Below is one of the earliest Kratom videos from famous psychonaut Terance McKenna, who traveled to Thailand in order to try Kratom and bring it back to the United States in the 1980s.
For those who do not know who Terance McKenna is, he was one of the biggest advocates for psychedelics and psychoactive plants in history, and aside from describing his experience and experiments with all of the psychoactive plants, he also advanced the science of ethnobotany. Further, Mckenna started a preserve for thousands of psychoactive plants on the Big Island of Hawaii called Botanical Dimensions.
A magazine paid McKenna to go to Southern Thailand in order to document his adventure. Apparently McKenna had previously read about Kratom in a pharmacopoeia, and McKenna wanted to find it even though it was illegal in Thailand.
Ultimately, McKenna was able to obtain some Kratom, and it had to be done in a very covert way due to Kratom being illegal there.
Notably, McKenna brought live Kratom back to the United States and planted it in his garden at Botanical Dimensions in Hawaii, and this is perhaps the only firm proof that Kratom was being grown and used in the United States during the 1980s.
On a final note, McKenna discovered why Kratom is illegal in Thailand. Essentially, the opium/heroin trade is a huge part of Thailand’s economy, and Kratom interferes with and disrupts opium/heroin addiction. Therefore, the reason that Thailand has banned Kratom is because it threatens the opium/heroin trade.
Unfortunately, to this day Kratom is still illegal in Thailand, although there is an ongoing effort to legalize Kratom in Thailand.