Finding a good kratom vendor is just like shopping for anything else, right? Although you might think things would be as simple as shopping for anything else that’s legal, American kratom consumers often pay more than they should and purchase mismarketed kratom. Further, the way many kratom sellers treat kratom gives political opponents ammunition in the fight on kratom.
Let’s go ahead and dig into a few strategies anybody can use to seek out reliable, reputable, fair kratom vendors here in the United States.
Reduce Variations Between Batches by Trusting the Industry’s Largest Companies
Kratom’s effects and overall quality are affected by things such as the time of year when leaves were harvested — the monsoon season in Indonesia has a tangible effect on the outcome of kratom. By purchasing major shipments of kratom to use as inventory at once, vendors effectively fill their stocks to the brim.
What’s cool about this is that it means you can expect greater consistency between batches of particular varieties of kratom whenever vendors purchase inventory relatively few times per year and purchase more pounds of kratom per shipment than their counterparts.
Stay Away From Head Shops and Gas Stations
Kratom, in addition to the dozens, if not hundreds, of web-based kratom vendors that operate within the United States, is often found in gas stations, head shops, and convenience stores.
There are a few downsides to sourcing kratom from these types of establishments. These business entities are more likely to store kratom is less favorable conditions. For example, products will typically be exposed to bright lights for the majority of their days waiting to be sold. Also, to make potential sales, clerks are often asked by prospective buyers to inspect such kratom products’ packages. These both reduce the likely quality of kratom purchased from these types of retail storefronts.
Typically, real-life, brick-and-mortar retail facilities that engage in the sale of kratom only do so as a small portion of their overall forms of income generation. There are few places to buy kratom across the United States — retail, brick-and-mortar storefronts, that is — that make most or all of their money from selling kratom as opposed to other revenue-capturing opportunities. This results in gas stations, c-stores, and head shops typically holding their inventory for longer than businesses specializing as kratom vendors.
The Biggest Are Simply on the Internet
The way the modern domestic kratom market operates is largely in an e-commerce capacity. As you probably know, this simply means that vendors carry out financial transactions via their official, very own websites. After that, these vendors ship batches of kratom to buyers through the mail, typically through the likes of the United States Postal Service, also known as USPS.
I am normally an advocate of shopping at smaller industry competitors, as opposed to their largest corporate participants such as Walmart, for example. However, on the current kratom market, people regularly receive subpar product that takes too long to get to them and is far more expensive than better options found all over the World Wide Web.
I want you to establish trust for an online kratom vendor, ultimately. As such, I want you to simply go for the big guys as a means of drastically increasing your likelihood of receiving quality kratom leaves.
See New Names of Strains That Are Unique to a Vendor? It’s All a Marketing Gimmick
Marketing is an important business function, after all. If not for the practice, businesses wouldn’t be able to create intangible brand value. All considered, they’d simply sell a lot less goods and services than they do today — the economy would be a lot slower, in other words.
In general, kratom varieties are marketed as “strains” that follow a two-step naming convention, much like first and last names in the modern Western world. The first name is the color, which can be white, green, red, yellow, and others; the second name is the purported geological location of that batch’s harvest.
I know that most kratom comes from Indonesia — almost certainly at least 95 percent, if not upwards of 99 percent in terms of how much the — specifically the island of Borneo. Indonesia owns about three-quarters of Borneo — it’s among the top three largest islands in the world in terms of land mass — and is called Kalimantan. Most kratom comes from Pontianak, West Kalimantan.
Further, the bulk of kratom leaves are red-veined at harvest. This simply refers to the color of the central vein that runs underneath every kratom leaf. Leaves are said to be be supported by white, red, or green central veins — they can be each of these colors, though most of it is red-veined.
As such, why isn’t the market overflowed with Red Borneo and/or Red Kalimantan?
This is one reasonable way that I can prove to you that different kratom “strains” are simply blends of various batches of kratom. These batches differ based on when they were harvested and how they were dried and processed. When combined, kratom wholesalers in Indonesia slap largely-bogus “strain names” on batches.
These strain names are simply the names of recipes that vendors have developed over the time they’ve spent as kratom processors and harvesters. At least some kratom vendors in Indonesia likely share recipes among one another.
However, considering that it’s currently generally unfeasible to secure consistency in the alkaloid contents of the “raw ingredients” — the kratom inputs used to whip up the recipes mentioned above — the outcome of blending batches together is usually slightly-different kratom.
Although, with as much focus that the average American kratommite places on bogus strain names, you’d think that people would be able recognize even the most minute of details between batches of kratom. However, most people in the general community of the United States’ end-users of kratom wouldn’t even begin to be able to reliably, meaningfully differentiate between these batches.
Kratom Can Only Get So Good
In my experience as both a kratom vendor and user, I’ve come to find that many people are comfortable with paying relatively exorbitant amounts for kratom that isn’t worth as much as it’s being sold for. Such vendors are typically able to take advantage of proper marketing practices for the kratom industry.
Rather than being enticed by more expensive vendors’ claims that their kratom is so much better than the rest of the pack’s, I urge you to seek out the cheapest kratom among reliable vendors.
In my experience, kratom can currently be found for $80 per kilogram when purchasing single kilograms at a time. Many people pay up to — if not even greater than this, in some situations — $1.00 per gram of kratom, or $1,000 per kilogram, in other words.
Find a few of the cheapest, halfway-reputable sources of kratom online. Order relatively small batches from each of them. Determine whether they’re of standard kratom quality or not in comparison to one another. If you generally perceive them all to be of the same quality, that’s a good sign that each of the vendors you bought from have acceptable product quality.
Look to Other Customers’ Anecdotal Experiences
Don’t trust websites that exist solely to sell people things. These often contain highly-inflated ratings of the things they’re trying to get rid of. Rather than trusting such ratings, which are common across the kratom industry — this happens because it’s unregulated and so young that rules of thumb simply haven’t been discovered by American kratom consumers.
Look to web forums, such as Reddit, for example, in seeking out reports of others’ experiences in dealing with kratom vendors you’re potentially interested in to help you make good decisions about sourcing kratom from domestic vendors.
This Is a Legal Industry — Don’t Stand for Shady Behavior in Kratom’s Retail Sale
Legal industries are regulated by government agencies and other organizations. Because of their legality, they can be improved through administrative oversight — also known as regulation — something that does not persist on American illicit drug markets.
In my experience, it seems that most people who use kratom have used some other recreational drugs in their lifetimes. I feel that drug-using habits among kratom-consuming populations are far more prevalent than when in normal society.
If you come across vendors who treat retail kratom sale like selling illegal drugs ranging from cannabis to street heroin, don’t be afraid to seek out another one! After all, thanks to the fact that kratom is legal in most jurisdictions throughout the country, finding new sources isn’t something you have to settle for, such as with your connections to purchasing illicit drugs.
On illegal markets, vendors are generally unable to market their products like legal goods and services might be marketed. Black-market economy competitors don’t get nearly as much utility out of marketing as they otherwise would.
People who treat selling kratom in this way do a disservice to kratom’s legality in the United States and general acceptance by most people across our society. Countless thousands of kratom users — just laypeople who happen to use kratom — have advocated for keeping kratom legal across dozens of jurisdictions on local and state levels all over the United States. If not for the leadership of these advocates’ efforts exercised by the American Kratom Association for more than a few years now, the current legal and societal status of kratom in Northwest Tennessee would be far less favorable.
Opioid Replacements Are Often Expensive
For myself and countless other regular opioid users, kratom has worked as a suitable replacement to opioids, going as far as ceasing opioid withdrawals after having not consumed other opioids for 12 to 18 hours, roughly, if not a day or longer.
Buprenorphine, in my personal experience, costs $800 a month for me since having enrolled in a medication-assisted treatment program since mid-September 2019. Methadone is also expensive, though I don’t have any personal experience with this form of government-approved opioid replacements — I can’t reliably be sure about methadone’s price, then.
Many people stop using opioids with help from kratom. It works well for so many people — including satisfying the opioid withdrawal symptoms presented by both prescribed, strictly-analgesic use or recreational, self-medicating use.
As such — this is my personal opinion and may not be correct — these people are generally more willing to pay more for kratom.
Further, I’d also think that people who are switching from regularly using illicit drugs, which, due to their black-market nature, which are much more expensive than they would be on regulated, legalized markets, would be more willing to pay more for kratom.
You Can Turn to Indonesia, Too
Although I think it’s a better idea to search for safe, reliable kratom vendors by looking for domestic e-commerce retailers, your options aren’t limited to the United States — feel free to seek out vendors in Indonesia, who offer lower prices and typically stock fresher kratom, though their shipping takes anywhere from two to four weeks to arrive in the United States from Indonesia.
These Indonesian vendors will require you to spend a higher minimum dollar amount than likely all Internet-based kratom resellers based in the United States, which makes the threat of getting ripped off by a scammer even greater because the incentives are higher.
Also, you may be able to develop strong relationships with Indonesian vendors. Although unlikely, you may kindle genuine friendships through which you can source insider information from Indonesian kratom professionals, giving you a leg up on the domestic kratom market.
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