Kratom fucked me up disproportionately to the amount I was taking and like no other drug did, I think I must have some kind of genetic predisposition to an especially harsh and rapid onset of opiate withdrawals.
In the beginning it was great but the wellbeing and motivational enhancement quickly gave way to a kind of lacklustre nice feeling that lasted maybe an hour and just a general apathy which prevented me from actually doing anything. I often stacked it with modafinil or ~afinil analogues though and a couple of times with amphetamine, which was catastrophically bad in the aftermath and maybe somehow primed my brain for badness from then on. Amphetamines I've read do potentiate some of the brain damaging effects of opioids (or maybe it's the other way around, I can't remember exactly, presumably also very heavy doses) so maybe there's a similar mechanism.
It also seriously fucked with my bowels beyond just constipation, it would be like constipation followed by half a day of long overdue, sporadic, messy evacuations of a consistency that was not healthy and I will save you all the disgustingness of having me describe it in detail.
During the end days of this apathetic, almost nice but mostly just maintaining shitness I got really fucking depressed and basically did nothing but watch shitty TV shows endlessly while waiting for another day to end and hoping I'd get away with being such a lazy useless fucker. I really leaned in hard to the stereotypical dysfunctional opiate addict in a way that I never would have believed I would have done.
I never went above 20g a day, most days were more like 10-15g. Maybe upping the dose would have fixed a lot of the negatives... I'm torn about whether the fact I didn't is a good thing or not, on the one hand obviously my policy of not just casually escalating doses probably has helped me avoid serious dependencies or problems with many other drugs... but equally I just ended up stuck in an unhappy, shitty, limbo, unwilling to just quit and unwilling to lean deeper into the addiction.
Anyway at the moment I have a strong aversion to even the thought of kratom, in my head it's acquired a sinister kind of vibe, a fleeting reward on the edge of a deep well of suffering.... I don't see myself ever doing it again, but who knows what the future will bring. Hopefully I won't end up hopelessly addicted to it again anyway.
