Hey
@intergalacticBG
I've read other peoples' responses here. I'll give you mine as well.
The nature of Kratom use is, as you've described, chaotic. There are different vendors, different stated potencies and the ever-present fact that you're not dealing with a pharmaceutical product, but raw plant matter. Even that lifelong Kratom farmer with the famous green thumb is not going to be able to grow Kratom and then slap a "3g of alkaloids per 5oz". The best they can do is maybe tell you if its weak, strong or somewhere in the middle.
As you've stated, this makes tapering properly exceedingly difficult. I often have people use volumetric dosing with their pharmaceutical Opioids over periods of months to allow them to make extremely fine drops that are ideally imperceptible. How on earth could you do this with Kratom? Maybe if you had the same cultivar in a massive quantity you could make enough of a standardized product to do this, though the fact that you're dealing with plant matter means it's more difficult to make a standardized, reliable solution.
That's not even touching upon the psychological bullshit that comes with this form of substance. As addicts, we have basically no self-control regarding our drugs of choice. It's a fine thought that we all cling to, "maybe one day, I will just about face, gain self-control and taper myself off over the course of the labor day weekend". I have rarely seen people truly withdraw without something, someone in their life taking part of the control away from them.
This can be as simple as throwing drugs away, putting them literally out of your possession with no easy way of getting more. This could be trusting a person to ration things to you. This could be ending up in a locked detox center where the process of leaving can't just be accomplished on a whim, but requires several hours and conversations with doctors.
If you just have a bag od Kratom in front of you and maybe a measuring spoon, what's stopping you from saying "oh well, maybe just a little bit more, I do have to go to sleep, I do have to take the kids today, my boss is mad at me, I hate my fucking life anyway who cares". You can always start the hard shit at a later time. We are humans and we spend sometimes our entire lives, decades preparing to do the hard shit until we are on our deathbeds. We plan to tell the woman we love how we feel every day until your life is over and you're still alone. The painful irony of life.
Buprenorphine
Buprenorphine has many advantages. One is that it is extremely easy to obtain. A person on Buprenorphine can be reasonably certain that they can have ready access to a pharmaceutical form of the drug for the rest of their lives if needed. There is no Kratom user, Heroin addict in this world who has that kind of surety.
I understad you have been dependent for a long time. Luckily, Kratom is not Fentanyl or a Nitazene. It is still a comparatively mild Opioid (Mitragynine that is). See, we are now seeing that for users of the more potent Opioids, Buprenorphine is simply not strong enough and thus not suitable for their treatment. Even doses of Methadone as high as 300mg are not enough in some cases, but I digress. This should give you a small amount of hope knowing you're not in the most serious cadre of dependency.
Buprenorphine, as a standardized pharmaceutical will give you things you don't have right now, like knowledge, surety and control. You know exactly how much to take. You know that to take more is wrong and against your stated goals. There is no "maybe a little more, maybe a little less", it is black and white.
This is something I feel you could accomplish with enough grit and determination. I know you can because I've done it and I'm a weak little shit. Imagine what you would be capable of? If you want to talk about it, let me know. I don't mind helping you out dude.
