Vancouver, BC researchers take issue with U.S. FDA’s alarmist memo on kratom
“The FDA is creating, essentially, public hysteria,” Paula Brown, director of the B.C. Institute of Technology’s natural health and food producers research group, said in a telephone interview. “I’m very skeptical that kratom could actually be attributed as a cause of death.”
Zachary Walsh, an associate professor in UBC’s department of psychology and co-director of the Centre for the Advancement of Psychological Science and Law, expressed the same skepticism for the FDA’s findings … He took issue with the evidence on which the FDA based the conclusions presented in its memo.If kratom acts like an opioid, it must be dangerous, right? Brown and Walsh both told the Straight that’s not necessarily true. “When you have one computer model interacting with another computer model, I’m reluctant to call it news,” Walsh said. “It does seem to mimic some of the activities of opioids but it doesn’t cause respiratory depression,” he continued. “It does act on some of the same pathways [as opioids] and the subjective effects are somewhat similar but way weaker [than opioids].” Brown said the same. “Predicting compound activity by structural modelling and theoretical comparisons has been proven to be problematic and not terribly effective,” she explained. “This is a theoretical approach and cannot be considered empirical scientific evidence. We just can’t do a good job at predicting specific activity based on chemical structure.”
Original Article (Straight.com):
Vancouver researchers take issue with U.S. FDA’s alarmist memo on kratom
Artwork Fair Use: Dr.kwan
