Posted by As much as I’d like to believe that natural is better, it doesn’t always mean safe. Botanicals like kratom, 7-OH, and mushrooms exist in a legal grey area. Sure, you can easily find them online and locally, but their lack of regulation means no standards and consistent dosing for safety. That hasn’t stopped people from seeing them as wellness alternatives to pharmaceuticals, but even so, users need to be their own best advocates.
There are as many as two to fifteen million Americans that use kratom on a regular basis – and that’s just kratom, not including users of other botanicals, or people who use kratom and others. It’s more important than ever to understand how to responsibly approach botanicals.
Botanical Categories
Consider these three categories that often overlap:
- Traditional ethnobotanicals that have a history of medicinal, cultural, and social uses in their native regions, or products based on them (such as kratom capsules or kratom and kava shots)
- Novel or concentrated isolated extracts such as 7-hydroxymitragynine (7-OH), Pseudoindoxyl Mitragynine (Pseudo), or synthetic, non-psilocybin mushrooms (like Mindless Mushrooms)
- Designer blends and nutraceuticals that borrow plant compounds but alter concentrations through synthetic means, such as Oxonol (an enhanced kratom alkaloid blend)
One of the pluses of being an unregulated market is that every vendor can determine their own composition, potency, and purity of their products. It’s like the Wild West of botanicals. These differences can make any random vendor unique with regards to sourcing, quality, and product offerings, too.
How to Approach Botanicals
Here are some important tips for keeping yourself safe and up-to-date on the latest information on any botanicals you buy.
Verify Sourcing Before Anything Else
Independent, third-party lab testing is the bare minimum to look out for with any vendor. You can see the results for contaminants like heavy metals, pesticides, and pathogens for each product in a Certificate of Analysis (COA). Reputable alignments like American Kratom Association (AKA) certification or Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) compliance are voluntary, but very much a bonus. They or the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA) also publicly share batch numbers and lab data.
There is also transparency of ingredients to consider. Product purity and concentration should be visible, as should the ingredients of a particular product. If a vendor can’t tell you what’s in their product, it shouldn’t be in your body.
Measure, Don’t Guess Doses
It’s up to you to engage in the regulation that unregulated botanicals don’t have. Your product should have precise dosing with usage directions. There should be a recommendation of dosing for beginners or first-timers. When in doubt, take half of whatever the directions say and wait up to an hour to see how you feel.
If the product label doesn’t have that information, don’t guess – use a digital milligram scale. Some people use a teaspoon or a scoop (say, kratom powder) but this method cannot guarantee any consistency of the active ingredients.
Regardless of dosing directions, you’ll want to keep track of your intake and effects. Doing so can help you learn if you’re developing a tolerance or adverse reactions, and exactly what dosage that happens at.
Give Your Body a Break – Reset Your Biology
Many botanicals have some kind of risk of developing tolerance, dependency, and addiction. Others are more about tolerance and psychological habit, which isn’t as bad, but something you’d still want to avoid. Not using a botanical too frequently is the best way to ensure that. The problem is, what counts as too often?
Instead of taking too large of a dose for even more potent effects, it’s better to have a 4-hour window of time where you can take another fraction of a dose. At that time, most of the active compounds in your body have cleared, and your brain chemistry becomes sensitive again.
The other side to this is alternating when you take the botanical. Dosing every other day (kratom or 7-OH) or every few days (mushrooms) keeps the botanical at peak effectiveness and prevents you from feeling like you need more of it to get the same effects or that you need it to get by every day. Taking advantage of timing, such as using kratom when you need to be productive, works with your body’s rhythm rather than against it.
Intent Determines Scheduling Protocol
Think about whether you are using the botanical for experimentation, self-treatment (e.g. therapeutically for anxiety, depression, or pain relief), or performance (e.g. exercise, study, chores, hobbies, or work). You’ll also want to choose the right environment (probably at home) and a predictable time of day; a botanical may have different benefits depending on whether it is taken during the morning, afternoon, or evening, while others are only for daytime or evening use or have dose-specific effects (such as kratom).
Avoiding Tolerance and Switching Compounds
A common theme among beginning users is haphazardly increasing dosage. One way to counteract this is by rotating between different strains of kratom or switching to a different botanical that works on a totally different neurochemistry and won’t overlap with that of the other (e.g. kava or ashwagandha).
Even just a few days of consecutive dosing can cause feelings of tolerance, although the typical time period is after one to two weeks. Allowing 48 hours of rest will reset the brain and liver and allow them to get back to normal baseline level. Think of it like the recovery sets in weight training: They let you keep going in the long term.
Tracking and Observation
To make up for the lack of legal oversight for botanical vendors, you, the user, need to self-monitor. That notebook or digital journal may include:
- Botanical information (e.g. strain, type, batch ID, other details)
- Source and exact dosing
- Time taken and accompanying factors (food, sleep, stress, etc.)
- Subjective effects you feel and their duration
This is a scientific, responsible approach. Over a period of weeks, you’ll see patterns you normally wouldn’t. Tracking lets you avoid physiological dependence before it takes hold.
Legal and Ethical Considerations
It’s easy to assume that just because a botanical is sold somewhere, it must be okay according to local laws. Not so! Sometimes, local regulations suddenly change. Not only can substance scheduling vary by country and state, but even by city or municipality.
Unfortunately, a botanical being legal at both federal and state levels doesn’t guarantee safety or purity, so the tips about doing your due diligence still hold true. Ethical sourcing is also important when the botanical product comes from a cultural plant, signalling respect for its role and the people that cultivate and harvest it.
Being a Responsible User
Information is your key to success for using botanicals safely and effectively. The point is to enhance your well-being, not work against it. But only if you use botanicals responsibly, with awareness over impulsiveness, can you do so.
If you’re looking for a botanical vendor, we recommend Real Botanicals. As one of our favorite vendors, their strict standards for quality control and no-nonsense approach to products is second to none.
See “Kratom Can Interact with Other Substances. Here’s How.“