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For anyone interested in trying kava recreationally (or really any new psychoactive drug), I highly recommend you read up on Erowid before partaking in consumpt

by vichu 7y ago

For anyone interested in trying kava recreationally (or really any new psychoactive drug), I highly recommend you read up on Erowid before partaking in consumption. Erowid is an amazing repository of knowledge, from scientific articles to dosage recommendations to anecdotal trip reports. Link here: https://erowid.org/plants/kava/ https://erowid.org/plants/kava/

markdown 7y ago
While Erowid is great for obscure drugs, you'll get much better info from communities of thousands of active kava drinkers like /r/kava and kavaforums.com That Erowid page is pretty useless since the vast majority of reports on there aren't about kava at all but about kavalactones extracted from kava root and put into capsules and tinctures. That's like a review page claiming to be about coffee but in fact filled with reports of people taking caffeine powder. This is a problem because just like caffeine doesn't have a long history of safe use (and in fact there have been recent fatalities from it) in comparison to coffee, kavalactone products have been blamed in a number of liver injury cases while kava has a long history of safe use. Also, the Erowid page on the liver FUD is almost two decades out of date. The WHO report in 2016 pretty much cleared traditionally prepared noble kava. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kava/wiki/does-kava-cause-liver-damage https://www.reddit.com/r/Kava/wiki/does-kava-cause-liver-dam... Kava is a beverage made from water and the root of the kava plant. This is so both in the traditional sense (what the word means in the Pacific Islands) as well as in legal sense (as it will soon be listed in the Codex Alimentarius). Pharma and nutraceutical firms trying to peddle kavalactone products while piggybacking on the long history of safe use of kava are doing the world a disservice.
- vichu 7y ago
  Thank you for the clarification. I personally have never drank kava or used any sort of kava derived product, but I have used Erowid to great benefit concerning a wide range of other substances and thought that the information there would be up to a similar standard. Still, there is information there that echoes what you’ve outlined in your comment - so it doesn’t seem like it was all hooey. How does that saying go? The road to good answers is paved through Cunningham’s law? :)

by vichu 7y ago

markdown 7y ago

While Erowid is great for obscure drugs, you'll get much better info from communities of thousands of active kava drinkers like /r/kava and kavaforums.com That Erowid page is pretty useless since the vast majority of reports on there aren't about kava at all but about kavalactones extracted from kava root and put into capsules and tinctures. That's like a review page claiming to be about coffee but in fact filled with reports of people taking caffeine powder. This is a problem because just like caffeine doesn't have a long history of safe use (and in fact there have been recent fatalities from it) in comparison to coffee, kavalactone products have been blamed in a number of liver injury cases while kava has a long history of safe use. Also, the Erowid page on the liver FUD is almost two decades out of date. The WHO report in 2016 pretty much cleared traditionally prepared noble kava. See also: https://www.reddit.com/r/Kava/wiki/does-kava-cause-liver-damage https://www.reddit.com/r/Kava/wiki/does-kava-cause-liver-dam... Kava is a beverage made from water and the root of the kava plant. This is so both in the traditional sense (what the word means in the Pacific Islands) as well as in legal sense (as it will soon be listed in the Codex Alimentarius). Pharma and nutraceutical firms trying to peddle kavalactone products while piggybacking on the long history of safe use of kava are doing the world a disservice.

vichu 7y ago
Thank you for the clarification. I personally have never drank kava or used any sort of kava derived product, but I have used Erowid to great benefit concerning a wide range of other substances and thought that the information there would be up to a similar standard. Still, there is information there that echoes what you’ve outlined in your comment - so it doesn’t seem like it was all hooey. How does that saying go? The road to good answers is paved through Cunningham’s law? :)