Consuming kratom products may result in an ED visit, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:03 — 1.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Kratom is a drug that has been unregulated and sold for decades in smoke shops and elsewhere, now associated with over a thousand fold increase in emergency department visits. Why? Substance use disorder expert Eric Strain at Johns Hopkins explains.

Strain: There's something called 7 hydroxymitragynine and there's very, very little of that in kratom itself, which is a plant product. However there are now companies that are marketing 7 hydroxymitragynine as kratom and 7-hydroxymetragynine is a much more robust opioid agonist, like heroin. There was an effort to try to regulate kratom several years ago and there was a lot of pushback from consumers and from the American Kratom Association as well.              :33

Strain says it’s caveat emptor with regard to what is sold as kratom, whether that’s a bricks and mortar location or online, with no easily available method for discerning what’s really kratom. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.