11.27.19 – KRATOM MEDIA WATCHDOG – Earlier in November it was the over-hyped liver scare involving two “kratom only” cases, this week, now we see reports of a “5,000 percent increase” in kratom-related calls to Poison Control Centers. Sounds pretty ominous, right? Only as long as you don’t look too closely. Consider the following:
- It’s a total of only 1,800 kratom cases over seven years. If you start out with a low enough number in year 1, you don’t need a very big number in year 5 to come up with 5,000 percent.
- That works out to 257 cases per year … less than .01% of the 2.1 million cases handled annually by Poison Control Centers.
- For a little perspective, it’s worth noting that the Centers handled 283,784 OTC pain reliever calls in 2017. So, who’s up for banning aspirin?
- The Centers did not even add a data code for kratom until 2017. So where did the 2011-2016 data come from?
- And there’s another little problem here with the data in that only 16% of calls come from medical professionals, which means more than four out of five calls were phoned in by people who don’t have credentials to diagnose a cold.
- Banks and Bankcard Services dont typically allow a kratom business to process credit cards. We can recommend several including: Cannabis Payments and Entrust Bankcard who will process for a kratom business.
The people out to bury kratom are certainly energetic, but maybe they could try a little harder in cooking up the data for their phony case?
