not particularly lethal. It can give you withdrawal symptoms you won't enjoy, but nothing like what you'd get from a prescription painkiller.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And something to watch out for is that it comes from the gray market, which means the drug itself might be adulterated, or it might be getting more potent month by month. So all of these risky calculations could be changing. Of course, Chris really got in trouble, not with Kratom, but with another drug he mistakenly thought was a kind of Kratom, T-Neptine.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And the story of T-Neptine, what it is, how it got here, and how much fault lies with the country of France, those answers surprised me. Mon dieu. We will continue our story after a short break. Search Engine is brought to you by Betterment. Do you want your money to be motivated? Do you want your money to rise and grind? Do you think your money should get up and work?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So Chris, in rehab, was talking about how he was struggling to quit cannabis. And this other guy mentioned that he had also had a bit of a problem with something called kratom.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash PJSearch. That's LinkedIn.com slash PJSearch to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back to the show. So what does the internet have to say about T-Neptine, the drug that Chris had found after Kratom, which had caused him his real problems?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The vibe on Reddit in the T-Neptine community is much darker than it is in the Kratom subreddit. I saw someone asking the question many people have wondered after consuming some exciting new substance. Quote, how many days in a row can I take this before I get addicted? The top voted reply, quote, I did research before I tried it, thinking I'd be able to control what many others couldn't. Nope.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I was fully addicted after a couple of weeks. I ended my addiction at six to 10 bottles of TD Red a day. I spent $20,000. This is Reddit, of course. Anyone can say anything, they often do. But you do notice here many more vivid warnings than celebrations. Many addicted users cautioning new people from following them down the path.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
We're going to return to Dr. Oliver Grunman with more questions. But for TNAPD, I wanted to start by speaking to a different kind of chemist, someone whose work I've been following for a long time.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Dear listeners, I present to you, Hamilton Morris. I've never spoken to him before, but I have listened to his hypnotically dry voice for maybe hundreds of hours.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I've heard him use it to soberly and methodically describe what it's like to consume the venom of a psychedelic toad, to participate in an iboga ceremony, to observe a bunch of meth heads stumble through a meth cook in a kitchen while wearing, for some reason, fireman's helmets. He's seen a lot. T-Neptune was obscure to me, but I had a suspicion it'd be old hat to Hamilton Morris. What is TNFD?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
What is its chemical composition? Where does it come from? What is it?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So, first of all, TNF is not a naturally occurring substance like Kratom is. It was synthesized by a company called Servier. Servier's bad reputation partly comes from their role in France as a major supplier of fenfluramine, half of the drug Fen-Phen, the famously lethal diet drug.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Servier, the company, was also convicted for deception and manslaughter in French court over a different diet drug, which killed approximately 2,000 people. T-Neptine's path to its current life as American gas station heroin, it starts with Servier. In the 1970s, Servier synthesized T-Neptine and sold it as an antidepressant called Stabilon. The drug made people feel euphoric in opioid-like ways.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But for decades, the company insisted it was not an opioid. Into this swirling morass of uncertainty stepped Hamilton Morris.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
To be clear, some users suspected that this French drug was an opioid because they had taken opioids before. But no one in the general public or scientists knew the actual mechanism this drug was using to have its effect. If Servier knew, they weren't telling people.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And so people were taking a drug that may have been an opioid, but the official story for how it was working on its users was different.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Finally, in 2017, a student at Columbia University figured out how to solve this chemical mystery. Hamilton told me that the student sent a sample of TNeptine to UNC Chapel Hill, which has something called the Psychoactive Drug Screening Program.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Chemists there can take a drug, expose it to cloned human or rodent central nervous system receptors, and actually tell you when this drug is put in your body, here are the receptors that it acts on.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Since we know that we define an opioid not by its chemical structure, but by whether or not it interacts with our opioid receptors, this would be the definitive test to prove if T-eneptine was in fact an opioid.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
If Chris was trying to figure out what to expect from Kratom, the way it's sold makes that mission a little confusing. He saw it in a vape shop. It's also sold at convenience stores and gas stations. There's often a picture of Kratom on the packaging, a gray-green herb which suggests it's natural. It's also often sold near cannabis products, suggesting it's mood-altering but maybe not that strong.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
A full agonist at the mu opioid receptor. A full agonist is a substance that binds to a receptor and fully activates it. Other full agonists at the mu opioid receptor? Oxycontin. Heroin. This drug was not as potent as them, but it was an opioid by anybody's definition. Some untold number of people had been taking an opioid without ever knowing it.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And we know how we feel about opioids in this country. They are highly addictive substances that often kill their users. But the strange thing about T-Neptine, an opioid, is that while it does seem to be a quite addictive substance, it doesn't seem to be as lethal as other drugs in its class.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Few Americans' lives would be improved by the addition of an addictive opioid. But the question you'd hope the federal government might look into is whether those Americans who are already addicted to a lethal opioid might benefit from a less lethal one. I asked Hamilton about this.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
TNeptine, relative to heroin, if somebody were recreationally deciding to, for instance, like stop using heroin, TNeptine might be a good option for that person because they'd be replacing something that gave them a high that they found that they wanted or needed with one that would be less likely to kill them in an overdose. That would be my guess, yeah.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
To me, what's interesting, and tell me if this analogy feels facile to you, it's like one way you could understand t-eneptine is that it's almost similar to nicotine vaping, where the idea with nicotine vaping was, okay, for people who are addicted to cigarettes, this can be an off-ramp from cigarettes.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But what also happened is that there were a lot of people who didn't smoke cigarettes, and nicotine vaping was an on-ramp. Like, instead of getting them off a drug to something less dangerous, it got them onto a drug. Like, is it possible that t-eneptine could work the same way?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Sometimes it's behind the counter. Sometimes it's in the aisles with the candy. If Chris was wondering, Will this work? Is it safe? Is it more like a medicine or a drug? The cultural signaling around it was just messy. But he wanted to try it. So he bought some.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Hamilton is pointing to a pretty extraordinary contradiction here, a policy problem I don't know how you'd begin to fix. Obviously, consumers should know what drugs they're taking. They should know that kratom is a partial opioid agonist, that t-neptine is a full one. Ideally, the government would regulate the concentration and purity of these opioids.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
And yet, if everyone widely understood these drugs were opioids, it's very hard to imagine that they wouldn't be outright prohibited or severely restricted. Our listener Chris had wanted to know if other people were struggling with these drugs and if the government was going to do anything about it. Some people are struggling with these drugs. Others say they're being helped by them.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
There are people who are addicted to more dangerous opioids who appreciate a less lethal substitute. That's the problem I don't know how to fix. Dr. Grundman seemed to think that T-ineptine will likely end up as a prescription-only drug in America, just like in France. But kratom is tricky.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
There are people who feel that Kratom is a medicine for them, a medicine that today they can access without having to rely on a healthcare system that may have gotten them addicted to lethal opioids in the first place.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Looking at this situation, it's hard not to wish that we had some other tool, some way to get these complicated substances to the people they'd help, some option beyond prohibition, prescription, or vape store free-for-all. I asked Dr. Grunman if he had any bright ideas. If you had to guess, like,
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Given the research we have right now, I feel like a reasonable thing to say is that the best way to distribute these drugs is not in unknown quantities from unknown manufacturer at gas stations. What would... Not thinking about the political realities of life in America, but...
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Given how people use them and what we know about their risks and benefits, what would be the best way for these drugs to be distributed based on the available information?
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Sometimes you ask a question and you get, actually, a pretty good answer. Empowering pharmacists to do more than we currently ask of them does not seem like a bad solution. Even if, for now, it does seem like, at least in America, an unlikely one. Oliver, thank you so much. I feel like I understand this much better than I did before we started talking. Certainly, my pleasure.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Dr. Oliver Grunman, clinical professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy and president of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology. Surge Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, BJ Vogt, and Shruthi Pinamaneni, and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John. Fact-checking this week by Holly Patton.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese-Dennis. Thank you to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Perrello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, JD Crowley, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Kate Rose, Matt Casey, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Shuff.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Our agent is Oren Rosenbaum at UTA. If you'd like to support the show and get access to our incognito mode feed with no ads, no reruns and bonus episodes, head to searchengine.show. You can also submit a question for us there, whether you're a paid subscriber or not. Follow and listen to Search Engine for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Kratom had briskly gone from a substance Chris was curious about to a substance he felt was giving him a nice high to a substance he was pretty sure was leaving him in withdrawal. So now he needed to make sure he was taking Kratom often enough to stay ahead of that withdrawal feeling. So his consumption went up, which made him feel ashamed.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
The shame may have been compounded by the fact that some people just don't consider Kratom to be a very classy drug, whatever that means.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Tiana, another substance sold in America's unofficial apothecaries, our smoke shops, our delis, our gas stations. Tiana gets its name from its featured ingredient, T-eneptine. Chris thought this was another form of kratom. It is not. We'll get into what it actually is later. Whatever you're guessing, I think you're wrong.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
But for now, what Chris knew is that the substance he knew as Tiana seemed to do more for him than kratom had. Maybe too much more. Before he could figure out what was going on, Chris was having deeper withdrawal symptoms. He now had trouble sleeping without the pills, and when he would fall asleep,
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I haven't taken opioids recreationally, but I just was recovering from a surgery, and so I've been on them recently.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
Nope. It's such a lonely experience. I feel like when people have issues with substances, you're in a big community of people who have those issues. But when you're having it with something that's more relatively unknown, it sounds like it's just even harder to chart.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
When you say people, do you mean like other patients? Do you mean practitioners? Like everybody was just like, I don't know.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
It's like you're trying to figure out if you're in the kiddie pool or drowning in the ocean. And when you're having opiate-style withdrawals at a detox center, you kind of have your answer. Yeah.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So I decided to try to answer Chris's question. And before we go further, I want to acknowledge that there are listeners out there who will not at all relate to the idea that someone would take a substance that they didn't know very much about, that they bought from a guy at a vape shop.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
My mom, for instance, who listens to this show, is probably drafting a text right now asking me to promise her I would never do this. So to give a little explanatory context to this choice Chris made, the truth is that we are living through a strange moment in American drug culture. Today, more adults are smoking cannabis daily than drinking. You can buy ketamine on Instagram.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
You're seemingly not allowed to run a startup unless you're on ayahuasca. The old world is dying, a new one struggles to be born, and nowhere are things more confusing than at vape shops and gas stations. Here, at the stores we know are not pharmacies, many Americans now buy tobacco, weed, and this new other stuff. Stuff that gave Chris opioid-like withdrawals.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
I couldn't imagine a world where the U.S. government would let you buy opioids from the guy at the vape shop or the dude at the gas station. And if that world existed, I certainly could not imagine being able to see that world's upsides. After the break, we learn quite a bit. This episode of Search Engine is also sponsored by Lumen. Lumen is the world's first handheld metabolic coach.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, it lets you know if you're burning fat or carbs and gives you tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, workouts, sleep, and even stress management.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
All you have to do is breathe into your lumen first thing in the morning, and you'll know what's going on with your metabolism, whether you're burning mostly fats or carbs. Then, lumen gives you a personalized nutrition plan for your day based on your measurements. And lumen will give you tips to keep you on top of your health game. Your metabolism is your body's engine.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
It's how your body turns the food you eat into fuel that keeps you going. Because your metabolism is at the center of everything your body does, optimal metabolic health translates to a bunch of benefits, including easier weight management, improved energy levels, better fitness results, and better sleep.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
So if you want to take the next step in improving your health, go to lumen.me slash search to get 15% off your Lumen. That's L-U-M-E-N dot me slash search for 15% off your purchase. This episode is also brought to you by Mint Mobile.
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The Mystery of the Vape Shop Kratom
You know when you discover a new binge-worthy show or a song that you bump on repeat and you have to share it with your friends so they can experience just how awesome it is? That's kind of what it feels like when you discover that Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for 15 bucks a month when you purchase a three-month plan. Thanks for watching.