Wellllll, my dissertation is finally handed in, so I thought I’d write a bit of a long post about Kratom today. Kratom is probably my favourite entheogen, so I’m surprised I haven’t written about it before. Actually, it did get a brief mention in JWH-018, Spice & Me (to the disappointment of a couple of kratom vendors more interested in profit than helping to spread factual information), but I think it’s worthy of a post of its own. I also recently added a tonne of kratom products to Coffeesh0p that I want to talk about too, so a post about kratom is about due.

It’s a shame that I don’t have any more presentations to give (well, kind of, because I hate giving presentations) because Kratom would definitely be the subject of the next one. So…

What is Kratom?

Kratom refers to the leaves of the Mitragyna speciosa tree that’s native to Southeast Asia. A member of the Rubiaceae family, Kratom is also related to the Coffee plant (Coffea spp.) and Psychotria viridis, a hallucinogenic shrub used throughout the Amazon. It’s effects include analgesia (ie, it’s a pain killer), stimulation at low doses and sedation at higher doses accompanied by euphoria. Sounds awesome, right?

Kratom Use

So, how is kratom used? Traditionally, workers of Southeast Asia would chew on the fresh leaves for a mild stimulatory effect and also as a pain killer. Sounds like a perfect natural remedy to get you through a long day, but unfortunately, fresh leaves are pretty scarce outside their country of origin. Luckily for us though, dried leaf retains its potency, so can be shipped worldwide – just don’t try and chew it. Dried leaf can be be brewed into a tea, refined into an extract (which can also be brewed up or eaten) or smoked, although the effects of smoking it are limited.

Kratom tea is generally prepared by boiling your leaf (see below for dosage info) in water and lemon juice for about 15 minutes. This is then strained and more water/lemon juice added to the leaves and the process repeated. The lemon juice is important, as the citric acid present in it acidifies your tea, meaning more of the alkaloids present in kratom will be extracted into solution. Once the leaves are strained for a second time, they can be chucked away, leaving you with a murky brown liquid that doesn’t taste amazing. This large quantity of liquid can be boiled down further to reduce the volume, but it’s not essential. You might want to add some sugar or honey for taste though. My lab rat and his gerbil friend tend to make their tea up to the nearest 100 ml, so it can be taken as 50 ml shots throughout the evening. Turning your particular dosage of kratom leaves into approximately 200 ml of tea is enough for 4 shots. If you’re new to kratom, try spacing these shots out every half an hour to an hour. This way, you won’t take too much and you can experience all of the subtleties kratom has to offer instead of diving straight in at the deep end. Alternatively, some people just throw all of their crushed leaf into a glass of juice, stir it up and just knock it back. This can be just as effective if you’ve got the stomach for it.

As far as smoking goes, it’s really not that great. If you’re going to smoke kratom, it’s far more rewarding to smoke some alongside a cup of kratom tea than just smoking it exclusively.

Kratom Dosage & Effects

An effective dosage for one person may be completely different for another person, as a tolerance can develop, especially with daily use. Other factors can also affect how much you might need (more on that later), so the best thing to do is start off with a low dose and increase it by small increments each time until you arrive at a dosage you’re comfortable with. This advice should be followed whenever you try something new, not just for kratom.

Here’s a rough dosage guide:

Dosages greater than 15g can be too much for some people, while dosages above 25g will be too much for most people. It’s statistically likely that you are included in the “most people” group, so please be careful!

Kratom Pharmacology

Kratom contains a number of active alkaloids, including mitragynine, 7-hydroxymitragynine & mitraphylline, which are structurally similar to the hallucinogenic tryptamines (eg LSD, psilocybin), as if this plant wasn’t interesting enough! At low doses, these alkaloids are thought to act on the adrenergic system (the same sets of receptors that respond to adrenaline & noradrenaline), responsible for the plant’s stimulatory effects.

At higher doses, however, these compounds start to activate your opioid receptors. These are the same receptors that opiates such as codeine, morphine and heroin bind to which cause the same sedation, analgesia and euphoria associated with opiate use. 7-hydroxymitragynine actually appears to be 17x more potent than morphine at these receptors. Powerful stuff! It’s no surprise then that:

1. Kratom can be used to help opiate addicts overcome their addiction
2. An effective kratom dosage depends on any pre-existing opiate tolerance
3. Kratom itself can be habit forming, just like opiates (so don’t use it every day!)

Growing Kratom

Unfortunately, growing kratom will be more hassle that it’s worth. Mitragyna Speciosa prefers the warm, swampy conditions of Southeast Asia, which makes growing it outside impossible in most areas of the world. Even a green house won’t be enough. If you’re going to grow it, you need to be serious about it. You’ll need an area of your house set aside for climate control, lamps, etc. Here’s the final blow: the kratom you grow yourself will likely be of inferior quality compared to that grown natively. Sorry to disappoint.

If you still want to go ahead, you’ll need to find a rooted clone, as you won’t find any seeds commercially available, or if you do, they might be fake, and cuttings tend to be vulnerable to infection.

Kratom Products

There are a number of kratom products available for purchase. I’m always on the lookout for more because I think this plant is truly amazing, so if you find something you think I should be stocking, let me know! Anyway, here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve got so far:

Kratom Leaf This is just bog-standard, dried, crushed kratom leaf.

Thai Dragonfly Liquid Kratom Extract Each bottle of liquid kratom extract contains 20 ml. I’m not sure what strength this extract is, but it suggests a dose of 5 to 10 ml will be sufficient.

Kratom 15x Extract This extract is 15x stronger the plain leaf. Each pack contains 2g of powered extract. Unfortunately, this is a little expensive compared to the rest of the kratom products available, because it comes in fancy packaging and I have to import it.

Freeze Dried Kratom 20x Extract This brittle, resinous extract is 20x stronger than plain leaf.

Kratom Gold 35x Extract Capsules Each pack contains 3 capsules of 500mg 35x extract. A convenient way to consume your kratom!

Buying Your Plant

The most expensive part of growing Salvia Divinorum on a organic/semi-organic basis is actually buying a cutting or whole plant. I managed to get my plant for £12 including postage and packaging. After this follows compost and a suitable size pot.

There are many places to find salvia plants/cuttings, not only at local plant nurseries, but all over the internet; there’s at least one salvia plant on ebay at any one time. It’s worth noting that prices can vary significantly with little variation in quality, so make sure you shop around.

Try and buy a plant locally if you can. If not, definitely buy from a website based in your home country to minimise the time it spends in an envelope.

Growing A Cutting

When your cutting arrives, remove it from it’s packaging extremely carefully and let it sit in luke warm water. Assuming your cutting already has roots, leave it in the water for a couple of hours. If no roots are present, leave it in the water for a week or so until there’s enough root growth present to allow for potting.

After it’s sat in water for a while, it’s time to plant it. You’ll need a pot at least 20-30cm wide to allow your cutting to grow without having to be repotted every couple of months. The first thing to do is place some gravel or broken crockery into your pot up to about 5cm from the bottom. This thin layer allows for superior drainage after watering. After that, fill the pot up with your loam based compost available from any gardening store and dig a little hole in the centre where your plant will sit. Next, take your cutting, splay out the roots gently with your fingers and place the cutting into the hole you provided. Backfill the hole with more compost and compress down lightly around the stem of your plant.

Travelling through the mysteries of the postal service and being stuck in some soil is thirsty work for a plant. Imagine you have been slaving away all day in the blistering sun, doing vast quantities of manual labour. How badly are you gagging for a pint at your local? This is how your plant is feeling right now. Although your plant needs a drink, don’t feel obliged to buy it any peanuts. Now your plant is potted, give it enough water so that excess water will drip from the bottom of the pot.

From here, I advise you to put the plant in a humid environment, at least at first, to promote healthy growth. Just like a fat kid loves cake, Salvia Divinorum loves indirect sunlight. This can be anywhere such as a light room with no direct sun blazing down on it all day, or even directly in the sun, but behind a net curtain. Provided your plant is not exposed to too much direct sunlight, it will do all right.

Leave it a few weeks and your cutting will start turning into a fully-fledged plant. Keep an eye on the compost, making sure it doesn’t dry up. Water once a week in summer and once every two weeks in winter. Just be careful to never over water your plant, or root rot could set in.

Growing & Maintaining A Plant

Growing an established plant is almost the same as growing a cutting. Salvia Divinorum can be very flexible about its growing conditions, but a quick change in conditions will most likely piss your plant right off. You have to consider that your plant has already been growing for probably quite some time in certain conditions, which it is now used to. These includes, but is not limited to, different light levels, compost, humidity, etc so it is very important to find out as much as you can about these conditions from the plant’s previous owner, then try to match those conditions as best you can. Once the plant has been repotted and is beginning to settle into it’s new environment, then you can slightly alter it’s environment a little each day until you have it growing in conditions easy for you to maintain.

The growth of the plant at first will be slow. Remember, it’s been shoved in an envelope for a few days with no light, so it’ll need to recover from that traumatic experience before it will even think about new growth. This can take up to around 2 weeks before any progress can be seen.

Look out for the leaves and edges of the plant turning brown, this means it is NOT in the right conditions. There are many things it could want, but chances are it’s something to do with humidity. Try misting the leaves if your environment is not very humid, or consider building a humidity tent or moving the plant into the bathroom, where people use the shower frequently. The stem, and possibly the leaves should return to normal in a couple of weeks. If not, cut the leaves off at the stem to facilitate new growth.

Sometimes the leaves might turn a yellowish colour. Never fear, it just means your plant could do with some more sun. This could be because other leaves on the plant are blocking out light, in which case, feel free to remove those other leaves and do with them what you will.

If your plant is wilting, it simply means it could do with more water. And if it’s bent, try rotating the pot 180 degrees. Plants will grow towards the sun, which could be causing the bowing in the stem.

Miscellaneous Tips

Automatic Watering – One method for ensuring your plant always has enough water is by setting up a low maintenance automatic watering system. You’ll need some organic rope (NOT plastic), a drill and a tray. Firstly drill two holes near the base of your pot in the side and push your rope into one side and out the other. Make sure there is plenty of slack inside the pot. The next step is to pot your plant or cutting as described above, only this time, wrap the slack from the rope around the root system of your plant before you pack it out with soil. You should now have one plant in its pot with two bits of rope hanging down from either side. Finally, place a couple of bricks, a lump of wood, or some other object into your tray and fill the tray up with water. Place your pot onto the bricks, wood, or whatever and allow the two pieces of rope to dangle into the water. This will automatically deliver enough water to the plant all the time.

Pinching – Pinching is a method to promote bushiness and outward growth in your plants instead of growing too tall. At the tip of each branch, there is a section called the apical meristem. This is where all the new growth comes from and is responsible for regulating a plant hormone called indole-3-acetic acid (IAA). This hormone promotes the growth of the main stem and inhibits sideways growth from nodes along the stem. If this hormone weren’t present in the plant, it would grow outwards instead of upwards, so it follows that if you remove the apical meristem, this hormone will no longer be produced and your plant will bush out instead of grow tall.

When your plant has reached the desired height, cutting off the top of the main stem with a clean sharp pair of scissors will safely stop the plant from growing taller, while maximising leaf output.

What better way to skim over the scientific method than by talking about Salvia Divinorum!

Bman_666, over at SalviaSource, had the very noble idea of applying a little science to growing salvia divinorum in order to dispel any myths or misconceptions about it, and maybe produce the ultimate “How To Grow Salvia” guide for salvia cultivators around the world.

Some of the variables under scrutiny are:

• Natural vs artificial light
• Different soil compositions / Fertilizer mixtures
• Effectiveness of CO2 supplements
• Contained growing (with controlled humidity) vs growing out in the open
• Will your TV kill your plant? [What?! - I suppose most scientific breakthroughs develop from "outside-the-box" thinking, so I'll reserve judgement...]
• Hydroponics vs Soil
• Watering frequency
• Misting the leaves vs not
• Varying soil pH
• Distilled/bottled/tap water comparisons

Noble goals indeed, but at the time of writing, Bman_666 wasn’t quite sure what he’d be letting himself in for! The first page of the thread in question contained some excellent insight about how the results might be structured within the forum, and some quick guidelines on standardisation, which are both important to prevent confusion and help mine accurate data. But there was one thing missing – repetition, they key to any scientific study.

Perhaps they’re way ahead of me, I thought – we could all take repetition for granted. Just to be extra vigilant (the, uhh, second key to any scientific study? It must some kind of many-keyed combination lock, with iris scanners ‘n’ all. A complicated beast!), I posted my advice on using 8-10 plants per variable to test. So, 4-5 plants for the control and another 4-5 differing in a single respect (ie, watered with deionised water). It turns out they weren’t as far ahead as I thought.

At this point, I’ll just point out I had to explain the same thing to someone in the lab today. We were setting up cell cultures in order to add varying concentrations of a drug (retinoic acid) to them to see what happens. For each concentration of the drug (dissolved in a solvent), we had a total of 8 cell cultures set up – 4 to receive the drug/solvent and 4 to receive the solvent without the drug, as a control. Since the concept of repetition seemed a less universal concept than I first realised, I figured I’d talk about it here.

So, back to this thread. My reply was the following:

Suppose your get set up with your soil cutting and your hydro cutting. If, for some unknown reason, the hydro cutting dies, all you can conclude is that hydro kills salvia plants.

Or, say in 1 week your hydro plant grows 10cm and your soil plant grows 9cm (I have no idea how fast it grows; figures are arbitrary). All you could conclude from that is that plants that grow in soil grow 90% as well as those with a hydro setup. Now, supposing you had 5 plants with each variable – the hydro plants grew this much {10,12,16,17,23} (average 15.6cm) and the soil plants grew by this much {5,7,8,8,9} (average 7.4) – as you can see this data suggests an approx 50% difference. Taking the tallest/shortest combinations of your 5 plants, you could end up with a height difference of as much as 18cm or as little as 1cm – working with only 1 plant per variable can give you very inaccurate data.

In reality, the ranges will likely be much narrower, but you should get the point. Even plants grown under identical conditions will not develop 100% identically, and that variable is one that you need to take into account, like any other (eg humidity). Because you can’t control that variable, the best you can do is eliminate its effects by using multiple data and averaging. You wouldn’t trust a drug that had been tested on a single individual, would you?

I hope that can highlight just how meticulous you have to be with your research. Growing only two plants side by side is great for a fun, personal experiment, but to further the collective knowledge in a particular field, you need to apply a strict scientific method.

Bman_666’s main concern with repetition was the number of plants he had available, which is fair enough. But serious science demands a serious commitment. From an idea in the mind of a chemist, to an actual prescribable drug, pharmaceuitical companies have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on research, involving trials of thousands of people.

While the details may be a bit out, the SalviaSource guys are certainly making tracks in the right direction. If you have 10 or so salvia clones lying around, maybe you can contribute to this fascinating project? Be sure to get involved @ SalviaSource!