The history of Kratom use

For all our professed knowledge about the world and drive for ever more complex technology, we in the West know very little about our forebears. As the US and Europe marauded around the world in the 1700’s and 1800’s we didn’t listen to the ‘savages’ we met but instead ‘civilised’ and enslaved them.

Consequently millennia of useful knowledge was wiped from humanity. Here’s one question that people don’t fully understand - how did the Mayan civilisation use cacao? We might know if the Spanish Conquistadors hadn’t massacred them.

As with cacao there are thousands of plants that have been used by various civilisations for a range of medical, religious and downright fun reasons, yet our haughty ‘civilised’ governments decide that ‘this one is good for you as I drink it’ (tea) or ‘there would be bloody revolution if we banned it’ (tobacco) / ‘organised crime would move into production if we banned that stuff’ (alcohol).

Mitragyna speciosa (known to us as Kratom) is one of those herbs that governments seem to be knee jerk banning without fully understanding. We also know very little about the history of its use - if we did we may have a widely available herbal remedy for opiate addiction, as an anti-inflammatory, something that stops intestinal problems (namely, the shits), and an alternative to coffee for a lift in the morning. Today it is readily available to buy kratom legally in many parts of the world, for people who use it for its medicinal properties that users report are often more effective than prescription painkillers.

A Kratom preparation doesn’t hit you like cocaine, but more like coffee. Consequently manual labourers working in paddy fields and on fishing boats in the fierce heat of the region need something to keep them going.

The plant is known by village folk to have other medicinal properties too - the research showed that, “Rural folk have traditionally ingested ketum leaves to self-treat common medical problems (e.g., diabetes, diarrhea, fever, and pain) and used it as a wound poultice.” Yes, a kratom preparation can stop the shits, and has recently been shown in modern medical science to be an excellent anti-inflammatory.

A final use that rural folk have long known about is that Kratom is good at tackling opium addiction. Is that why the British government last year outlawed the sale of kratom, because the City of London is the world’s financial capital for laundering drug money?

One thing our forefathers did when ‘civilising savages’ was introduce opium use to much of Southeast Asia. The UK even went to war with China to maintain their grip on the opium trade in the Opium Wars! Kratom however has been known in traditional medicine to help tackle the side effects of opium addiction.

Villagers’ use …

Again, since the ‘civilisers’ wiped much ancient knowledge from history, we can only rely on what rural folk know and a little about recently documented history. Modern research has found that kratom can work on the nervous system to calm the withdrawal effects of opium addiction. One paper explains, “Mitragynine, therefore, may exert several convergent pharmacological effects that could attenuate opioid withdrawal symptoms and blunt cravings.”

In the villages of Malaya and Thailand Kratom was used when there was a scarcity of opium to chill out with, and for those who had a bad habit to withdraw from opium addiction safely. This came to a head in the 1940’s when the Thai government banned it.

Thai government bans Kratom.

In the 1930’s there was a ‘bloodless coup’ in what was then called Siam where the military forced the Thai monarchy to become a constitutional monarchy and not have absolute power. The military also promised elections but these wouldn’t come until the 1970’s.

The government was hungry for revenues and spotting that opium was a very good business, it chose to tax the daylights out of the production and sale of the drug. According to one blog, this caused major social problems: “With this boom in opium consumption, there was also a boom in opium addicts, opium-related deaths,and general public health concerns that come with any drug, licit or illicit.”

Whether the government wants you to get trashed on a drug or not, you need to function in society. We all have a wish for a certain lifestyle and to look after our kids, and if we’re caned or drunk all the time are no use to anyone. People started cleaning up their act. How? The old herb in the forests, Mitragyna speciosa. Kratom grows in abundance on the Thai and Malay peninsula and was known in ancient tradition to help people out who had opium problems.

Consequently, in 1943 the Thai junta passed a law banning kratom use in an attempt to up opium use. It was reported, “A member of the House of Representatives from Lampang in a special meeting on 7 January 1943 (Police Major General Pin Amornwisaisoradej) said this: “Taxes for opium are high while kratom is currently not being taxed. With the increase of those taxes, people are starting to use kratom instead and this has had a visible impact on our government’s income.”

Genie out of the bottle

Banning a widely used and popular weed that is indigenous to your country is nigh impossible. The laws proved ineffective and despite the crazy laws, kratom use didn’t subside.

It is now widely seen as a great opiate use suppressant and today is used in many countries around the world to help people come off prescription painkiller and heroin addiction.

Listen to your folks …

When an older member of your family dies, so does their knowledge and wisdom. Western society ignores wisdom and elders’ knowledge at its own peril. We seem to have been destroying such knowledge for hundreds of years by ‘civilising people’ and even now are having to ‘rediscover’ things that we might have known for years if only we hadn’t been so snobby about our own ‘values’ and ‘knowledge’. Would kratom be used in modern medicine today instead of Methadone? We don’t know, and it is a sad fact of life that science is only now waking up to something our forefathers may have known in the time the Pyramids were being built in Egypt.

Interestingly, while a western country such as the UK has saught to restrict the sale of kratom, there are calls for it to be decriminalized in Thailand. Who’d have thought that Thailand could end up with having a more progressive drugs policy than the United Kingdom?