Kanna first crossed my radar in 2022, during a visit to Amsterdam’s chillest shroom shop, Kokopelli. A woman popped into the dispensary, searching for a supply of the substance. She worked for a smart shop nearby, but they’d sold out. The Kokopelli employees shook their heads. “We sold out of kanna too!”
My ears perked up. Drug dispensaries–like rave dancefloors–are excellent frontiers for scoping out trends in psychoactive substances. So what was this new drug that the heads were hyped on?
Turns out kanna isn’t new at all, but a succulent from South Africa called Sceletium tortuosum that has been used by indigenous tribes for its mood-enhancing and fatigue-fighting effects. Kanna was traditionally chewed or smoked as an essential treatment for pain, stress, and anxiety; its tranquilizing properties were particularly helpful for alleviating the stress that comes from surviving the harsh conditions of Bushman land environments. According to researchers, European colonizers who dispossessed native South African tribes of their land became interested in kanna as an alternative to sought-after ginseng, thus bringing it into the herbal worlds of colonial pharmacopeia. The Dutch named it “kougoed,” meaning “good to chew,” and by the 17th century, the area where kanna grew abundantly was referred to as “channaland.”
Today, kanna remains relatively obscure amongst recreational drug users, and remains far less popular than kratom and kava–other similar-sounding legal plant medicines favored by the hippie-leaning set. But kanna has started attracted scientific attention for its anti-depressant anxiolytic effects, with an animal study showing it could be as effective as the antidepressant drug imipramine in treating depression, and other studies demonstrating that it could be beneficial for a wide range of conditions ranging from ADHD to PTSD, sleep disorders, low sex drive, and Alzheimer’s. A Pharma company called Zembrin sells patented, low-dose kanna extract pills as a nootropic supplement, while other companies are trying to cultivate versions of this plant to sell as plant-derived dick pills.
Recently, kanna has also started trending amongst underground psychedelic circles, with some newer kanna companies positioning the substance as “nature’s MDMA” – a healthier alternative to white party powders that stimulates serotonin without the side effects of SSRIs. Over the last year, I started getting samples of these kanna products in the mail: low-dose tinctures and capsules that promised subtle mood-boosting effects if taken regularly over a stretch of time.
Then, a couple months ago, I stumbled across Kanna Extract Co while browsing the booths at a psychedelic party in Los Angeles. In between hits of his kanna vape, company founder Ryan Latreille was offering samples of a high-potency kanna extract to curious passersby. The company offers four kinds of kanna extract powders with various effects like “Lift” and “Rest,” as well as chocolates and tinctures. “You can actually snort the powder for the strongest effects,” he told me with a grin, offering me a bump with a little orange plastic spoon. I leaned in, took a couple sniffs, and quickly felt like I was coming up on Molly, my body shuddering with waves of rolling relaxation as my eyes began to wobble. The effects were intense, immediate, and far stronger than what I’d experienced with the low-dose tinctures. “What the fuck!” I exclaimed, unable to believe that this experience was somehow… legal?
A few weeks later, I visited Ryan at his office in Venice to go deeper into the pharmacology of kanna, the complexities of working with South Africa’s indigenous tribes, and how the hell he made this incredibly potent extract that could change up the legal drug landscape. “This is a new high to explore,” he told me. “People like to compare it to MDMA, but these psychoactive compounds found in kanna are not found anywhere else on the planet.”
*Rave New World subscribers can get a cute lil discount on purchases from Kanna Extract Co using the code “LHOOQ” if you’d like to try these extracts for yourself!*
How did you get into psychedelics?
I grew up in Santa Clarita in the suburbs of Los Angeles, like what you see in sitcoms. I’d never done drugs until I was 26, when one of my customers at Kreation Juice Bar, where I was working, invited me to an underground psychedelic group therapy session. It was a combination of MDMA and kanna combined.
So your first trip was already with kanna!
Yeah! When you combine kanna with MDMA, it’s much more gentle and soft. You can take half the MDMA dose and be in a full-blown rolling state, and you don’t feel as bad the next day. But back then, high-potency extracts of kanna, like what I'm doing now, didn't exist yet.
The high potency extract that you're making is a rarity in the market. How are you doing this?
It starts with the genetics of these high-alkaloid plants that we cultivate. And then there’s a proprietary extraction process, primarily using ethanol, water, and methanol, which combined create a broad-spectrum extract with the active alkaloids that meet pharmaceutical-grade standards to make sure there are no residual solvents. Finally, we use a process called pharmacophoric modeling to see how our extracts are going to feel when someone takes it, to show us different receptors sites that the extracts activate. For example, Lift has really high activity on your 5-HT receptor sites, and this is going to feel more stimulating and euphoric at higher doses.
[Michelle’s note: Pharmacophoric modeling is a form of computer-aided drug design that allows researchers to search large libraries of compounds in order to select molecules of interest.] There are hundreds of alkaloids in the kanna plant, each with distinct measurable effects on the central nervous system. The three primary alkaloids that we are focused on are mesembrine, mesembrenone, and delta-7. With these alkaloids, we're able to target 5-HT, cannabinoid, GABA, PDE, and opioid receptors to create a broad range of effects. So if we’re developing a kanna extract profile that tries to mimic a legal cocaine, we can test what percentage these alkaloids are targeting each receptor by percentage.
So you’d be targeting the same receptors that cocaine does?
Maybe an easier one to mimic would be MDMA. It’s targeting 5-HT receptors for stimulation, and just enough GABA so you’d also feel relaxed. And it’s all pure kanna. That’s what’s amazing, it’s not anything else. We have two formulations now. Our “Lift” powder is more stimulating like an upper, whereas “Bliss” is more of a melty MDMA-like experience. And the third new extract, “Rest,” will be really relaxing.
I’d love to hear more about these alkaloids. How does mesembrenone feel different from mesembrine?
Kanna as a baseline is calming and relaxing, and at the same time you feel open and happy. It’s an experience that happens more in the body and the heart than cerebrally. But with these really strong extracts, we can really exaggerate certain aspects of the plant to make it way more outgoing or relaxing. But you have to hit a certain dose threshold to get that effect. So mesembrine is gonna feel calming, until you hit a certain dose threshold that’s 50 mg of this extract we make, and then it’s going to feel stimulating, euphoric, empathogenic, and stimulating. Mesembrenone is lightly relaxing and balancing, and it has light aphrodisiac benefits, and it’s very balancing. Delta 7 mesembrenone is relaxing, calming, and in high enough levels, sedating.
How much are you able to do?
I would say the upper limit in a day is like 100 to 150 mg. The scoop we provide is 10mg, and a good dose is 20-50mg, so two to five scoops. Most people have been underdosing! This guy I know snorted 750 milligrams. A jar fell, and he snorted the whole thing. He said it felt amazing, and he had to go lay down. And that he’s had no desire to do kanna again. And he also doesn’t have any cravings for cocaine. It’s really interesting. I hope nobody reading this is tempted to snort a whole bottle though…
What’s the difference between snorting kanna versus smoking or eating it?
Obviously if you take it intranasally that’s the strongest way because it has the highest absorption. It’s different when you vape it, I’ve found that it’s more of a relaxing body high. If you take it orally, especially combined with coffee, it feels much more like MDMA.
It’s so interesting how you’re kind of hacking kanna to have so many different effects.
It's a true master plant. There was a lot of skepticism about whether kanna is a true psychoactive or not, because high alkaloid extracts of kanna didn’t exist. Everything was under 1% mesembrine; the strongest out there was 0.4%. This has a lot of benefits for mental health, but you really don't feel very much. Those benefits appear over time. When you take it over a four to six week protocol, people start to see a lot of support with depression, or anxiety. A lot of the research around this came from this company called Zembrin that produced low-alkaloid strains.
How exactly do you create these high-potency extracts?
I have supply partners in South Africa who met with an indigenous tribal leader named Danab (Chief) Kutela, who was the chief of the Ka !Khorana clan of the Khoi people of South Africa. There are two South African tribes that we know for sure had traditional use of kanna: the Khoi and the San people. When scientists look at their DNA, these two tribes are maybe the oldest people on the planet.
The San are a true hunter-gatherer culture. They hunt, they live off the land, there's no farming. The Khoi are a nomadic pastoral culture that herded cattle and sheep. So they have a lot of clans that formed around their herds, and expanded around the whole country. Traditionally, the indigenous people used to take it when they were on these multiple-day hunting trips to reduce hunger, pain, thirst, fatigue. Sadly, they’re now probably the most marginalized ethnicity in South Africa.
So my partners met with Chief Kutela, and they asked him if kanna is a real plant medicine, like does it really bring you to an altered state? He told them where to find these high-alkaloid plants that are above 1% in alkaloid concentration. But the problem is these plants are not geographically stable, so when you try to grow it in another country, it doesn’t grow with the same alkaloid content. It’s so sensitive that even just moving it from one part of South Africa to another, it doesn’t perform the same way. And without high-alkaloid plants, you’re just not gonna get anything worthwhile, because you have to extract so much plant material. So essentially we had to stabilize the strain by hybridizing it with another sceletium species, sceletium expansum, that created a high output strain of kanna.
Fascinating. My understanding is that kanna is available throughout South Africa, that you can buy it in the supermarket. Presumably that’s the chill, low-alkaloid form.
Well, interestingly, a lot of people in South Africa have never heard of kanna. It’s just becoming more popular.
That’s crazy. How do today’s Khoi people regard the plant?
Sadly, the colonizer government installed there basically wiped out indigenous culture and traditional knowledge, so they don’t have that deep relationship anymore. A lot of them don't even remember. There are still tribal elders, and I asked the new tribal leader what would be most beneficial, and he said help us work. So that’s the goal.
We have a benefit-sharing agreement in place with the Ka !Khorana. Whatever amount that I'm spending on kanna, an additional 3% is allocated directly to them to support programs and activities that preserve their traditional knowledge and culture. For example, every clan has traditional songs and dances that they perform during festivals. Previously they would just wear whatever clothes they had. We funded the purchase of these springbok skins to make the traditional skirts they would wear for these festival dances.
The plan is that we're also going to make a land purchase in South Africa, and bring them in as actual equity partners in the farm, so they could have housing on the property, a cultural center, and the opportunity to cultivate the plants.
You’ve told me that other kanna brands that claim to have indigenous reciprocity programs are disingenuous about it. Were they just lying about giving back to these communities?
Yeah, that’s the dark side of the psychedelic industry. There are brands that don’t have benefit-sharing agreements at all. And even worse, other brands that claim to have agreements are not actually giving back in any way. Brands like to have some kind of certification or seal to say they’re doing good, but they don’t want to take any responsibility into how that money is being used. It’s bullshit.
Are you concerned that as public awareness grows, these powerful extracts might become more regulated?
I'm not concerned. I don't know if I shouldn't be. We’re doing everything we can to set the standard of what the highest potency and purity extracts look like. These are by far the most potent kind of extracts available commercially. Now, I know there have been bad actors that sell kanna that have something else in it.
It’s funny, I was trying to see where else I can find extracts and one of the first things that popped up was Etsy. It was so cheap. Then I read the reviews and all these people were saying it’s not kanna.
They’re saying their kanna is from China or Thailand, but as of now, South Africa is the only place in the world where it is cultivated commercially. This Etsy brand, they don't even say on their website how much mesembrine it is. They don’t know. Imagine it’s cannabis, and they’re trying to sell you 100x cannabis extract, but they're not telling you how much THC is in it. Those numbers “100x” are irrelevant. And you can’t get it that cheap! Kanna is much more expensive than what they’re selling it for.
I’m afraid that as kanna gets more popular, more bad actors will flood the space, and regulators might catch on to the fact that this high-potency version actually feels too good to be legal.
We'll see what happens. It feels like a secret that might not remain a secret.
What is it like navigating the legal market?
Right now, kanna can be sold like any other supplement, like lion's mane. I'm taking every step that I can to put my company in a position that it’s protected, regardless of what happens in the market. We grow with essentially organic standards, although we haven’t pursued certification yet. We’re making sure the potency and purity are good, making sure that if there's no pesticides in it, there's no residual solvents in it, which is really important when you're dealing with extracts. We're doing all this with transparent third-party lab testing. So just making the COA publicly available. We also have unique output profiles that are light years of everything else, where you can have unique experiences with the same plant. Standardizing it so you’re having consistent reliable effects is really tricky. You have no idea how the raw material is different from batch to batch, so you don't know how much to take or how much you're taking.
Why do you think kanna is getting more popular? It can’t just be that my Instagram video of me snorting it went viral, although maybe that’s part of what’s driving it [laughs].
When people find out about kanna, it checks all the boxes of what they are looking for. It’s a natural alternative to conventional pharmaceuticals. And from a recreational perspective, people are looking for healthier, safer alternatives to things like alcohol and other substances that are not good for your brain or body. Kanna is not as strong as cocaine. But when you take it, you feel amazing, and it does have this social opening that happens. Someone the other day asked if there is liver or kidney toxicity. It's active on such a small microgram scale that there is no toxicity to it, and you feel great the next day. And then from the psychedelic perspective, it's a novelty to explore a new substance.
You can take it daily or more regularly, and it doesn't have diminishing returns. You feel more dropped in, more open, happier, more connected to your body, and you don't feel too tucked up. And it's legal, so you don’t have to worry about fentanyl getting in it. There's a really strong use case for kanna–a lot of people want this, they just don't know that it exists yet.
There haven't been that many studies.
It's coming. And I mean, there are alkaloids in kanna that are PDE-5 inhibitors, which is the same mode of action as Viagra and Cialis. Kanna is also a strong PDE-4 inhibitor. Synthetic PDE-4 inhibitors are used as pharmaceuticals, they are very effective for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and these more hardcore mental health issues. But these pharmaceuticals have really gnarly side effects. So kanna should be taken really seriously, it should be researched.
It's like a whole new world that you're unlocking here.
Rave New World subscribers can get a cute lil discount on purchases from Kanna Extract Co using the code “LHOOQ” if you’d like to try these extracts for yourself!
Honestly, I thought Kanna sounded too good to be true. Maybe I'm just jaded from all the BS out there. But, I tried "Lift" from Kanna Extract brand, and whoa, I am a believer. I put it under my tongue and it didn't taste nearly as bad as I expected (or maybe all those years of putting MDMA under my tongue have made anything else pale by comparison). Within 15 minutes, I felt like I was coming up on an E high. Warm, chill but energized buzz, music is amazing, and the feeling of connectivity with others and being at one with everything was unexpected from such a small and cost-effective dose. Obviously it's not as intense or long lasting as MDMA, but you can sleep when you want to and there's no hangover or "blues" the next day. Pretty amazing stuff. I'm looking forward to the vape becoming available. Thank you for spreading the word and educating us about this fantastic substance.