Posted by For most people reading this article, the safest assumption to make about 7-OH is that it is NOT a safe substance to consume on a daily basis, nor is it a healthy substance to consume even in a vacuum and on rare occasions. There is one very specific kind of user who can take 7-OH daily while keeping its effect relatively innocuous, although this user is a special case and doesn’t represent the 7-OH user who is going after 7-OH products or their alternatives to consume for its sedative or opiate-like effects. But more on that use case later. Let’s discuss 7-OH products themselves first.
7-OH is a highly addictive alkaloid found within Kratom. The older the Kratom leaf, the more present 7-OH is relative to the other active alkaloids. What’s key to understanding 7-OH and Kratom is that in youthful leaves, the 7-OH to Mitragynine ratio is very, very low, which means that the Mitragynine (MTG) is the overwhelmingly active alkaloid during consumption. This leads to an energizing feeling that Kratom made its fame with. Much akin to coffee, youthful Kratom leaves are consumed during workdays or as a morning ritual for some people, this practice is common in southeastern Asia, where Kratom is native.
In these youthful leaves, consumption of 7-OH is so minute that the opiate-like effects are not only not present, but the overall effect 7-OH has on the user’s body is often unnoticed and innocuous, even over a moderate length of daily intake (think 2-3 months of consumption, between 100 and 500 milligrams per day.) But in aged Kratom strains, often labeled as “Red” Kratom, owed to its coloring, the 7-OH to MTG ratio is swung heavily toward a higher 7-OH presence. Although the ratio still isn’t that staggering (7-OH is still present in small amounts), there is now enough 7-OH in this strain of Kratom to make the opiate effects dominant over the MTG’s energizing effects at high enough dosages.
In short, this means that users taking Red Kratom at 5grams or higher are consuming the Kratom, whether they know it or not, for the effects created by a highly addictive, dangerous substance that can cripple its users over time with habit-forming effects. It should go without saying that this is not only unsustainable from a health perspective, but even in an isolated case, the user consuming this Red Kratom, and in such a high dosage, is damaging their health not just in the long-term, but is making some kind of health sacrifice, even if temporary, the moment they partake.
And then there’s the experienced users who understand all of this and decide that they want to go straight to the source: products that are pure 7-OH or some kind of alternative. The truth is that I’m not in a position to tell someone what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives, and as long as a substance is legal to purchase where you live, you have the right to consume it. However, there’s really no way to consume 7-OH in a healthy manner. Some use it for pain management where their prescribed medications fail to do the job, and others have tried using it to slowly get off of other drugs, but ultimately these are just forms of making “less-bad” health choices in trade of others, not forms of making healthy choices altogether.
This is to say nothing of consuming 7-OH daily. It should be fairly obvious at this point that, unless you’re the specific Kratom consumer who takes their Kratom in moderate doses and only with youthful strains, there’s no way to consume 7-OH daily and avoid it’s habit-forming effects, alongside it’s other nasty problems, one of which includes horrific withdrawal symptoms.
In short, the only way to consume 7-OH daily in a sustainable manner is to consume Kratom in such a way that you minimize it out of necessity using youthful Kratom strains and moderate Kratom dosages for an energetic effect. Those who successfully consume 7-OH in this manner indeed do so precisely because they aren’t seeking out 7-OH in the first place.
You might be interested in reading “7-OH Tablets vs. Shots.”