|
Google Jeb Bush posted:I'm going to take any pro-kratom stuff with a huge grain of salt personally, because (as mentioned in the thread) the industry is pretty sleazy and the big guy in the industry group would (and possibly does) make developing world oligarchs go "whoa man, maybe cool your jets a little". It's a legit dangerous opioid, just less so than street versions. I do agree that banning Kratos without taking a look at how to assist the people utilizing it would be a bit silly, but that just means the answer is "staple something about that to the bill / policy and also have relevant agencies and organizations ready". 
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 03:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 15:22 |
|
|
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 03:54
|
|
|
Once again a mod refuses to ban someone with a known history of violent abuse.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 03:57
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Once again a mod refuses to ban someone with a known history of violent abuse. The mods can ban him when they earn him.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 05:04
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:From the DoJ: Security costs money, think of the shareholders... Sorry, ratepayers. This poo poo makes my life hell sometimes.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 05:47
|
|
|
I'm watching Colbert with a traveling nurse and an octogenarian and we suddenly arrived upon the realization - all three of us - that we see Taylor Swift in our feed at least twice as much as we see Donald Trump. So I logged on to announce that here. I'm sorry. Happy new thread!
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 06:33
|
|
|
Kratom is a potentially incredibly addictive partial mu agonist that in some cases is harder to get people off of than fentanyl. Some people it just melts. I used suboxone tapers to get people off. And people ruin themselves financially on that stuff. It’s very fast up but also fast down and patients develop a tolerance very quickly. I had patients who were spending several hundred a day on it and losing their family’s and homes. One power contractor installed gps on their fleet vehicles because they were worried about technicians getting high off of it during work, or having all their trucks in front of a head shop. It also causes seizures. Dont use Kratom. Do not buy drugs from the gas station.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 06:41
|
|
|
FizFashizzle posted:Kratom is a potentially incredibly addictive partial mu agonist that in some cases is harder to get people off of than fentanyl. Some people it just melts. I used suboxone tapers to get people off. And people ruin themselves financially on that stuff. It’s very fast up but also fast down and patients develop a tolerance very quickly. I had patients who were spending several hundred a day on it and losing their family’s and homes. One power contractor installed gps on their fleet vehicles because they were worried about technicians getting high off of it during work, or having all their trucks in front of a head shop. But what if the gas station is really convenient, it's on my way home!
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 07:04
|
|
|
FizFashizzle posted:Kratom is a potentially incredibly addictive partial mu agonist that in some cases is harder to get people off of than fentanyl. Some people it just melts. I used suboxone tapers to get people off. And people ruin themselves financially on that stuff. It’s very fast up but also fast down and patients develop a tolerance very quickly. I had patients who were spending several hundred a day on it and losing their family’s and homes. One power contractor installed gps on their fleet vehicles because they were worried about technicians getting high off of it during work, or having all their trucks in front of a head shop. I believe the dominant product out there is a mix of kratom and kava. Do you have any sense of how those might interact?
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 07:16
|
|
|
Don't forget that Florida still doesn't have recreational cannabis (delta 8 analogs are everywhere though). Kratom and kava are what we got. Tourists get sucked into it all the time here. I know people (in healthcare) that drink that poo poo at work. "Oh, it's the stimulating kind." Yeah, keep telling yourself that. The botanical tea shops, which at least try to have some harm reduction literature available, seem to be okay in the way they handle their sales and business. The headshops & gas stations probably should be banned from sales. I wouldn't be surprised to hear half those OTC products are adulterated with banned/regulated FDA compounds (like finding steroids in pre workout or tadalafil in horny goat weed pills). Discendo Vox posted:I believe the dominant product out there is a mix of kratom and kava. Do you have any sense of how those might interact? Broadly speaking, kava works like a benzo on the gaba receptors and kratom works like an opiate on the opiate receptors. You can expect about the same interactions as those two drug classes. So respiratory depression, loss of coordination, drowsiness, etc etc. iirc, fatal outcomes have been documented when mixing the two. Edit- That being said, a lot of people mix the two still, because they're very mild compounds in general. Just like a lot of people mix benzos and opiates and alcohol. ummel fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Feb 1, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 12:18
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:I believe the dominant product out there is a mix of kratom and kava. Do you have any sense of how those might interact? None whatsoever. It’s so unregulated you’re rarely ever getting what it says is in the bag. But just briefly looking up, Kava is GABAnergic, so it counteracts glutamate. Like a dime store gabapentin basically. No idea of its potency, but anything taken in large amount that mediates glutamate can cause seizures when abruptly disrupted (alcohol, benzos). Mix it with something that’s highly addictive too? Easy math.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 12:29
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:Eh, her voters had a decent idea of what they were getting with her. All her old leftist rhetoric was long gone by the time she set her sights on Congress. By 2018, she was pretty much openly campaigning on her willingness to defy Democratic leadership and show how independent and unconcerned with partisan politics she was. She had still some left, like ‘protecting women’s reproductive rights’, which is what got a lot of people voting for her, and then she decided that she should do that by…. blocking passage of bills doing just that. That one got a lot of people mad. Basically compromise is fine, but when your compromise is “screwing over your own side for no gain on important causes”, that starts to piss people off. She voted with the Dems 90% of the time, but if the 10% she didn’t had been on non- or less important stuff, then she wouldn’t be in this trouble. Unfortunately, that 10% was on stuff that was extremely important to her base.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 12:36
|
|
|
Uglycat posted:I'm watching Colbert with a traveling nurse and an octogenarian and we suddenly arrived upon the realization - all three of us - that we see Taylor Swift in our feed at least twice as much as we see Donald Trump. Yes, the conservatives fear Taylor Swift, not just because she can mobilize voters against them, but also because she can be the Dems answer to Trump. The idea of the Swift-Ocasio-Cortez 2028 keeps them up at nights.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 12:50
|
|
|
Kchama posted:She had still some left, like ‘protecting women’s reproductive rights’, which is what got a lot of people voting for her, and then she decided that she should do that by…. blocking passage of bills doing just that. That one got a lot of people mad. Yeah. She is trying to be McCain but with none of what McCain did. I don’t like the fucker and he did it for poo poo reasons but he saved my healthcare by thumbs down. He went against the grain to stop something unpopular. Sinema saw that and didn’t get the message and kept trying to do it for popular stuff or stuff the party wanted. She sees the imagery but doesn’t understand the context.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 13:15
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:Everyone knows she started out super left, but what doesn't get so much attention is that every time she encountered a political obstacle or wanted to move up a rung on the political ladder, "moving to the right" was the strategy that consistently helped her overcome those challenges. Moderate compromise worked pretty well to bring her success in Arizona state politics, but she failed to understand its limitations and she failed to understand how national politics were changing under Trump. That seems like a pretty good point. So the missing piece of the puzzle with Sinema is that she found One Weird Trick to win her local races -- move to the right in left wing races -- but didn't really understand why or how that was working for her, so she just kept pressing the button harder expecting the same candy to drop out.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 14:15
|
|
|
Big thanks to all the Kratom info being posted here. We currently have a Kratom issue developing with a member of our family (combined with mental illness as well) and this is providing very useful. Also my sister, an alcoholic, died of liver and other organ failure 5 years ago and apparently this family member had gotten her taking Kratom as well. Not so say it couldn't have just been the alcohol abuse, but now I'm wondering if the Kratom was part of it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 16:54
|
|
|
PhazonLink posted:listening to afternoon npr, and they're talking about some new herbal supplement notdrug call Kratom, never heard of it, but im a lame straightedge nerd. also i dont live in FL. (the guest journalist are in FL) My girlfriend has been going to a kava bar a couple of times after work and I just found out she is drinking Kratom tea and not Kava here in Florida. Just had to have a talk with her about it because she wasn't even aware of what it was and how addictive it can be to some people. I don't think she is addicted yet because we have been able to go away on a few trips recently without her having any or wanting for a week at a time or so but yeah yikes. So far she has significantly reduced her intake of it but yeah I don't think people realize what it is and it is just sold as a natural tea at these Kava bars. She stopped going to real bars when she quit drinking alcohol we thought kava bars were a better replacement for the social experience. Pretty upsetting to hear that this might actually be worse than alcohol. Due to my own health issues, I don't really drink any of that stuff and when I join her I only drink Kombucha.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 17:35
|
|
|
Google Jeb Bush posted:Huh. The numbers are still quite low, but looks like you're right, firearms seem to be involved in a plurality of child deaths, taking the lead somewhere in the last decade. I think one of the things that threw my dim recollection is that some of the stats file "accidents" as the leading cause, rather than breaking out "firearm related accidents" and making it a bit easier to sum up with homicides and suicides. just more proof imo that firearms are a public health problem It has been a big topic of discussion and area of advocacy in my field since these numbers were discussed more than a year ago. The most conveniently put together site from Google is this one which tells you how to use the CDC Wonder tool to recreate the query. For multiple years firearm deaths have overtaken loving heart disease, all other trauma, and cancer as the leading cause of death for children. It's just super depressing and I know how well received gun control topics are. Not to derail any further with this tangent discussion from someone's tongue in cheek comment.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 18:18
|
|
|
haveblue posted:Sinema is like the Civil War I always loved this joke about the Civil War, thank you for reminding me of it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 18:26
|
|
|
Kratom sounds like a cool elder god of the abyss and I'm upset it's just a lovely drug for idiots.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 19:45
|
|
|
Leon Trotsky 2012 posted:Thanks for the link. That is most likely the explanation and it is a great piece of journalism. People usually (if not always) die from unregulated kratom being mixed with other things (either more powerful drugs or other contaminants). It seems like the stuff people are buying on the street (or in gas stations, etc) is frequently mixed/contiminated with other substances. This isn't meant to be a defense of kratom, though. It's still a very addictive substance, and anyone trying to act like it's not (which I believe is the American Kratom Association's line) is completely full of poo poo. Back in the early 10s I was addicted to kratom and later a kratom "extract" that I'm 99% sure had something mixed in with it (because it was literally the only kratom-related product that had those effects - effects strong enough that they can punch through suboxone, which is absolutely *not* true for plain kratom leaf in any dose). That "extract" was the far more serious problem, and where comparisons to other hard opioids like heroin, oxycontin, etc become reasonable. I suspect FizFashizzle may be referring to people on stuff like that (and I wouldn't be surprised if other "mixes" having been spreading on the streets and in headshops, etc) because that's the only plausible way you could end up spending so much money on kratom (which is exactly what happened to me at the time, and resulted in me getting on suboxone). Normal kratom leaf (that isn't spiked/mixed/contaminated with anything) has an obvious peak to its effect - if you take more than that, it just makes you feel kind of sick and lovely (and not in an overdose way, but in a "I ate too much food and want to lay down" way). And that peak is reached very quickly. It's still an addictive opioid, but a comparatively mild one that it's probably impossible to overdose on by itself. It's hard to explain how obvious this is if you haven't experienced it yourself (and why it immediately becomes apparent if there's something else mixed in or acting as a contaminant). My personal view on kratom is that it should definitely be regulated and probably be legalized to reduce/prevent the sale of unregulated kratom, because the biggest problem (and the cause of most kratom-related deaths) is kratom being mixed or contaminated with other substances. It seems like most of these deaths have only started popping up as its been spreading on the streets, being sold in headshops, etc. Back when I was using it, around 2009-2013 or so, people only ordered it directly from the countries in Southeast Asia where it was harvested. In those countries, Kratom addiction is also a problem. But deaths were very rare and usually (if not always) attributed to mixing with other substances. Severe "life-ruining" addictions at the time (in the US) were nearly always attributed to the specific "extract" I mentioned above. Anyone familiar with this history will immediately know exactly what I'm talking about; it was - and apparently still is - a huge problem. It seems like the more serious health issues happening in more recent years have coincided with the increased sale of kratom in headshops, gas stations, etc. Just to reiterate - this isn't in any way a defense of kratom. No one should be using kratom outside of maybe people who are already addicted to more serious opiates. If you ever feel like trying it out - don't do it! It's a partial mu-agonist and, as a result, very addictive! It isn't comparable with something like marijuana, which is the comparison a lot of kratom proponents seem to use. I'm just arguing in favor of it being regulated, because most of the danger seems to come from mixing/contamination. The "kratom is killing people!" stuff seems aimed at criminalizing it, which would only make things worse. While we're on the topic of "technically-legal drugs that you should absolutely avoid," I should probably mention Tianeptine. This is another drug that is a mu-opioid agonist that has become a major problem in recent years. I believe it was initially prescribed in much lower doses as an antidepressant in Europe/Russia, but it's become a big problem in the last few years. It's a horrible substance that is responsible for the worst years of my life from 2015-2017. A recent NYTimes article about it - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/health/gas-station-heroin-tianeptine-addiction.html
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 19:59
|
|
|
Thank you for sharing your personal experience.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 20:40
|
|
|
Discendo Vox posted:Kratom is not banned under the CSA but it's also not lawful as an ingredient in food, dietary supplements or drugs. It's not sold legally; there's just not sufficient enforcement. FDA seized the product at one of the largest manufacturers last year, though I don't think they actually shut them down; my impression is they're fearful because it's a multibillion dollar industry headed by people who make big tobacco look innocent. If you see a state bill trying to "regulate" kratom, that's the AKA trying for state legalization to interfere with federal regulation by tying their product to the state's revenue scheme. Can you dive into this a bit? I'm reading that you think the FDA is fearful of the folks heading the kratom industry because they're worse than the big tobacco folks? What are they afraid of - gangland executions? Public smear campaigns? It's the federal government, kinda weird to hear about them being fearful of anyone other than other state entities.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 20:44
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/rpyers/status/1752914377395851642 This is like, struggling state party numbers....
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 20:51
|
|
|
probably the RNC is struggling because it's all going right to Trump right
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:03
|
|
|
Tatsuta Age posted:probably the RNC is struggling because it's all going right to Trump right Only for the time it takes to transfer into and out of his account to E. Jean Carroll 
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:04
|
|
|
For comparison the DNC raised $97m in 2023Q4
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:04
|
|
|
zoux posted:https://twitter.com/rpyers/status/1752914377395851642 How much is this because Trump PACs are just vacuuming up all the fundraising? Down-ballot races will be starved for cash.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:05
|
|
|
Would be really interested to see that same fundraising comparison with all the Trump PACs/other fundraising orgs tied to him, and see if the total has fallen as much, or if he’s just successfully hijacked the party fundraising apparatus
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:05
|
|
|
davecrazy posted:How much is this because Trump PACs are just vacuuming up all the fundraising? Didn't this happen in 2016 too?
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:06
|
|
|
Failed Imagineer posted:For comparison the DNC raised $97m in 2023Q4 "Oh, that's a comparable number I guess it's not... Wait, yearly RNC numbers beaten by a single quarter of Dem fundraising?!  "
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:07
|
|
|
MAGA Inc raised $46 m in the second half of 2023 for a yearly total of $59m. Unfortunately, that's only $4 m more than the big boy spent on legal last yearquote:Two of Trump’s committees, Save America leadership PAC and the Make America Great Again PAC, spent $55.6 million on legal bills in 2023, including $29.9 million in the second half of the year, according to the new reports released Wednesday.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:11
|
|
|
Ms Adequate posted:Only for the time it takes to transfer into and out of his account to E. Jean Carroll There is no chance, no chance at all, that he's not skimming before doing that, when he's finally forced to do that.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:17
|
|
|
zoux posted:https://twitter.com/rpyers/status/1752914377395851642 it feels a tiny copey but i think alot of it is trumps eating the money, lots of quiet corruption like with scott, true believers replacing various good earners and alot of billionares staying out of it because they want haley types or dems nstead of maga. also with suburbs moving more blue, the GOP is reliant on the chud base and the chud base just donates to trumps scam poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:23
|
|
|
Dapper_Swindler posted:it feels a tiny copey but i think alot of it is trumps eating the money, lots of quiet corruption like with scott, true believers replacing various good earners and alot of billionares staying out of it because they want haley types instead of maga. I mean I have no doubt the money men can turn on the spigots when they want but that still shows a shocking lack of donor buy in for the year leading up to the election.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:24
|
|
|
DarkHorse posted:"Oh, that's a comparable number I guess it's not... Yeah, I had to read that a couple times to realize the magnitude of the difference. I don't think it's just because people are donating directly to Trump.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:24
|
|
|
zoux posted:I mean I have no doubt the money men can turn on the spigots when they want but that still shows a shocking lack of donor buy in for the year leading up to the election. because they know their money will get flushed away for some new case that trump has. they also arnt getting anything out of the gop. its just insane circus poo poo. the GOP is too crazy for alot of donors of various stripes. i also wouldnt be shocked if alot of money from suburbs just isnt happening anymore because the GOP pissed them off and away. Dapper_Swindler fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Feb 1, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:29
|
|
|
zoux posted:I mean I have no doubt the money men can turn on the spigots when they want but that still shows a shocking lack of donor buy in for the year leading up to the election. Yep, there's probably no better indicator that you will definitely turn out to vote than being a donor. Well, maybe having a MAGA tattoo or being in the KKK, but y'know what I mean
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:29
|
|
|
Even the GOP's control of the house is threatening various tax cuts, since they can't keep their caucus cohesive enough to pass legislation and negotiate.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 15:22 |
|
|
DarkHorse posted:"Oh, that's a comparable number I guess it's not... I made the same exact mistake  Absolutely astonishing. The Republicans are in so much trouble.Captain_Maclaine posted:There is no chance, no chance at all, that he's not skimming before doing that, when he's finally forced to do that. Ideally his finances will eventually get sufficiently untangled, under constant scrutiny, and under the control of courts and their appointed caretakers that he simply can't, but unless that actually happens - and I think there's a snowball's chance of it - you're absolutely correct.
|
|
#
?
Feb 1, 2024 21:47
|
|