I don't have figures because nobody has done the studies. Like I said... Completely unregulated.
R/quittingkratom has tens of thousands of members. So hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives seriously affected by it (every addict ruins multiple lives... Family and friends). That's to say nothing of the many dead from kratom.
If there are no studies and you're implying that kratom is a big problem, so what are you basing that on?
There are many subreddits related to quitting various things. If that's your metric for “lives ruined" there are dozens of other things that have ruined dozens of times more lives.
I mean, if there are hundreds of thousands of posts from Americans talking about how it's ruined them, how the hell are you going to respond with "show me the studies"?
1. Most of the posts on they sub have nothing to do with people's lives being "ruined".
2. Yeah its may be unhealthy but people do all kinds of unhealthy things to themselves.
3. 35k subs on a subreddit that seen around 12 years is TINY. There's a sub about quitting porn that has over a million.
4. Even though you claim there are "no studies", here's a study from the WHO. Where they concluded that no action beyond "monitoring" was warranted based on current evidence.
Fully informed people doing unhealthy things to themselves by choice is fine. That’s not how the kratom industry operates though. Instead, they cover up the dangers of the drug with “it’s in the coffee family”, straight up hiding it in “herbal teas”, and even covering up entire operations behind “kava bars”. It’s all slow sleazy, with the goal of creating addicts before they even realize what they’re addicted to.
R/quittingkratom has tens of thousands of members. So hundreds of thousands of people have had their lives seriously affected by it (every addict ruins multiple lives... Family and friends). That's to say nothing of the many dead from kratom.