The Downward Spiral of Addiction: My Untold Story

Breaking the Power of Despair? Yes, But…

There was an unspoken status quo for the majority of 2023, a fragile balance in my mind that was putting all the effort into not doing anything and not taking any decision that could affect my life in any severe way. I don’t mean addictions right now, but, you know, those life decisions everybody has to occasionally take. I was stuck at ground zero and didn’t want to move in any direction because I became terrified of the consequences of any possible action and their irreversible nature. I wasn’t happy at all. In fact, I was deeply depressed, but it was still better than the living hell that I imagined would have come if I even dared to do anything and to take a decision. I also realized that when I am drunk, I don’t really feel any need to drink another glass of kratom, so my brain did some math. Kratom is cheap, but alcohol is in the order of magnitude more expensive, so what if this relation is in fact an equivalence and not an implication? Could I instead stop drinking and just increase the kratom dosage? Well, it turned out that I could! 2023 was a really bad year with an extreme 20 percent inflation rate in Czechia, and I was running short on money, so saving them was suddenly a priority to me. I swapped alcohol for kratom, and I stopped drinking almost entirely. Win-win scenario, right? Hell, nope!

I guess at some point, with such a stimulating dopamine release, my brain just decided to give up and called a friend from forgotten times for help. Hello, ADHD¹! Welcome back! Forgetting that I used to have it as a child, this friend of my brain took control over me. The only important thing I had left in my life had begun rotting and decaying, and I stopped being able to work. I couldn’t focus on anything but playing Epic RPG² game on Discord, stuck in front of the screen, and typing commands from morning until evening. Yes, I could play some computer games also, but did it make any difference? You bet not. I had felt even worse than before and was praying silently to all the Gods in The Multiverse to end this condition of mine and give me back my workaholic superpowers, please! But nothing worked, and I was lost. I didn’t realize this was a side effect of the extremely high kratom dosage I was taking for nearly 2 years straight. Also, my libido dropped to zero, and I hadn’t touched myself for almost three months. What the hell? I am not that old yet, am I?! was the question I kept asking myself, not taking my mental and physical condition into consideration at all.

I cried a lot, but this obviously didn’t help either. So I realized the time to ask doctors for professional help had come. It took me a week to find a free spot at literally any available psychiatrist because I believed only specialists were able to help with such a complicated condition as fully developed ADHD. The longest three-month wait for the first appointment had begun, and during those three months I was able to finish work equivalent to, like, two weeks, compared to my previous pace. I used to love my work, so why can’t I do it anymore? Did I burn out? Maybe? Not for a single second, I thought my situation could be related to my drinking-kratom-instead-of-water-in-amount-of-three-to-four-liters-per-day condition. And to boost this shit up even more, just two weeks before I was about to see my freshly acquired psychiatrist, an injury happened at home, not to me, but… even that it was too stressful for me to handle. I was sitting for 2 hours in the hospital waiting room while praying for a good outcome for the person to whom I was still emotionally attached. As a bonus, I’ve been suffering from white coat syndrome³ since my early childhood due to an incident with a dentist when I was 12 years old, so I was shaking badly, and the horrible hospital smell was boosting it. I hated it, but I stood brave. However, my stress levels went over the top during that evening, and I couldn’t handle my own existence anymore, so I politely asked my local coworker for antidepressants. He was kind enough to bring me some the next day at noon, and on this day it was the first time ever in my life that I put SSRI⁴ antidepressants into my muzzle. The relief came within one hour and reduced my stress levels even lower than before the accident happened. So to wrap up, I consumed pills and up to 70 grams of kratom powder every day just to handle and absorb what had just happened and everything else from the past. The next whole week I spent at my friend’s place far far away from home just to relax a bit, as the weekend before was a pure living hell with barely any sleep, but I won’t go into details here for obvious personal reasons. All I can tell is that there was an incident related to sexual frustration that literally exploded inside me.

The week after, I finally had my long-awaited appointment with the doctor. When he was asking me questions and writing down answers into his computer, at that moment when I said I am taking approximately 70 grams of kratom every day, he assertively told me that I have to stop immediately, noting that this, and only this, was the root cause of my ADHD. Fine, I said to myself. Some authority had finally told me what was going on with me. A spark of motivation had refueled my empty tank and given me some confidence that this time, for the third time, I would finally quit drinking kratom. So the most challenging health-related process in my life could begin.

The Most Painful Kratom Withdrawal Ever

I just had enough of all of this. I wanted to quit, and I wanted to quit immediately. But that was far from possible. This time I refused the usual advice to reduce the dosage by 10 percent per week or any similar bullshit. I’d rather had suffered intensively for 3 to 7 days and then had peace. It definitely didn’t sound that horrible to me. I googled a lot, read tons of discussions on Reddit and elsewhere, and was quite optimistic. It can’t be that bad, I thought. Kratom is a light plant-based opioid, much less severe than heroin, morphine, fentanyl, you name it. Again, I was so wrong. Immediately after I returned home from the appointment, I set strict rules for myself: 5 grams every 4 hours, not sooner. I’ve been here already. It will be painful, uncomfortable, but survivable, right? And yes, kinda. But I was dropping dosages way faster than before. My goal was to achieve 4 grams every 5 or 6 hours by the end of the week. And the living hell (you will see that I really like this phrase) started. Restless Legs Syndrome, aka RLS, kicked in very fast. You may think that it can’t be that bad because a lot of healthy people have their legs restless frequently. I bet you remember someone “vibrating” their legs when sitting at their desk in the office and disturbing everyone. This kind of behavior, right? NOPE! It was way worse, so much worse that I was unable to sleep at all, no matter how hard I tried or how many melatonin pills I ate. So to wrap up, during the day I was unable to think because the only thought my brain was able to focus on, due to the lack of dopamine in my system, was the taste of kratom on the tip of my tongue, and when the fuck will be the next time I finally get my dose, counting seconds for hours and hours. And during the night, I was sleeplessly chasing my legs on the bed. My brain craved badly for kratom, and the symptoms were not improving at all.

And I wish it was only my brain and mind craving with a bit of RLS added on top, but other physical symptoms had developed too. I had never felt that miserable like I did that time. The first symptom was constant shaking. My theory was that the imbalance of neurotransmitters in my body, which opioids are known to cause by saturating the receptors and affecting the dopamine chemistry, damaged my nervous system. I was unable to hold my hands still, and the effect was intensifying over time each day. In the afternoon, I was barely able to type on a computer keyboard. The second symptom was the cold sweat. Terrifying cold sweat, due to which I simply couldn’t warm myself enough. No matter that I had over 24 °C in my room, I still had to wear sweatpant shorts with sweatpants on top of them and the hoodie too, and it was still not enough. An electric warming blanket helped a little, but not that much. In the end, I was still freezing, and my clothes were soaked in cold sweat, making me shiver from the cold even more. The third major symptom of the withdrawal process was diarrhea. Later on, I found out that my particular antidepressants also frequently cause it, and apparently the major producers of serotonin are bacteria in the intestines. But back then, it was not the case, as one of the usual side effects of consuming kratom is intestinal constipation. For the vast majority of people, it is an unpleasant condition, but to me, it had its advantages. Remember the NSFW note above? Let me expand it here. Since my stool could be compared to what rabbits produce and it was rock solid, I got used to always being able to clean my insides super fast. Imagine what happens to the body when there is suddenly no substance that solidifies poop for two years instead of regular body processes. So, now, with two causes, the diarrhea was just a literal durchfall. Brown water with small pieces of poorly processed food, nothing else. Regular cleaning of the toilet bowl became quite pointless for nearly two months, as I literally peed poop, spraying it all around, and nothing was helping against it. I tried probiotics and also anti-diarrhea medicine from a pharmacy, but against the chemical imbalance inside my body, this was barely enough. On a daily basis, I started taking multivitamin pills that tasted like chewing wood, as well as Shilajit, an organic-mineral compound with antioxidants, and milk thistle capsules to help my liver recover.

I remembered the trick with the alcohol, the only inhibiting substance, which was helping my horrible health condition in some way, or at least enough for me to stop paying attention to the withdrawal symptoms. So I started drinking again. I drank a lot during the day, in the evenings, and also at night. If I didn’t drink up one whole glass of Morgan and Coca-Cola before sleeping, I was guaranteed to not fall asleep, as instead I would be fighting the RLS and my own legs moving all over the bed. As the time went by, day after day, week after week, the conditions were not really improving, maybe only a little. I had so many diarrhea accidents in my underwear, I couldn’t warm myself up enough, and my daily body shaking was only encouraging me to buy more alcohol because it significantly helped fight it. I was so desperate. I started buying Captain Morgan at the local B2B store in packs of six one-liter bottles every single week, and I drank. It became harder and harder to stay sober for a while in order to be able to drive to that store and back, as I would definitely never sit in my car after drinking alcohol. Also, the alcohol tolerance in Czechia is a strict zero, and losing my driver’s license was an unacceptable consequence for me. This was everything but good. As my psychiatrist insisted, during the next appointment with my psychologist, I revealed the horrible truth: I am a fucking kratom addict! But he was kind, as psychologists usually are, and appreciated my open-mindedness. I also told him that I’ve been writing down the times of my dosing for months just to have some reflection on my actions, desperately hoping to trigger any leftovers in my conscience that would stop me from increasing my dosage further. He recommended that I convert my small piece of paper into something a bit more sophisticated, so I could write down my emotions or anything that could be coming to mind. I made a Google Spreadsheet and started writing times, my mood and my emotions there. The goal was to look for trends, and there were some positive ones too, but my major eye-catching trend was me screaming “I am so drunk, help!” in text in the Comment field, row after row. However, despite the suffering, December 12th was the day I took only one gram of kratom in a bit of water and zero grams further. I was finally free of this hellish curse! Well, except for the huge withdrawal symptoms.

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1. Attention deficit hyperactive disorder, more on Wikipedia. ↩︎
2. It is actually a great and sophisticated text-based RPG game, and I happily recommend it. Just be warned that it could become very time consuming 🙂 ↩︎
3. Fear of doctors and hospitals. The typical symptom is increased blood pressure. But it can also be anxiety, which is typically my case too. ↩︎
4. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Simply put, these molecules allow serotonin to stay active in the body by inhibiting the usual recycling mechanisms. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, which is a key component for either amplifying or inhibiting neural signals. ↩︎