Hey, that's nothing like scam, it's called trickle down economics. We just need to give the rich a little more money, and then they'll give money back to us. It's totally gonna happen this time for sure!

>"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

>-Carl Sagan

Pretty sure he was talking more about superstition and pseudoscience, but the concept applies to a lot more than that. It it sure is accurate.

As I understand it, the liver issues mostly came from unscrupulous extract sellers who were using the stems and leaves.

Basically, you drink the dried & powdered roots of the plant, but for a while there was a big boom on making pills with extracts. Demand exceeded supply and some people started using the parts of the plant not traditionally consumed. These parts have some other compounds in them that you don't want (similar to how tomato and potato leaves contain solanine), and now people were taking basically concentrates of them. This is where you get problems. The roots have hundreds of years of traditional consumption in Polynesia, the leaves, not so much. Supposedly they were traditionally used as an abortifacient, so probably not something you want to drink.

Among those who drink traditional varieties of kava in Polynesian cultures, I do not think the liver problems have been well documented. Which doesn't mean it doesn't cause problems, it could also be due to it being a relatively less studied topic.

I don't think they were saying that. I think they were pointing out that, from the Florida mans' point of view, the 2A is more important. And they're not wrong.