Kava Article: Fatal kavalactone intoxication

[verticity]

FINE. Yes. I was overly broad with my statements of disgust.

I'll paraphrase Abraham Lincoln to say "People who are injured by the use of kava are not injured by the use of a bad thing, but by the misuse of a good thing."

I know what you mean, I just thought the picture of the nurse chasing the guy with the enormous needle was kind of hilarious. Also, if injected ethanol can kill cancer cells, it would probably not be very good for your ordinary cells when injected "recreationally"

 

[Steve Mariotti]

Google "krocodil"

 

[verticity]

For anyone else reading this: DON'T GOOGLE KROKODIL!

 

[KavaCat]

Man injects strawberry kool-aid and orange juice, DIES! FATAL FRUIT PUNCH TOXICITY!

 

[Rookietwoshoes]

Now I'm wondering what the heck is a krocodil

 

[mjazzguitar]

Now I'm wondering what the heck is a krocodil

look it up... it's krokodil, not krocodil.
Try not to look at the images.

 

[verticity]

I was wondering what the lethal dose of kavalactones actually is, and found this:
From Kava: From Ethnology to Pharmacology (edited by Yadhu N. Singh)

LD50 refers to the dose of something that will kill half the test animals it is given to, in terms of mg of substance per kg of body weight. This is measured by actually killing a bunch of animals, so should give a reasonable estimate of toxicity. So a LD50 of approx 350 mg/kg, for an 80 kg human being, would mean a person would have to inject 28000 mg, or 28 grams of kavalactones to have a 50% chance of dying.
Now how does this translate to what was actually found? Well the actual total volume of blood in the human body is 5 liters, with a little math we can estimate the total KLs in the person's blood:
(6.29 mg total KLs/liter) * (5 liters) = approx. 32 mg total kavalactones in the person's body. Or probably the same amount one would get from drinking a dropper full of tincture.
So, to put it mildly, my BS detector is going WOOOOWOOOOWOOOOOO-cough-bullshit-cough

 

[August West]

So what i've gathered here is If you're going to shoot up kava, don't use a 254 strain with a k/dhm ratio of less than 1. A little gallows humor.

 

[verticity]

So this idiot had a BAC of 1.7%, over three times the expected lethal dose, and these "scientists" title the paper "Fatal kavalactone intoxication by suicidal intravenous injection"???

It should be pointed out that the units of measurement of blood alcohol reported in the paper are "permille", not percent. Permille means parts per thousand, as opposed to percent, which is parts per hundred. It is represented by a symbol that looks like a percent sign, but with an extra zero: 0/00. This unit is apparently commonly used in some countries to measure BAC, including Finland, where the paper's authors are from. So to convert this to percent, as we use in the US, you need to divide the BAC numbers by 10. So the actual BAC was 0.17%. At this BAC, the person would be severely impaired, but it is probably not, by itself, a lethal dose of ethanol.

So we know the following things:

• The patient had approximately one half to one third of a lethal Blood Alcohol Level
• As I showed above, the patient had approximately one thoundsandth of the lethal dose of kavalactones (considered alone) in his blood
• The patient also had approx. one five hundredth of the lethal dose of caffeine. (4.3mg/L)*(5L blood) = 21.5 mg total caffeine. Source FYI: How Much Caffeine Would It Take To Kill You? (According to the site, it would take 10 g of caffeine to kill an average person)
• Also found: salicylate, probably from aspirin. A concentration of salicylate of 300-500 mg/kg can be fatal. Interestingly this number is quite similar to the LD50 of IV kavalactones. Crunching the numbers: (21 mg/L salicylate) * (5 liters of blood) = 105 mg of salicylate. A lethal dose of salicylate would be ~32000 mg for an 80 kg individual, so there was about one three-hundredth of a lethal dose of salicylate.

Now, it is possible there could be some synergistic effect between the alcohol and the kava, as the authors do point out in the paper, but given the above facts, to title the article "Fatal Kavalactone Intoxication" is just not borne out by the evidence actually presented in the paper.