Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/09/15/weirdly_tramadol_is_not_a_natural_product_after_all.php

by crygin • 12 years ago

217 117 12 years ago

pipeline.corante.com

knd775• 12 years ago

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.

lobotryas• 12 years ago

It's the circle of life!

acchow• 12 years ago

I only wish we could get a wikipedia-news-citation cycle in on this story.

johndavi• 12 years ago

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

gcb0• 12 years ago

Drugs company hates him!

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

philosoft• 12 years ago

Exacerbated by the animals seeking shade near the trees and then relieving themselves in the shade.

lotsofmangos2• 12 years ago

I didn't even know that Frankie Boyle had taken up farming.

gwern• 12 years ago

This may also be a tribute to the sensitivity of modern chemistry's tests.

robert_tweed• 12 years ago

Can't help but be reminded of the Wikipedia circular citation phenomenon - http://xkcd.com/978/

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

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.

sp332• 12 years ago

Hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are natural. But this arrangement of the atoms does not occur unless humans want it to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramadol

spacehome• 12 years ago

Eh. If you leave hydrogen alone for long enough, it will turn into tramadol.

Igglyboo3• 12 years ago

Yes that's what I'm saying, "unless humans want it to" still qualifies as natural. Humans are natural and a part of nature and so anything they create is as well.

If a beehive or beaver dam is considered natural then so is the empire state building, all three were created by animals native to this planet.

alexjeffrey2• 12 years ago

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.

80ProofPudding2• 12 years ago

Agreed. "Organic" is pretty widely abused, too - want to drink some crude oil? It's organic...

rjurney2• 12 years ago

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

teekert2• 12 years ago

Exactly, cyanobacteria are also natural as is tobacco. One can synthesize many natural products in purer and safer forms.

qnaal• 12 years ago

The idea, I think, is that humans have been sharing the planet with everything else for so long that anything especially dangerous that occurs "naturally" is likely to have been already tested- ie "artificial" drugs should be more unpredictable, and therefore potentially more dangerous, than whatever stuff some exotic culture has been fucking with for hundreds of generations (which is pretty much any interesting compound you can find "naturally").

Of course, unscrupulous-types will lean on whatever marketing stunt they feel will sell some short-term product, with little respect for the long-term dangers/benefits, so naturally words like "natural" and "organic" get abused.

eru• 12 years ago

Alcohol is natural, and dangerous. But at least we know the long term effects.

s_baby2• 12 years ago

How are the farmers obtaining such large quantities of Tramadol?

ch4s3• 12 years ago

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

danford• 12 years ago

Could you expand or provide a link?

s_baby2• 12 years ago

Tramadol is a low-grade narcotic, not an AG drug. Unless I'm missing something.

telecuda2• 12 years ago

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...

rjurney2• 12 years ago

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.

duncanawoods3• 12 years ago

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.

linker30003• 12 years ago

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

wtallis2• 12 years ago

Cultivating the plants in a lab to study would have been a lot more difficult than what was actually done in this attempt to replicate the results, which was to just take samples from more than one region.

linker30003• 12 years ago

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.

wtallis2• 12 years ago

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

pron5• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

Natural products chemistry is a very old branch of synthetic organic chemistry. See wikipedia article: 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.

pron5• 12 years ago

Oh. I stand corrected.

evincarofautumn• 12 years ago

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.

paul• 12 years ago

Yes. "Natural" flavoring often means something manufactured by a genetically engineered bacteria.

lotsofmangos2• 12 years ago

Well, there is natural products chemistry, which is anything that is produced directly from biology. It is a useful thing to keep track of as if something complex is being produced by a biological process you can hook into it for precursors to make other complex molecules more easily. You can also completely synthesize a natural product and it doesn't stop the status of the chemical. All the name means is that it is known to be existent as the output of a biological process.

throwaway_yy2Di3• 12 years ago

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

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2014/09/12/thiola_retro...

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• 12 years ago

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.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

He used multiple accounts to vote-ring.

throwaway_yy2Di3• 12 years ago

It's linked in that blog post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/2g43kw/a_generic_drug...

silencio• 12 years ago

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.

dbbolton5• 12 years ago

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.

Houshalter2• 12 years ago

Presumably they are getting the drug from supplies meant for the cattle. It's not like they have a choice of drugs to use.

titanomachy2• 12 years ago

The article actually seemed to imply that the farmers started taking it first and thought (for some reason) that the cows might also benefit.

tedunangst2• 12 years ago

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.

dbbolton5• 12 years ago

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.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

Half right. They're using for the benefits you cite, but taking a much higher than indicated dose (based on Yonatan Zunger's fascinating G+ thread on this topic).

kranner• 12 years ago

I just want to note that acetaminophen (paracetamol) is not an NSAID. As a haemophilia patient who can't take NSAIDs but can take acetaminophen, this is an important distinction for me.

apercu• 12 years ago

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.

bishun• 12 years ago

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

ck2• 12 years ago

wtf are anti-depressants being given to cattle?

titanomachy2• 12 years ago

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

markdown• 12 years ago

Probably the same reason chickens are fed anti-biotics... to increase yields.

In the case of chickens... antibiotics keeps them disease free and promotes growth. Cows milk production is negatively affected by stress and unhappiness. Painkillers help keep them happy.

viggity• 12 years ago

Tramadol is being investigated as a potential anti-depressant as withdraw symptoms mimic withdraw symptoms of SSRIs

pdkl95• 12 years ago

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.

vhost-• 12 years ago

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.

Tramadol Is Not a Natural Product After All

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