About Natural Kratom Leaf
Kratom leaves are harvested from trees. Then, the leaves are dried and milled. From there, the leaves are further processed for packaging or encapsulation.
Natural kratom leaf products most commonly exist in the form of crushed leaf, powdered leaf, and powdered leaf in capsules or tablets.
The natural kratom leaf products offer the consumer the product as it’s used traditionally: in its natural state, without any alteration of the concentration. The content of mitragynine, the primary active ingredient in kratom, is typically 0.5% to 1.5%.
Adulterated Kratom
Unfortunately, the marketplace abounds with adulterated kratom products.
There is strong evidence that some commercial kratom products are adulterated. Some of these are even promoted as being natural.
Vendors are “spiking” their products with synthetic alkaloids to give their products an edge. In some cases, kratom products containing illegal and/or prescription drugs are being found.
Here are a few instances where reports of adulterated kratom have surfaced, and we will be adding more:
- In a published study co-authored by Dr. McCurdy, multiple commercially available kratom products were found to have significantly elevated levels of 7-hydroxymitragynine. The study concluded that the increased concentrations were likely artificial because they were 5x higher than natural levels. 1
- In a June 2017 presentation, Dr. McCurdy recounted a few episodes of kratom samples that tested positive for hydrocodone. In both cases the individuals claimed they were using pure kratom but the forensic evidence suggested otherwise. One of the samples tested positive for morphine as well. 2
- There was a commercial product called Krypton that contained kratom and O-desmethyltramadol. O-desmethyltramadol is a metabolite of tramadol, a commonly prescribed analgesic. Krypton began appearing in Sweden in 2009. 3
What can be done?
Dr. Christopher McCurdy is doing more extensive research right now on kratom products in the market to determine how widespread these issues are.
You must be wary of the quality of the kratom you use. We here at Super Speciosa subject every batch of our products to third party lab testing using high-performance thin-layer chromatography (HPTLC), an enhanced laboratory technique, to ensure that our products contain only natural kratom leaf constituents.
References:
1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27752985
2 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yH7btQWJagv-y_WO8q7pqMtxGYwoppbo/view
3 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21513619
Learn more about kratom quality and good manufacturing practices:
