Who here has tried either of these? There’s a Kava bar that opened recently here and reading the review has got me a bit intrigued. This place also serves beer and wine, and I’d like to visit the place either way as the atmosphere looks like it could be fun.
From what I’ve read it is unwise to mix either substance with alcohol. How true have you found this? Is it due to dangerous side effects or does it enhance the effects too much, or perhaps it is just unnecessary?
What *about *side effects? Is there a “hangover” of any kind? Is it recommended that one not drive when using it?
I’ve tried to read up on them but everything is a bit clinical and I’d just like to hear from anyone who has tried it or uses it regularly.
Kava- no discernible effect I could notice, but then I see people say no you need really fresh kava or it needs special processing(one method involves human saliva fermentation!)
Kratom- Definitely effective in a subtle way, hard to describe kind of mildly stimulating or something. Again others insist you need special or fresh one blah blah.
Interesting. Did you drink it in a tea, or chew the leaves or what? Obviously I would assume at a bar they’d be serving it in tea form lest everyone sit around looking like koalas.
Kava kava is traditionally produced in a water extract of sorts. You take a big mucilageous leaf, split it down the center, pack it with pieces of kava kava root, wrap it up and then smash the hell out of it. Then you wring the goo into a cup and share the cup with your friends.
I don’t know a single person in the US who makes it that way. For starters, we don’t have fresh kava kava root. And goo is gross.
I’ve had both capsules and tea from the dried roots and medicinal tincture and recreational alcoholic beverages spiked with kava kava. As the effects of kava are much like the effects of alcohol, in the alcohol forms it’s really hard to decide if you are experiencing the effects of kava or alcohol or the social nature of the event. (Except that kava makes your mouth numb. That’s pretty unmistakable.)
In capsules, tea or in small doses of medicinal tincture, I find it useful in keeping my anxiety disorder in check.
The kava was at a kava bar in tea, kratom was years ago when it first started appearing. Someone who had ordered a pound of the dried leaves gave me a fair amount, I put them in my electric coffee bean grinder and then just mixed them with hot water in a mug and took it like a shot(once the water was cool of course!).
I think the main draw is a sort of faux forbidden thing or something, like look at me taking drugs(legal herbs).
Oh yea forgot to mention they both taste herbish and bitter, I also think kava can damage the liver with chronic use.
Neither ever did anything for me. If you’re looking for a legal high or are looking to self-medicate, there are far better methods. For a benzo-like anxiolytic effect, try etizolam. It really works, and is at this time perfectly legal. For an opiate-like buzz, tianeptine will do the trick quite nicely. One-sixteenth of a teaspoon should suffice.
I just finished a steaming cup of kava tea. It was the Yogi brand you can find in the health food section of a lot of supermarkets. No idea how strong the dose I actually got was. I don’t notice any real effect of it. It’s marketed as a stress reliever, but I don’t feel any less stressed after I drink a cup of it. I drink it a couple times a week. It tastes interesting I guess. I recently gave up my nightly cocktail in favor of a nightly herbal tea. I bought a random assortment of types. None of them seem to “do” much for me, except for giving me something to do with my hands when I really want a whiskey.
This is part of my reason for asking, and touches on Washoe’s comment; I guess I *am *trying to self medicate in a way. I’d like to have one cup of tea as opposed to four glasses of wine on a week night. The fact that I desire / require either is a subject for another thread
Yeah, “cocktail” was a euphemism for “big ass glass of booze”. When I decided to give up the nightly booze, I grabbed a bunch of different teas – a couple kinds of the Yogi brand, some rooibos, some lapsang souchong, etc. None of them, of course, quite match the relaxing properties of five or six ounces of hard liquor. But I get to have a new ritual of brewing up the tea, and I can savor the taste and put some effort into finding new and interesting blends, kind of like what I used to with whiskey. I substituted tea snobbery for whiskey snobbery. So, I can replace some of the things that I enjoyed about the whiskey without doing as much damage to my health.
