“I admitted I was powerless over my addiction” is a phrase I only uttered under extreme duress, monitored by a rehab counselor who controlled my fate. It never rang true for me, despite the heroin addiction. Seeing as how I couldn’t get past Step One, I could never glean any benefit from 12-step. Being forced to return to something that did not work for me soured me to the thought of treatment itself, until I resigned myself to a life and death in addiction.
I didn’t need the Steps to quit heroin. And my recent experience of quitting kratom after nine months of daily use has only cemented my suspicion: We are not powerless over the drugs we use.
Type “kratom withdrawal” into Google and you will see a series of addiction treatment centers and SAMHSA warnings. Where there is money to be made, there is pristine search engine optimization. Surprise, you can go to an expensive inpatient detox and rehab for this plant.
Spend any time on the r/quittingkratom subreddit, and you’ll be left with an even more dire impression of the drug. People lament the green sludge that has robbed them of their lives, turned them into recluses only focused on their next dose, driven them into poverty, all the while beleaguered by withdrawals comparable to heroin.
When I made the conscious decision to take kratom daily, deciding that the benefits outweighed the cost, I knew the day would come that I would need to taper off of it entirely. Thanks to my raging PTSD from being force-detoxed into withdrawal at the county jail, I always held a healthy skepticism of any substance that required daily dosing. For this reason, and the fact that there is scant research about long-term or heavy kratom use, I always kept my dose low. When tolerance left it creeping upward, I would dramatically reduce for a week to “reset.” But I never completely stopped.
Thanks, once again, to criminal-justice system traumas, however, I’m now massively wary of breaking laws. I regret that that sentence could be read by some as a justification of punitive policies; it should not be. Nonetheless, it’s true for me. So when my best friend suggested that we visit the UK this summer, I knew what it meant. Kratom is a banned substance there. I would have to taper all the way off.
Because of my felonies, I had to apply for a tourist visa even though most Americans don’t need one. While I waited, I read up what the tapering journey …….