>Kratom can be used to treat or replace alcohol, cocaine and opiate addiction. This is a strange claim. Kratom alkaloids appear to be opioid receptor partial a

>Kratom can be used to treat or replace alcohol, cocaine and opiate addiction. This is a strange claim. Kratom alkaloids appear to be opioid receptor partial agonists [1]. De-escalation from opioids to kratom makes sense. Cocaine and alcohol addiction usually do not require "maintenance" post-rehab [2,3], unlike opioid dependence which is highly persistent [4], and this seems to muddy the story of a promising treatment [5] (it may compete favorably with buspirone and methadone) by mixing in stories of polydrug users who switched from cocaine to kratom. I think kratom deserves further investigation not because it is so miraculous but because the options for effective management of opioid use disorder are extremely limited, so I would think defenses of kratom should focus on this application in particular. It is certainly much less deadly than true opioids. 1: https://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/376/3/410.abstract https://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/376/3/410.abstract 2: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/206441 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst... 3: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376871603001674 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037687160... 4: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673698053562 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067369... 5: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40122-020-00151-x https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40122-020-00151-x