It’s a drug that is legal in some places and a grey zone in others. It is the leaves of a plant that grows in southeast Asia, which are ground into a powder and sometimes fermented. I take it like four or five times a week and it helped me in the past with smoking cessation since it limited the urges and lessened the withdrawal symptoms. While it feels good, people who only take drugs to get high, but don’t care about the safety shouldn’t take it, because mixing it with some things can be dangerous. For example mixing it with alcohol is like mixing alcohol with pain killers: It can lead to dangerously shallow breathing. Worst case scenario it can be deadly. Like with many things, you should not overdo using it.
Getting off kratom is a lot easier than getting off cigarettes or cocaine, but it still sucks because you will feel like you have the flu for a few days.
The effect at low dose feels stimulating and relieves anxiety. Low doses help me with productivity. A high dose is rather euphoric and sedating and it feels like you are covered in a heavy blanket. You get very talkative and somewhat hyper from it. Sometimes you feel like you could hug someone.
It is not safe, but I would say alcohol is more dangerous. You should definitely not take it if you have liver or kidney problems though. You shouldn’t take it if you are on painkillers or certain antidepressants. You shouldn’t take it if you can’t consume these things responsibly and with safety in mind. You shouldn’t take kratom if you don’t understand how to take it correctly, at the correct doses, for safe consumption.
So in like 3 out of 5 cases, I wouldn’t recommend against it’s use because of the person. In one out of five cases, I wouldn’t recommend it because there is no standardize formula of it and a lot of vendors mix it with dangerous shit, especially in the US and eastern Europe.
In the one out of five cases where you can take it, you should be a mature and responsible adult who isn’t on medication that interacts with it and you know what the hell you are doing and you have a reliable vendor who supplies you with unadulterated kratom.
Kratom didn’t kill him, not by itself, not leaf capsules. Want to hear from an actual addict?
You got great answers as to the opioid effects, but I’ll lay out my experience. No idea if this is typical as I’ve never known anyone else to use it. I can only speak to the ground plant-leaf capsules, nothing purified, synthetic, whatever is out there.
I’ve done about everything but angel dust and heroin, and kratom is truly strange. For me, it’s psychologically addictive, zero withdrawal symptoms if I quit cold turkey. The worst part is being annoyed at lethargy. More on that later.
There are three sorts: Red, green and white. I gather the difference is in the leaf’s vein color. Never tried red but it’s said to be calming with the same analgesic effect. Green gives me speed and pain killing, makes me nauseous, puked on it, damned near quit. White gives me both and I feel great. 🤷🏼♂️
Kratom is an excellent pain killer. I often work on projects all night, physical stuff, wake up in the morning with aches and pains I didn’t know I had. I’d hate for it to become illegal because I know a great many people need it for pain control. I don’t have to have it, but I’d cry for the people it helps.
The energy boost is great! And that’s where my addiction comes in. Using too much writes a check your body can’t cash. Gotta pay for that. I don’t mean a hangover, but I have to sleep extra to recover. OR, I could just take more! See how that works? It’s a spiral but takes a long time to be an issue. I’ve been on it for almost 5 years. In any case, it beats the hell out of caffeine for me. I can get almost no end of energy out of kratom where caffeine leaves me feeling like shit after too much. And I’m not going to get monster headaches if I quite kratom, like I used to with coffee.
Strange enough, that speedy boost doesn’t kill my appetite. No idea why this is. I can’t eat on crack or coke or even old-fashioned white crosses, but I can hog down high on kratom if I’m physically active. Another strange thing about the speed, I can sleep on it. Doesn’t make sense, but I can be wired up, lay down, grab my novel and crash out. Caffeine’s 5-hour half-life comes back to haunt me at times. Not so with kratom.
One other note on addiction: The more ya take, the more ya gotta take. OTOH, if I lay off even a day or two, my tolerance mostly resets. After 5-7 days, my tolerance level is gone.
Perhaps your friend was using kratom to get over the effects of some other drug? That would be my suspicion, but this comment is all about my personal experience, YMMV.
Not my best writeup, but I hit the high (heh) points. Questions?
EDIT: Forgot to mention an important part that may be relevant to your friend’s case. Got my first ever bad liver report a couple of years ago. Doc knows I’m an alcoholic, checks me yearly, always GTG. Since starting kratom I got some bad numbers back one time. Quit for two weeks and she congratulated me for laying off the beer. Yeah. 😜 More like I wasn’t wired up and drinking so much, secondary effects and such. Hence why I wonder if your friend wasn’t self-medicating in some way.
Gas station addictive dope. None of it is regulated, so you can get 10X or 0X dose.
I advise not buying drugs from gas stations.
People often use it to try to get off opiates (or to relieve withdrawal symptoms), and I’m not sure how much kratom you need to take for it to kill you. So I’m wondering if your friend was struggling with opioid addiction and maybe it wasn’t the kratom that killed him.
What about getting off meth? He did long ago have a history of using that but as far as we know nothing recent.
Did he have a history of taking drugs or have an addictive personality? Because people with addictive personalities should not touch kratom. There are too many interactions that would make kratom dangerous for such people.
Not sure about that, sorry. Some people struggle to stay sober (I’m one of them, which is why I use cannabis), and will search for something legal that will allow them a little escape. So it is possible. But I think it’s much harder to die from just taking too large of a dose of meth than it is an opioid. Would prob be heart failure if the cause was meth. I’m honestly not sure what the LD50 for kratom is, but I think it’s pretty high.
I would try to confirm what the actual cause of death was (e.g. acute liver failure could be due to excess use of kratom [again not an expert], or they might find excessive meth or opioids in his system).
Without that info, I’d hold out on making assumptions. It could have been unrelated.
It depends on the kratom. It’s basically a mild opiate. I have a kratom drink every now and then, but that’d be a relatively low dose. Products like Feel Free or something else you’d get from a gas station would be extra-concentrated to better simulate an opioid high.
Kratom is an opiate-like plant-based drug that gives users a boost of energy, but is addictive like actual opiates.
It more so helps with pain management, and calms the nerves. It does give a slight energy boost, though hardly noticeable. The affects are fairly minor, not producing much of a high with consistent usage.
Will not cause death either.
As far as I know (and I very much could be wrong) “opiate like” isn’t really a thing. Opiates are classified by their interactions with your body, not by the drug. So, if they’re interacting with the opiate receptors, they’re opiates.
https://www.azarius.com/wiki/ethnobotanicals/kratom/kratom-vs-opioids
It’s an agonist for the opiate target receptors which is why I say opiate-like.
My condolences. I don’t have any personal experiences with it, but a while ago I saw a video by Evan Edinger about his Kratom addiction which I found pretty informative.
Thank you for sharing this. I knew him from his video about English exams. Didn’t know he got addicted. Powerful stuff
John Oliver also did a segment.
https://youtu.be/mRZqHzDG_c8?t=551
Timestamped at the Kratom chapter, but the whole thing is good (as is normal for JO).
Just wanna tag OP cause the john oliver segment linked above has some very important info.
the woman who spent $80,000 on it because she lived next to a gas station.
I saw this a while ago, and did not expect to sit through the whole thing. Scary shit.
Thank you for mentioning the video I’m too lazy to link.
K2 (spice, etc) is the synthetic cannabinoids (https://m.psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabinoid), which are often fairly dangerous, but are unrelated to kratom.
Kratom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitragyna_speciosa) is a plant that produces two substances (mitragynine, 7-hydroxymitragynine aka 7-OH) that act like opioids. The pharmacology is relatively unusual, relative to most opioids, as the primary active substances in kratom also bind to serotonin and norepinephrine receptors; other alkaloids in the plant also act as ex. NMDA antagonists which may cause a dissociative experience (vaguely along the likes of ketamine, etc).
i have only taken xanax by rx and adhd meds … i say i am allergic to pot because i panic. always curious what is an opioid high like internally? i am a firefighter - and have administered narcan and the expected other things… but have never experienced opioids. thankfully. first wife had fentanyl and others due to chemo. she was in pain though. not “high”? (she died. cant really ask her …)
I’ve been using kratom every day for at least 10 years now. I have chronic pain and use it so I don’t have to use oxy. I get regular health checks and I haven’t had any problems with it. That being said, there are extracts, I believe those are more dangerous. If you just take the leaf, you’ll throw up before you overdose. I also think mixing it with other drugs is not a good idea. Everyone is different though, what applies to me will not apply to everyone else.
A plant people have been using in medicine since at least the mid 1800’s. The type of high varies on how much and how it is consumed, lately I’ve seen a lot of people drinking it in the morning like a caffeine substitute (I think the place near me calls it an ‘island tea’ or something like that). It made my wife jittery and throw up so we never tried it again.
Some people smoke it or chew it so those could be different.
The type makes a huge difference for me. Red is said to be a calming pain killer. Green makes me nauseous, white hits perfect.
It’s a plant based product that is rapidly gaining negative attention. Don’t try this at home. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitragyna_speciosa?wprov=sfti1#Description
Kratom is a tropical evergreen native to Southeast Asia. It’s an agonist for a few opioid receptors and has been used for centuries to treat opium withdraw. K2 on the other hand is synthetic pot.
My understanding is that Kratom high isn’t really a big thing. Like trying to get high on ibuprofen or CBD. It has some promise for pain management and anxiety but it’s hardly something you’d party on and if you’re worried said friend OD’ed I can tell you it wasn’t on Kratom.
Mostly agreed, but I can get pretty fucking high on kratom, am so now. It’s not morphine “high”, but it gets me speedy and kills all aches and pains.
Not sure. I got old and boring before this became popular.
My understanding its a mood enhancement and pain reliever.
I’m sorry you lost this person.
I recently read an article about synthetic Kratom getting banned for sale. In that article a couple store clerks were arrested after selling the federaly banned versions of the product. I’ve never heard good things about Kratom, but now it sounds like it’s getting significantly more dangerous.
synthetic Kratom
Why would anyone make that?! It’s a dried plant lead in a capsule, and relatively cheap. Want more dose? Take more.
Now that you mention it, I vaguely remember a similar article. Anyway, I’m an addict and wouldn’t touch synthetic even if I couldn’t get regular leaf.
They banned in-person sales but it’s still on the clear net because it’s technically still being reviewed before being scheduled.
From what I understand, it’s a stimulant and people with ADHD are self medicating with it and developing a dependency on it. I don’t know exactly how it harms the body though.
Metta Beshar is a decent drug user/educator who has ADHD and went over his own addiction and widthdrawal in his video here:
Mind you it’s a combined video where he tries 7-OH as well. Not everyone wants to watch a video so here’s a chopped up cliff notes transcript:
Metta presents Kratom’s American story as an “ethnobotany 101” case study. Every time a culture meets a new substance it has no experience with, it goes through a chaotic phase of not knowing how to use it in a responsible manner. Going from raw leaf to a powder, to extracts, and now 7-OH pills which are getting banned all over.
Metta is still on and off user and doesn’t want to quit outright. He just dialed usage back. He describes Kratom withdrawal symptoms as runny nose, body aches, and insomnia like a less severe opioid-type withdrawal and says it’s “not as scary as a lot of people think” but that it depends on how deep and how long you were in. Tolerance creep he describes as starting at 2–3g → 6g → 8g before dialing it back after 4-5 years. Some people get dangerous with it and go up to 28g or even 50g/day. He also described the typical experience I’ve had with chemically addictive substances where you constantly find reasons to “treat” yourself as a reward for doing something.
His active user experience:
- Onset takes about an hour.
- Very relaxed, “sense of peace”
- Aches and pains greatly reduced. He likes to take it after martial arts training.
- Feels like a “warm comfort blanket,” almost like cuddling someone you care about
- Subtle overall, no noticeable change to his mental processes
- Sedating, ready for bed
The active compound in Kratom is called Mitragynin which is a partial mu-opioid agonist. You get the opioid feel (relaxation, mild euphoria, pain relief) but with a built-in ceiling so it stays mellow.
Nothing like K2, Don, since OP asked.
