“Is this just getting older?” The crying jags had become more frequent. Color drained from my life and usual distractions. Color drained from my face and skin. The days were interchangeable, tense, and brief. Hurry hurry til you crawl back home half-dead. But there was no cocoon of safety or “me”-ness to return to anymore. I watched the minutes domino mindlessly with no sensation more concrete than dread.
It wasn’t the getting older. And it wasn’t any of the problems (probably projections) I had with my loved ones. A light inside me had turned off. Motions were gone through but nobody was home. Maybe my struggle was part of something bigger, but mostly in a “class-action” lawsuit kinda way. I don’t think it was just the delusions and deficiencies coming home to roost in middle age. Or, it was probably all of that stuff too. But it was also the kratom.
I picked up a bag after reading it mentioned half-positively online. Drinking as cope was getting old and causing too many problems. I’m pretty sure I was aware it could cause mild withdrawal symptoms. But gas-station shit is supposed to be bad – supposed to self-regulate because it sucks. Kratom (what an ugly word) wasn’t quite like that. For every boost in mood (and the social lubrication that allows), there were weird depressive spells. Heavy doses especially can make you feel dizzy and pissed. But it’s not an opi-rage (from excess dopamine). It’s more like a dissociative anger. It’s tenseness from anxiety and a sharpness without words. Kratom is like if codeine gave you autism. The essential “you” blurs into an anhedonic prick.
It’s made from the leaves of an Indonesian tree, Mitragyna speciosa. It’s usually consumed in the States as powder, in capsules, or in strengthened extract shots. It’s a “dirty” drug in that it has multiple mechanisms of action. Its many alkaloids, like mitragynine, speciociliatine, and 7-hydroxymitragynine, affect different parts of the brain and body. Kratom is basically an extremely weak opioid. But it resembles in its various effects other classes of drugs like anxiolytics and SSRIs. Quitting kratom is half as physical but twice as mental as that of full-agonist opiates. Kratom messes with your serotonin bad. It becomes hard to quit ‘cuz it makes you a little bitch. But the chemistry isn’t interesting unless you’re a kratom-nerd justifying their own addiction or a chemist trying to manufacture an even slimier product.
I’ve heard uncut heroin is hard to get now. Elder millenials‘ biggest foil died and two monsters crawled out of its corpse. In the shadows, fentanyl – which when mixed xylazine, I’ve heard is too stupefying to even be called enjoyable. It’s just straight obliteration of self. “You’d have to be STUPID to use that,” etc. Anyone who starts that is quickly relegated to the extreme margins. Kratom, on the other hand, is popular amongst “normal” people with kids and jobs. It causes no obvious signs of intoxication. It just makes everything a little easier, until it doesn’t anymore.
It’s not a great drug, so it makes sense that it never exploded in popularity before. People “in the know” in the natural remedy or bodybuilding scenes have been using it for decades. But it needed to be ordered online and consuming it was gross (scooping tablespoons of powder into your mouth with orange juice.) And “society” once amounted to more than Amazon packages to your door and testy interactions in public (OK boomer). Gas station dick-pill manufacturers have probably salivated for a long time watching cannabis legalization. Weed prohibition has been limitless folly in both its to and from swings. Weed obviously doesn’t ruin lives or bodies. The cognitive dissonance eroded our will to say “no” maybe a little too much. We got a little too comfortable when it’s like, No, capitalism will definitely use this to exploit, increase, and profit off of human weakness and misery.
The early 2000s opioid epidemic was either a good or bad time depending on where you are in your recovery. Kratom’s gotten popular in-part as Americans drag themselves out of its wreckage. It soothes and fills the famished opiate receptors for those in withdrawal. Better drinking Miller Lights than a fifth of whiskey every night (?). Pain pills are downright hard to get prescribed unless you’re rich. But scarceness is not universally welcomed. Sufferers of chronic pain tout kratom as godsend past stingy doctors. So it’s good for both too many and too few opiates. I personally couldn’t afford rehab if I got addicted to heroin, as I can’t now to kick kratom. It’s easier just to go on like this. It feels like we’re allowing kratom half-because how fucked up our medical/insurance system is. “We know it’s broken. Here – take these shitty gas-station pills to at least dull it for a while.” The system is overloaded, and kratom alone can’t kill (it don’t induce respiratory depression). An emergency stopgap, in the wealthiest nation in all history, against having to take seriously the health of its citizens.
I’m genetically predisposed to Team “Ruin it for Everybody.” Some people get a good 3-5 years of kratom “working” for them. Perhaps because of previous opiate use I speed-ran that timeline into wanting to die within 6 months. Pretty soon I was in bathrooms downing 50 capsules a time. Twenty-five grams – a high daily dose even spread out. I’m not embarrassed to admit that when I go unprompted into a head shop and try something, it’s reached peak normie-ization. With its legal status, many people will be entering the exciting world of addiction and withdrawal for the first loathsome time.
You’ve probably noticed an improbable amount of vape shops springing up over the last few years. There’s not a gold rush going on for mango-flavored nic vapes. Kratom (and other crumby “legal highs”) are a big part of their profits. Millions have tried these kratom products over the last few years. And hundreds of thousands – teenagers, mothers, ex-addicts, the naive – never stopped coming back for more. I wonder what’s inside the mind of the shop owners. The largely Indian and Arabic proprietors know what’s up (duh). That money’s going towards their daughters’ education. Maybe they share convention space with liquor store owners. I imagine they feel contempt and pity with a mixture or spritz of glee (if they see any of the profits themselves). For young people, the economy is mostly service & gig-work, with a predatory underbelly feeding off the misery & despair of it all. Nothing’s happening, but it’s also happening all too quick! You might need some kratom to help you with that.
Kratom isn’t regulated as a drug or food product. And consumers/manufacturers want to keep it that way. So synthetically-made analogues of it are completely unregulated as well. The big one – the one likeliest to pull the whole plug on this money machine – is 7 hydroxymitragynine, or 7-OH. Kratom gets converted to 7-OH in the liver; it’s hypothesized to contribute heavily in making kratom compulsive. 7-OH is like super kratom. I stayed away from it for a while because, I mean, it’s just obviously bad news. They come in 15 mg tab 3 packs for $30 and have pharmaceutical-like packaging (with a “wellness” twist). Anyone sensible takes it and immediately thinks “This should be a prescribed substance.”) It lacked kratom’s body-load which I disliked at first. But I found myself getting them more frequently. 7-OH got right to the point. “Pain management” is rarely mentioned as even a pretext. Every cashier at every store has told me of a different someone who buys 6-8 packs a day ($200). And the high is extremely short – an hour at first but only 30 minutes with tolerance. It could be the perfect prescribed painkiller – its short halflife and diminished effects don’t reward constant redosing. But that’s what I was telling myself hovering over two grams of it in my online cart.
I feel like my IQ on kratom has dropped like 10 points (you be the judge, dearest reader). But at what point is drug legalization just social Darwinism? I feel uncomfortable playing the victim card, ‘cuz I’ve been a real piece of shit at times. But on the ground level, it’s just not a marker of a serious country to be letting the scourge go on for 5-10 years now. Allowing manufacturers to profit from the sorrow and misery this shit induces is unconscionable. The kratom and alcohol industries should have to pay billions of dollars for anti-tobacco-style PSAs in my opinion. Only half-moral way of justifying this charade. Basically, I know this isn’t society’s fault, but it says a lot about society that I would get addicted to this. (That’s why we need JD Vance as our first vice president physically and psychologically addicted to Mitragyna speciosa.)
I understand my policy suggestions are pleb and rooted in, uh, carceral modes of knowledge. A dispensary-style system with volume limits would obviously be an improvement to what we have now, without jailing consumers. Putting like two extra steps between wanting something and getting it, along with making it harder to get a lot, would do a ton of good. People’s laziness is underestimated. But there’s just no talk or action. Except by psychopathic Republican sheriffs in Mississippi.
Heroin had a sadomasochistic allure. Squinting hard enough, slavish devotion to it could seem distant echo of a higher love. But kratom – elixir of Indonesian slave labor – tracks with our current anhedonic drift. Cost of living’s rising – you need to go, go, go. But damned if you’re not close to collapse all the time. I know kratom is valued by some Amazon delivery drivers for its analgesic and boredom-killing effects. But we’ve lost the plot when the best we can hope for is a managed and self-medicated decline.
Anyone with people who depend on you – shun this like the plague! It will help you have more energy (in ever-shorter supply) for 6 months to a year. And then leave you so exhausted you become a burden to loved ones around you. I don’t want to tell my woman again I’m going to be borderline-bedridden again for a week getting lean. And I guess that’s part of the problem.
In late 2019, early 2020, we got the great Vaping Lung Injury Pandemic fiasco. According to reports, vaping as a whole was causing teenagers lungs to collapse. Panic spread; laws were passed banning certain flavors and increasing regulation costs. This was forgotten about once COVID hit. But one detail was off. All of the injuries associated with the epidemic were from Chinese-made black market THC vapes. This was widely known on the ground level and the internet. Though profoundly wrong we enacted quick and sweeping regulation & change. And yet with Kratom, most states are further cozying into bed with vendors and trade groups like the Americans Kratom Association.
Kratom produces profound and singular disenchantment with life and the world unlike anything else I’ve tried. Half the struggle of getting clean is remembering there’s anything on the other side worth regaining. Kratom dampens creativity and dreams. But it’s also just a physical thing that’s on the shelf (and is allowed to be on the shelf). Expanding access to medical care and regulating addictive products should go hand-in-hand. Wasted lives & money are all we’ll have to show for the delay.