Editorial & Sourcing Policy
This page explains how the articles on KratomShop.com are researched, what we will and will not publish, and what commercial interests sit behind the site. It exists so you can discount what we say by the right amount.
Material connection — read this first
This site is owned and operated by KV Naturals, Inc, which also operates Shaman’s Garden, an online retailer that sells kratom, and Kava.com, an online retailer that sells kava.
Nearly every article on this site carries a contextual link to one of those two stores. Those links are commercial and they benefit the same owner as this site. We are therefore not an independent review site and do not present ourselves as one.
We do not accept payment from third-party vendors in exchange for coverage, links, rankings, or favourable treatment, and we do not run sponsored posts.
How we source
In order of preference:
- Peer-reviewed literature — pharmacology, toxicology, and ethnobotany published in indexed journals, cited so you can go and read the paper.
- Primary regulatory and legal documents — the text of statutes, FDA and DEA publications, and court filings, rather than someone’s summary of them.
- Documented traditional use — ethnographic and historical accounts of use in Southeast Asia, identified as such.
Vendor marketing copy, forum anecdote, and other kratom blogs are not sources. Where we describe what users report, we label it as reported experience, not as evidence.
What we will not publish
- Dosing recommendations. We report documented amounts; we do not tell readers what to take. See the Medical Disclaimer.
- Therapeutic claims — that kratom treats, cures, or prevents any condition.
- Claims that kratom is a safe substitute for prescribed medication or for medically supervised withdrawal treatment.
- Assertions about a product’s purity, potency, or contamination that we cannot source.
- Anything written to rank rather than to inform.
The 2013–2015 archive
Most of this library was written between 2013 and 2015, and then sat untouched for about a decade. In that time the research base grew substantially and the legal landscape changed almost entirely — the 2016 DEA scheduling attempt, the state-level Kratom Consumer Protection Acts, individual state bans, and the current regulatory fight over 7-hydroxymitragynine products all postdate the entire archive.
We are working through those articles: dating them, checking their claims against current literature, correcting what is wrong, and retiring what cannot be salvaged. An article that has not yet been reviewed reflects 2013–2015 understanding. Do not read the archive as current.
Corrections
If we publish something wrong, we want to know. Write to us via Contact with the article and, ideally, the source that contradicts it. Substantive corrections are made on the article itself and noted there rather than quietly edited away.
AI-assisted drafting
Some articles on this site are drafted with AI assistance and edited by a person before publication. We use it to draft, never to decide: sourcing, the claims that survive, and the corrections below are human judgements, and an article that cannot be sourced does not run whatever drafted it.