The College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at Washington State University will conduct a 5-year long study on kratom. The study is funded by a $7.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
NIH has previously given millions in grants to universities for the purpose of studying kratom via the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), including grants to University of Florida, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and University of Kentucky.
Mary Paine, a Pharmaceutical Sciences professor at WSU, told WSU Insider that chronic pain sufferers amount to “over 1.6 billion people in the world. In the U.S., it’s about 60 million people. And there’s a vicious cycle between chronic pain and a cascade of negative effects, including poor sleep, anxiety, reduced quality of life and other problems. That’s why it’s important to do this work — it could potentially help tens of millions of people in this country and billions of people worldwide.”
The project will also include researchers from University of Arizona and University of North Carolina Greensboro. Researchers will conduct a sleep study in people with chronic back pain as well as mouse models using a purified form of kratom.
In recent years, more and more clinical trials researching kratom have been conducted, including one by the Food and Drug Administration that administered plain leaf kratom to healthy participants.
Classifying kratom as Schedule I on a state or federal list of controlled substances severely limits research, as has happened for decades with cannabis.
“I’m all for it not being sold to children or teenagers, not unlike alcohol and cannabis,” Paine said. “But the science has lagged behind and some decisions are being made without having concrete, definitive scientific evidence.”