Its not really a single rule rather a combination of more regulations for botanical mixtures and difficulties with patents such that drug companies always prefer to isolate and market molecules rather than mixtures. The idea is to know and control everything about the drug.
In cases like this and basically all opiates that's clearly a dumb policy since concentrating the active ingredient promotes abuse and probably eliminates the other ingredients which induce the nausea that prevents abuse and makes kratom safe :/
Few died in the opium dens of the past. Today opiate addiction gives you a decent chance of dying in an od and its due to this policy.
I believe he means that they don't let approved drugs be natural plant matters or organic stuff, for example. They will extract the mitragynine, develop an analogue, patent it, and sell it.
Which is unfortunate not least because some people prefer the fact that kratom (that is, mitragynine with all the other stuff that naturally comes with it) has been more safety-tested by thousands of years of use..
It might actually be the case that 7-OH-mitragynine is the most potent form of mitragynine - failed attempts have been made at finding a more potent analogue[1]. This could be a hindrance to a pharmaceutical product being produced.
I think this is a clear case where a pharmaceutical shouldn't be produced at all. Rehabs should be able to distribute the botanical which is already helping thousands of addicts. It will never happen because there is no profit in marketing vegetables.
I strongly suspect this move to ban kratom is related to growing profitability in the US market of subutex as a dependence treatment. Unlike a botanical subutex is readily abused, often intravenously.
Manufacturers and the FDA know from basic epidemiology that prescriptions of all opiates far outpace the diseases they are indicated to treat. I have to believe somewhere on someone's email there is hard evidence pharma knowingly promotes abuse.
Not really but it helps. For instance LOVAZA is a patented form of fish oil so I imagine that you could prepare kratom in a special way, patent it, get it through the FDA, and market it as KRATOR or something. But of course there's also the DEA to consider...
Is that true?
I thought there was an ADHC drug that was combined with some kind of enzyme inhibitor or inducer? (sorry, forget the name!)
Also Sativex is undergoing Phase III trials in the USA, and it contains both THC and CBD (and I think terpenes and possibly CBN and CBG).