My Kratom Journey

 

It wasn’t until I tried to quit Kratom that I realized the repercussions it would have.

I was a heroin addict for many years. After finally putting the needle down in 2016 and no longer wanting to be on pills, I was still looking for something to mitigate my back pain. Kratom has been growing in popularity for over a decade, but it was never as mainstream as it is now. In the four states I have lived in since Covid hit in 2020, Kratom was available to purchase.

It was available in every store I went to, even grocery stores, and at the time, I wasn’t very educated on the subject. But I knew I was in pain and unable to confront it, so I looked for an easy way out of the situation that I was in. It started innocently, taking small doses at a time. That was over five years ago, and I was 25 at that time.

I assumed I was taking the lesser of more than two evils, but I would soon learn the consequences of my actions. As I sit typing this, not taking anything, the pain I feel isn’t as bad as I remember when I was in Colorado and trying to work multiple jobs. And those jobs weren’t too physically demanding. However, I was standing for numerous hours at a time.

To be more specific, I was born with kyphosis, which is a bent curvature of the spine. How my tendons and muscles pull and stretch my vertebrae gives me a noticeable hunch in my back that has only progressed over the years. My top five vertebrae have fused and rotated 35 degrees to the right due to the tension and friction, which has also caused my rib cage to lean forward on a 45-degree tilt. To put it in layman’s terms, my back is messed up, and like I said, I thought I had picked the lesser evil when it came to any form of pain management.

Maybe I was fooling myself, or perhaps I didn’t want to face the truth, but when I first started taking Kratom, I noticed that my pain would go away, and I was also met with a slight euphoria. The euphoria I felt was nothing like heroin or prescription pills, but the way it masked the pain was interesting to me. I was taking a modicum amount at a time, maybe 3 to 5 grams, to try and help myself get over everything I was going through at that point in my life. I knew I didn’t want to go back down the path I had previously treaded in my life, but I also couldn’t stand to be in pain anymore. Looking back on it now, I wish I had just gritted my teeth and bore through it without taking anything; that would have been the lesser of the multiple evils.

The final nail in my coffin was when I found myself taking Kratom every single day, three to four times a day, and the back pain had come back in full swing. So, at this point, I was taking the Kratom to lessen how bad I felt, not simply because my back was hurting but because I was also going through a withdrawal. I had found myself thoroughly addicted to Kratom after a few months of using it, but I still hadn’t realized what it was doing to my brain and body. I tried to justify my actions by telling myself that it was just an opiate alkaloid, and it didn’t show up on a drug test, so it couldn’t be that harmful. Fast forward four years, and I was still taking the same amount for the same reasons I had been for all that time. So there I was, utterly addicted to a substance I didn’t want to be addicted to, and in no better shape than I was four years ago when I first started taking something for pain. I became so spaced out, it was like I was going through life in some time warp, not being fully there for myself or my fiancé. I wouldn’t say my fiancé enabled me because she wasn’t making light of my situation and wasn’t helping me by purchasing anything. It was almost like she didn’t know what to do to help; she was fully aware of my past and what I had previously done, and she knew I wasn’t going down that path. However, she had never taken Kratom before, so she wasn’t aware of what it did for me or how it made me feel. I wouldn’t say I was taking nearly enough to get a high from it anymore; I was taking enough to not feel awful from not having any. Every time I tried to get off it, I was met with the same back pain and, on top of it, all the withdrawal symptoms I had gone through getting off heroin.

The sad truth is even though it was much less potent, I would soon realize the withdrawal from it was completely comparable to what I went through in detox from heroin. I was about two days into my detox from the Kratom, and I was hit with a massive flood of emotions. It was like walking through a fog for five years, then hitting my eyes with direct sunlight. Everything hurt, even my thoughts. I had realized how much I had forsaken in my life to not be in pain; all the feelings, thoughts, and emotions I thought I had permanently lost just came rushing back. I couldn’t handle facing all of it, so I spent the majority of my time in detox just crying because I literally couldn’t do anything else.

“I would compare Kratom to heroin in one aspect, and that would be the withdrawal itself. It felt exactly like a heroin withdrawal from the restless legs to the body aches to the racing thoughts and back around. It took me just as long as a heroin detox...”

I would compare Kratom to heroin in one aspect, and that would be the withdrawal itself. It felt exactly like a heroin withdrawal, from the restless legs to the body aches to the racing thoughts and back around. It took me just as long as a heroin detox as well—about a week and a half—and like I said, the crazy thing is the high was not even comparable. However, the detox itself was the same. It might differ for others, but the theory is the same.

I now sit here typing this blog, and I have been sober for quite some time, at least long enough to look back, and I never want to go down that road again. Luckily, I have an amazingly supportive fiancé who I have gotten with to figure out better options to deal with my back pain and not take any substance for any reason. I now see I don’t need to, and the pain itself can be temporary, but the things I have put her through and the mental fog I lived in were not worth a $30 bag of Kratom every week.

Z.L., Narconon Graduate