The Washington Post released an article titled, “What it’s like to be high on kratom, according to the people who use it.” The article reads in part as follows:
“The Drug Enforcement Administration has said it will ban the kratom plant for two years because it can produce effects similar to opiates. Although it’s been used for centuries in Southeast Asia, its use is relatively new in the United States, spurred in large part by users sharing reports of their experiences with the drug on online forums.
One of the most well-known of those forums is the website Erowid.org, an “online encyclopedia of psychoactive substances,” whose founders were profiled in the New Yorker last year. At Erowid, users of everything from caffeine to heroin can submit first-person reports of their experiences with drugs. These “trip reports” are reviewed by moderators, categorized thematically (“bad trips,” “glowing experiences,” etc.) and published on the website.
The reports are used by both researchers and drug users seeking out information on emerging substances or new use trends in established substances.
[The DEA wants to ban another plant. Researchers say the plan is ‘insane.’]
The website includes 286 user-submitted reports detailing experiences with kratom, either alone or in combination with other drugs. These reports were the subject of a study published last year in the journal Psychoactive Drugs. As authors Marc Swogger and his colleagues note, there has been “little scientific research into the short- and long-term effects of kratom in humans, and much of the information available is anecdotal.”
Short of rigorous studies into the drug’s effects, Erowid’s archives represent the next-best thing.
Swogger and his colleagues read all of the kratom experience reports available on the site at the time — 198 of them, which they whittled down to 161 by tossing out multiple reports submitted by the same user. Then they categorized the reports according to the individuals’ overall experiences, positive and negative — euphoria, pain relief, nausea, itching, etc.”
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