I spent like three hours looking this shit up, but the answer doesn't really go anywhere. Why not put my brilliant research on a subject, that turns out everyone else heard about on Reddit two years ago, here. It is not very interesting or funny.
In 2014 researchers showed curcumin might prevent tolerance and dependence to opioids. In mice, with morphine.
Turmeric is a root like ginger, and it's used as a spice in Indian food and a yellow dye (the stuff in yellow mustard). Turmeric has an "active" ingredient called curcumin (not the seeds called cumin that are way more common as spice). Curcumin was thought, based on real lab results, to be so healthy it cures diseases humans have yet to encounter, like through the future, it's so healthy. Basically every disease scientists threw at it, curcumin could cure. That's why I used to muck around with it.
> the bioavailability of curcumin is so bad, it's nearly below zero. Basically what little curcumin gets absorbed is rapidly destroyed or peed out, none gets to whatever tissue you're trying to get it to. There is a supposed trick using piperine and oils, but it brings us to
> you're stuffing turmeric in your gel caps, not curcumin. Turmeric from the health food store is like 2% curcuminoids by weight if you're lucky. Likewise piperine from black pepper. If you did find purified curcuminoids instead, it's frequently adulterated with toxic bright yellow pigments, because it's not very stable.
> the breakthrough oral doses the researches used for unmodified curcumin were 100mg/kg. So I would need over 6g of pure curcumin for threshold. From health-store turmeric, hoping for 1% curcumin, that's 600g, over a pound of powdered dried root.
> researchers had to tweak it hard to get it abosrbable by mice, by using: "state-of-the-art polymeric formulation technology to produce poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA)-curcumin nanoparticles (nanocurcumin)", something not yet at your Food CoOp (and I wouldn't trust it anyway, on an actual nanoparticle-scale). That lowers the threshold to 6mg/kg and restores baseline with 20mg/kg (a reasonable 480 - 1600mg for a 80kg adult human).
> researchers look at analgesia: they stick the mice tails in very hot water and time how quick they flick the tail back; and withdrawal: give the mice naloxone and see how much they kick. They got the mice tolerant to morphine by a) giving them a single whopping 100mg/kg dose. Five hours later, a 10mg/kg dose and do the tail dip OR precipitate withdrawal with naloxone; and b) the chronic junkie mice got just 10mg/kg morphine 2x a day for 5 days, then the same tests.
> if they doped the mice first with nano-curcumin, the pain-killing action of morphine remained at baseline, and they barely showed naloxone withdrawal kicking. Note that is the "reversal of dependence and tolerance" that the press went with, they don't mean it can necessarily reverse YOUR tolerance or dependence.
> This means, if you took a massive OD for your very first opioid experience, and re-dosed later that day, if you ate some super-curcumin first, you would find it restored the pain-relief. If you used large doses for five days, then ate the nano-curcumin, it would restore the pain-killing action and cut the naloxone kicking on your day 6 dose by half. Does that compare to a human who's used daily for years? No idea.
> Follow-ups show it CAN reduce hyper-algesia in mice, so maybe that really does apply to chronic users. Then again, they're backing off their NMDA-mediated model. For now they blame a protein kinase expressed in certain brain regions, with even less idea how it works.
Does pre-dosing with nano-curcumin change the subjective high? Can you get a nod with it? I'm thinking that's got to be attenuated too, if not straight dysphoric. The mice didnt kick, but we don't know if they weren't squeak-screaming silently inside the whole time. I know that morality doesn't exist outside human society, and don't see a moral sin seeking pleasure for its own sake; but this would be a free lunch, it seems like. Call it cynical cosmology, not puritanism. You can prevent a relapse of alcoholism from getting really bad with a Vivitrol shot. BUT IT DOESN'T CURE IT. You no longer get pleasure/relief from alcohol, but you ain't fucking happy, y'know?
Problem is, curcumin is notorious for screwing with lab results. Nothing has ever panned out for it in a clinical setting, and a lot of money has been poured on it. The original was done through the University of Illinois, but published in a niche journal. It hasn't been replicated, and emphasis is definitely on the promise of their fantastic new super-curcumin, not on a pure-research mechanism.
OK, so there's no real harm in eating turmeric before you dose. It'll just convert your money into yellow poop. I don't like the supplement industry, because they call their lawn clippings organic health food and make billions off of it. Nearly all of it is unregulated, overblown, bullshit snake-oil at huge markups. If you buy turmeric, at least buy the spice intended for food, not Vitamin Shoppe Online Life Extension stuff. The supplement industry poisons everyone with pseudo-science and convinces them eating a capsule they think is full of ginseng will counteract the high-sugar diet they eat. They're the ones who foist things like anti-gluten hysteria on us and reduce the nation's biology IQ down even further.
So in the name of HR, save your money, because there is no way to get that curcumin into your body, unless you know the people who wrote this paper, because they made it in-house (which is also a red-flag). To repeat, no amount of black pepper or green tea will get that stuff in your blood even if this paper isn't fraudulent (its fraudulent, trust me), unless you have:
The Linus Pauling Institute (ironic since I think he was the guy who dumped all the "Vitamin C megadoses will cure it" ridiculousness on us) has a summary of the extensive research on curcumin, not a single useful bit of which has been developed. Other than methods to spot "Pan-Assay Interfering Compounds".
To answer your question, TommyTerds, turmeric does not at all, even in theory, potentiate any opioid.
My girlfriend swears by turmeric and or green tea freshly brewed as potentiators
In 2014 researchers showed curcumin might prevent tolerance and dependence to opioids. In mice, with morphine.
Turmeric is a root like ginger, and it's used as a spice in Indian food and a yellow dye (the stuff in yellow mustard). Turmeric has an "active" ingredient called curcumin (not the seeds called cumin that are way more common as spice). Curcumin was thought, based on real lab results, to be so healthy it cures diseases humans have yet to encounter, like through the future, it's so healthy. Basically every disease scientists threw at it, curcumin could cure. That's why I used to muck around with it.
> the bioavailability of curcumin is so bad, it's nearly below zero. Basically what little curcumin gets absorbed is rapidly destroyed or peed out, none gets to whatever tissue you're trying to get it to. There is a supposed trick using piperine and oils, but it brings us to
> you're stuffing turmeric in your gel caps, not curcumin. Turmeric from the health food store is like 2% curcuminoids by weight if you're lucky. Likewise piperine from black pepper. If you did find purified curcuminoids instead, it's frequently adulterated with toxic bright yellow pigments, because it's not very stable.
> the breakthrough oral doses the researches used for unmodified curcumin were 100mg/kg. So I would need over 6g of pure curcumin for threshold. From health-store turmeric, hoping for 1% curcumin, that's 600g, over a pound of powdered dried root.
> researchers had to tweak it hard to get it abosrbable by mice, by using: "state-of-the-art polymeric formulation technology to produce poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA)-curcumin nanoparticles (nanocurcumin)", something not yet at your Food CoOp (and I wouldn't trust it anyway, on an actual nanoparticle-scale). That lowers the threshold to 6mg/kg and restores baseline with 20mg/kg (a reasonable 480 - 1600mg for a 80kg adult human).
> researchers look at analgesia: they stick the mice tails in very hot water and time how quick they flick the tail back; and withdrawal: give the mice naloxone and see how much they kick. They got the mice tolerant to morphine by a) giving them a single whopping 100mg/kg dose. Five hours later, a 10mg/kg dose and do the tail dip OR precipitate withdrawal with naloxone; and b) the chronic junkie mice got just 10mg/kg morphine 2x a day for 5 days, then the same tests.
> if they doped the mice first with nano-curcumin, the pain-killing action of morphine remained at baseline, and they barely showed naloxone withdrawal kicking. Note that is the "reversal of dependence and tolerance" that the press went with, they don't mean it can necessarily reverse YOUR tolerance or dependence.
> This means, if you took a massive OD for your very first opioid experience, and re-dosed later that day, if you ate some super-curcumin first, you would find it restored the pain-relief. If you used large doses for five days, then ate the nano-curcumin, it would restore the pain-killing action and cut the naloxone kicking on your day 6 dose by half. Does that compare to a human who's used daily for years? No idea.
> Follow-ups show it CAN reduce hyper-algesia in mice, so maybe that really does apply to chronic users. Then again, they're backing off their NMDA-mediated model. For now they blame a protein kinase expressed in certain brain regions, with even less idea how it works.
Does pre-dosing with nano-curcumin change the subjective high? Can you get a nod with it? I'm thinking that's got to be attenuated too, if not straight dysphoric. The mice didnt kick, but we don't know if they weren't squeak-screaming silently inside the whole time. I know that morality doesn't exist outside human society, and don't see a moral sin seeking pleasure for its own sake; but this would be a free lunch, it seems like. Call it cynical cosmology, not puritanism. You can prevent a relapse of alcoholism from getting really bad with a Vivitrol shot. BUT IT DOESN'T CURE IT. You no longer get pleasure/relief from alcohol, but you ain't fucking happy, y'know?
Problem is, curcumin is notorious for screwing with lab results. Nothing has ever panned out for it in a clinical setting, and a lot of money has been poured on it. The original was done through the University of Illinois, but published in a niche journal. It hasn't been replicated, and emphasis is definitely on the promise of their fantastic new super-curcumin, not on a pure-research mechanism.
OK, so there's no real harm in eating turmeric before you dose. It'll just convert your money into yellow poop. I don't like the supplement industry, because they call their lawn clippings organic health food and make billions off of it. Nearly all of it is unregulated, overblown, bullshit snake-oil at huge markups. If you buy turmeric, at least buy the spice intended for food, not Vitamin Shoppe Online Life Extension stuff. The supplement industry poisons everyone with pseudo-science and convinces them eating a capsule they think is full of ginseng will counteract the high-sugar diet they eat. They're the ones who foist things like anti-gluten hysteria on us and reduce the nation's biology IQ down even further.
So in the name of HR, save your money, because there is no way to get that curcumin into your body, unless you know the people who wrote this paper, because they made it in-house (which is also a red-flag). To repeat, no amount of black pepper or green tea will get that stuff in your blood even if this paper isn't fraudulent (its fraudulent, trust me), unless you have:
a multi-inlet vortex mixer . . . One stream was 0.2% weight percent PLGA and 0.2% weight percent curcumin dissolved in tetrahydrofuran. The other three inlet streams were deionized water as an antisolvent to precipitate the drug compound and PLGA. The volumetric flow rate of streams 1 and 2 was 6 ml/min, and it was 54 ml/min for streams 3 and 4. Freeze drying of the nanoparticle suspensions was carried out in a freeze dryer at a vacuum pressure and 247?C. Trehalose and leucine were used to prevent nanoparticle permanent aggregation during the freezedrying process. PLGA-curcumin nanoparticles were homogeneously resuspended using bath sonication for 10 minutes before use.
The Linus Pauling Institute (ironic since I think he was the guy who dumped all the "Vitamin C megadoses will cure it" ridiculousness on us) has a summary of the extensive research on curcumin, not a single useful bit of which has been developed. Other than methods to spot "Pan-Assay Interfering Compounds".
To answer your question, TommyTerds, turmeric does not at all, even in theory, potentiate any opioid.
