
Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All - crygin
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/09/15/weirdly_tramadol_is_not_a_natural_product_after_all.php
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knd775
Wait, let me make sure I am understanding this. So Tramadol was given to
cattle in such large amounts that it made it into the soil and enough got
soaked up by trees that it was thought that Tramadol came from those trees.

That is just incredible.

~~~
johndavi
Once enough is coming up through grassblades then farmers can cease giving it
to the cattle directly. The holy grail of Unlimited Tramadol!

~~~
gcb0
Drugs company hates him!

now seriously, where do one find such abundance of opiates to feed cows of?!

~~~
ceol
I'm not sure if you're joking, but _opiates_ are grown from opium poppy
plants, so that would be a good place to start if you actually wanted an
abundance to feed to animals. Tramadol, however, is an _opioid_ , which is a
term that encompasses both opiates and synthetic opiate-like drugs -- of which
Tramadol falls in the latter.

~~~
gcb4
that's the point. synthetic opiates are not cheap. and those farmers are
feeding herd with it.

------
dbbolton
>The farmers apparently take the drug themselves, at pretty high dosages,
saying that it allows them to work without getting tiree.

That's insane. Tramadol is among the _worst_ painkillers to use
recreationally, which is why it's often the next line of analgesic therapy
after NSAIDs and before hydrocodone.

It is a comparatively weak mu-opioid agonist, so the dose a person would have
to take to get a prototypical opioid high, likely quadruple a normal
prescribed dose at minimum, is pushing the margin of safety.

I am not advocating drug use here, but if you're dead set on getting high,
please use something else- namely something with a higher mu-affinity that
would require a lower dose, and ideally something that's not combined with
acetaminophen or other NSAIDs.

~~~
tedunangst
It doesn't sound like they're trying to get high, per se, just work harder
without feeling it. A "recreational" dose would probably interfere with
getting work done.

~~~
dbbolton
Not necessarily. Opioids, like other euphoriants, are somewhat "stimulating"
(mentally) in small doses.

I know they aren't just "trying to get high". The problem is that in order to
get _any_ psychotropic effects from Tramadol, the dose is so high that a lot
of other really nasty effects will come with it. A 5mg dose of hydrocodone
would accomplish the effect they are after with very little negative physical
effects.

If they were just using it as an analgesic, which the article clearly
indicated is not the case, it would be a different story.

~~~
ceol
Wouldn't Tramadol be classified as a psychotropic just by virtue of it
inhibiting your central nervous system?

As someone who takes Tramadol for pain, it does have an odd effect when I'm
tired: I find I become _less_ tired, as if the Tramadol is making me ignore my
fatigue. Oxycodone, on the other hand, causes me to be more drowsy. This might
be what the farmers are talking about.

~~~
dbbolton
First of all, I didn't say that Tramadol was not a psychotropic. I said it was
not a potent one.

Second, the definition you are describing is a _depressant_ , not a
psychotropic.

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telecuda
Tramadol recently became more regulated as a controlled substance and now
requires patients to jump through more hoops (pain management visits, drug
tests, etc.) to obtain. Source: Family member on Tramadol and
[http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20140818/NEWS08/140...](http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20140818/NEWS08/140819860?tags=%7C69%7C79%7C80%7C304%7C92#)

~~~
rjurney
I think its stupid they did that, but then I do remember widespread use of
"Tromol" in Moscow. People would take it in high doses and veg out for days at
a time.

~~~
duncanawoods
Is this is the same Tramadol that is incredibly addictive and kills people if
they taper off too quickly? Why wouldn't you want some hoops for this?

I was prescribed it after I broke a leg in judo. I was shocked when I looked
it up and found forums rife with addicts in great distress.

~~~
girvo
It's not as addictive as other opiates. It is physically addictive though,
yes.

Opiate withdrawals don't kill you, although you'll want to die; Tramadol has a
weird secondary set of effects that act like an SSRI/anti-depressant, so you
get both the opiate withdrawal symptoms as well as SSRI discontinuation
syndrome symptoms which is a very unpleasant combination.

It's a decent painkiller, but like any opiate based pain medication has
potential for abuse.

~~~
duncanawoods
I think I read about seizures from cold turkey which required a 35 week long
tapering schedule to avoid. Checking for a source I don't find this mentioned
in official side-effects, only less formal guidance for addicts. Strange.

~~~
girvo
Seizures can also be caused in "overdose", which is unfortunately very very
close to "recreational" doses. It's a very very weird drug in terms of
secondary side-effects, the "SSRI" side can cause dangerous issues as well
(serotonin toxicity when coupled with other serotonin affecting drugs).

------
pron
> Natural products chemistry is getting trickier all the time

So now there's "natural" chemistry and "plain" chemistry? I thought molecules
are molecules, and don't care how they came to be. What if humans were to
artificially select some bacteria over a few generations to synthesize a
certain molecule. Would that molecule now be "natural" or synthetic? In fact,
it can be argued that many "natural" molecules are a result of that exact
process, because their synthesizing organism has evolved to survive human
effects.

EDIT: as pointed out by localhost, _natural products chemistry_ is actually a
well defined -- and widely accepted -- term.

~~~
localhost
Natural products chemistry is a very old branch of synthetic organic
chemistry. See wikipedia article:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_product](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_product)

If you do a quick search for Natural Products in Google Scholar, and you'll
see that this is a widely accepted term in organic chemistry.

Now, what you're saying is something that generally irritates me to no end -
differentiating between "synthetic" and "natural". An alkene is an alkene,
regardless of whether it was synthesized by a natural process or in a reactor.

~~~
evincarofautumn
In fact I’d half-expect that synthetic products be generally safer, since you
know exactly what you’re making and the extent to which it may be adulterated.
If I want to eat everything that comes from the vanilla bean, I can buy
extract. But if I want _just_ vanillin, I can buy exactly that.

~~~
SAI_Peregrinus
Natural products can be produced via a wholly synthetic method, they're just
compounds which are also produced by non-human bits of nature.

------
linker3000
So, no organisation took samples of these trees/seeds to cultivate and study
elsewhere and wondered why they weren't getting the same results!?

~~~
linker3000
Guys, that was a genuine question so why the downvote?

I'm not a scientist and really can't understand why no-one wouldn't have done
a controlled test or comparison in laboratory conditions.

~~~
wtallis
Laboratory tests are expensive and time consuming and in this case completely
unnecessary. Why _would_ anyone do such an experiment?

~~~
linker3000
Good point - as I said, I am not a scientist, so that's what I wanted to know
and your answer helps me understand.

In my mind, it seems like declaring that a plant is growing gold, without
testing the ground (or doing a lab test), and later finding out that its roots
are picking up the gold from a seam near the surface.

~~~
SixSigma
As an aside, carrots are a plant that takes up gold if given the oportunity.

~~~
FreeFull
Is there anywhere that one could read more about this?

~~~
SixSigma
I got it from Bob Cannard's lecture at Berkeley's Edible Education series 2013

Bob's -
[http://vimeo.com/album/2192316/video/51178467](http://vimeo.com/album/2192316/video/51178467)

The whole series -
[http://vimeo.com/album/2192316/page:2/sort:preset/format:thu...](http://vimeo.com/album/2192316/page:2/sort:preset/format:thumbnail)

I've just watched it again to double check, it wasn't a chore.

This year's - [http://edibleschoolyard.org/library/edible-
education-101-ris...](http://edibleschoolyard.org/library/edible-
education-101-rise-and-future-food-movement-2014)

------
vhost-
This drug is absolutely awful.

I had an abscessed wisdom tooth and was prescribed Tramadol for pain
management while I waited for an appointment to get teeth extracted.

Not only did I feel like shit all the time, when I tried to stop taking it, I
couldn't sleep at all. It was entire nights of frustration, tossing and
turning. I was only taking 100mg a day to just get through work and whatnot
too.

I decided to do some research and I read about people taking upwards of 700mg
to 1000mg a day because of addiction. I can't imagine being addicted to this
drug. It makes you feel foggy, your throat burns, you have headaches...

I've been sober for most of my life. I've never drank or taken prescriptions
recreationally. So this experience was pretty terrible.

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apercu
I give my aging lab Tramadol. It is easier on his liver than other
painkillers. Vets routinely proscribe Tremadol as a painkiller to animals
after surgery, as it's not hard on their organs.

But that doesn't mean you should take it. Stick to beer.

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s_baby
How are the farmers obtaining such large quantities of Tramadol?

~~~
ch4s3
they buy it. ag drugs are not very heavily regulated.

~~~
danford
Could you expand or provide a link?

~~~
tedunangst
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameroon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameroon)

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ck2
wtf are anti-depressants being given to cattle?

~~~
titanomachy
Tramadol is a painkiller, not an anti-depressant... but the question remains.

~~~
pdkl95
It's both a painkiller (mu-opioid agonist) _and_ an anti-depressant (SSRI, or
possibly SNRI style effects). The fact that many people - including many
doctors - ignore the latter effects is, in my opinion, criminal negligence.
The SSRI effects are NOT trivial, and last _days_ compared to the "hours" of
opiate effect you get.

Even worse, the "M1" metabolite of tramadol is itself an active drug in
similar ways, and metabolized by the same P450 liver enzyme. So the rate the
drug leaves your system is a nasty differential equation as it competes with
itself for the the same enzymes. That equation gets even more insane if you
have anything else in your system that interacts with it, even slightly.

Note: I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad drug - the SSRI effects by
themselves can be useful for certain types of pain (neurological pain in
particular), so it may be a better choice than morphine/{hydro}codine in some
cases. People just need to be aware it's _not_ a "trivial" drug, that it can
interact with _many_ things, and has more effects than the usual painkillers
that may be contraindicated for some people.

------
throwaway_yy2Di
[off topic] Wow, his last post created some bizarre drama on Reddit:

[http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/09/12/thiola_retro...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/09/12/thiola_retrophin_martin_shkrell_reddit_and_more.php)

His criticism of a biotech CEO provoked a Reddit thread with two thousand
comments, and the CEO showing up to write responses. And controversially the
whole thing was removed by moderators, and Dr. Lowe briefly banned from the
site.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Would you mind linking to the thread? I know it's been removed, but I'm
curious which subreddit that happened in.

Also, did anyone ever explain why he was shadowbanned? Only Reddit admins can
shadowban someone, and I thought they only issued bans for vote manipulation,
not for causing controversy.

~~~
silencio
> Only Reddit admins can shadowban someone

I'm a mod of a default subreddit. We can't shadowban people from the entire
site, but we can use AutoModerator to moderate comments and shadowban users in
a specific subreddit based on certain criteria (e.g. one day old account with
negative comment karma or if account mentions certain keywords) or by manually
adding a user to a shadowban list. This is separate from reddit's built-in
subreddit ban, which is much more obvious.

It's possible (and sounds a lot like) he got banned/shadowbanned in /r/news
and the mods there thought his self-promotion went too far and got reported
for spam to maybe be banned outright from reddit. That seems excessive though.
I usually just tell people to do a better job contributing to reddit if
they're being spammy, and I only report people when they're creating new
accounts to harass others.

~~~
cdr
I don't mod a default, but in my experience it's historically been _really_
easy to get someone shadowbanned for self-promotion by submitting to r/spam. I
don't know if it's run by a script or just overworked interns, but anyone
technically breaking the 20% rule over any period of time has tended to get
the axe without consideration of mitigating factors (celebrity, posting to
subs that encourage self-promotion, etc).

I don't know if that's changing with the drama over r/gamedeals company reps
being repeatedly shadowbanned for trolls submitting them to r/spam, but not
optimistic.

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bishun
My first thought would not have been, "Wow this tree's producing tramadol." It
would be, "Wow this tree's contaminated, I wonder how?"

------
Igglyboo
You could easily argue that everything that ever was or will be is natural,
not really sure why the word is still used to describe products.

~~~
alexjeffrey
more importantly, the use of "natural" to describe a product with the
implication that it being synthetic would be a bad thing is a fallacy.

~~~
rjurney
Still, there is something nice about a chemical appearing in nature. Gives
evidence that it doesn't do batshit crazy things to life.

~~~
pron
Have you heard of the very natural Oxygen Catastrophe[1] that wiped out much
of the life on Earth? Some organisms began dumping a toxic chemical (oxygen)
into the atmosphere in such large quantities that it practically killed off
everyone except for those weird mutants that evolved to actually breathe that
dangerous toxin synthesized by the killers!

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event)

~~~
gohrt
Right. Oxygen was very bad for life when it appeared. Oxygen is good for life
now, that evolved in its wake. I don't want massive quantities of stuff
appearing that is bad for life _now_.

~~~
pron
But that "bad stuff" is just as likely to be a natural product (as was oxygen
during the catastrophe) as it's likely to be synthetic.

