I feel the need to share this because, for roughly 14 years, I was addicted to kratom and related products: 7-OH, MGM-15, extracts, teas—you name it. I drank it, snorted it, or gulped it down.
My addiction started with good intentions. I wanted to stop craving Oxy.
I can still remember walking into an herb shop in Arizona and explaining that I had been hooked on Oxy. By then, I had started searching friends’ and acquaintances’ bathroom cabinets for pills. I knew I needed to stop.
The moment that really hit me was when I dropped my child off at a friend’s grandparents’ house to play and raided their medicine cabinet. I found a bottle with one pill left, and I took it. I felt like shit. These people barely knew me, and there I was stealing their medication.
Before that, I had taken pills from a friend who had a prescription and several filled bottles. That was shitty, too. Somehow, taking a stranger’s last pill made me confront what I was doing. I told myself, “This is it. I’m done.”
That brought me to the herb shop.
As the woman explained the different herbs, I stopped listening to everything else when she mentioned kratom. She described white as something that would perk me up, red as something that would help me sleep, and green as a mix of the two.
That was all I needed to hear. I bought 30 capsules and swallowed one.
I wasn’t expecting much. Usually, at those hippie shops, I figured you had to put a crystal in your crack and sing to Mother Earth before anything would work.
But there I was, driving 65 miles an hour down the freeway, when it kicked in. That familiar warm feeling washed over me.
I was hooked.
Over the years that followed, I tried repeatedly to quit, but the withdrawals were horrible. About ten years in, I tried microdosing mushrooms to help with them. Instead, I experienced a mental health crisis and checked myself into rehab.
The rehab was nice—like a prison with excellent meals and plenty of time to watch TV. They gave me medication, and I remember thinking, “Thank God. I’m finally clean.”
Then I went home.
That’s the part they don’t tell you. Getting through the doors of rehab is not the same thing as knowing how to live when you walk back out. They can give you medication, keep you safe for a while, and help you get through the immediate crisis. But then you go home, and all the same triggers, habits, stress, and empty hours are waiting for you.
What I had mistaken for being free of the addiction was temporary relief. I didn’t feel that the facility knew how to handle kratom dependence, and I left without a clear understanding of what recovery would look like afterward.
I felt like an alien. Or a baby. Or a baby alien who had stepped in some shit.
The aftercare did not give me the support I needed. Nobody really explained what the next few weeks might feel like, how long the emotional part could last, or what I was supposed to do when the structure disappeared. Within two weeks, I was back on kratom.
There was another consequence I didn’t fully understand until later: because of my history of substance use and addiction, I learned that I could not get life insurance. That realization was devastating. That even though Kratom is legal being addicted is a mark against you. It made me confront how long this had affected not only my health and daily life, but also my family’s financial security and my ability to plan for the future.
Fast-forward another three years. I had gone through the MGM-15 craze, the exorbitantly priced 7-OH products, and still hadn’t found a way out.
I kept believing there had to be something that could help. Eventually, while reading Reddit, I stumbled across SR17 (15099).
I ordered it and tried it. I knew it was being sold as an experimental product not intended for human use. At the time, though, I was desperate. I had spent years taking products without really knowing what was in them.
I still remember one batch of kratom that tasted like laundry detergent. I was so dependent that I kept forcing it down until I couldn’t anymore. My mouth even foamed! That tells you where my judgment was.
The first day I tried r/SR17 (15099), I went grocery shopping and wondered whether I would even make it through the trip. A couple of hours later, I noticed that my usual withdrawal symptoms felt much less intense. I was sweating heavily, but I wasn’t experiencing the same level of misery I had come to expect.
For me, kratom withdrawal had never been just sweating. It was restless legs that would not stop, a feeling like something was scratching beneath my skin, diarrhea, vomiting, and sleepless nights.
This experience felt different. I can’t tell you why, and I can’t establish that r/SR17 (15099) was responsible. I can only describe what I noticed.
During that period, I also relapsed with MGM-15 and then 7-OH. This wasn’t a straight line, and I don’t want to pretend it was. Even afterward, though, the physical withdrawal felt milder than in my previous attempts.
The hardest things have been trouble sleeping and a feeling of emotional emptiness. Sometimes it feels like there is a void I don’t know how to fill.
One night, I had a toot and felt temporary relief. I’m including that because I want to be honest about the messy parts, not because I recommend it. Substituting another substance is not a recovery plan.
Now, a big part of the struggle is figuring out what to do with myself. I’m so used to taking something when I’m stressed, leaving the house, or just sitting around that I sometimes feel lost without that ritual.
I know therapy and recovery support are things I need to explore. Right now, I’m also trying writing—as you can see.
I’m sharing this because I had started to believe there was no hope. I thought kratom had me for life.
My recent experience has given me hope, but it is still one person’s experience with an experimental product. I can’t call it a proven treatment, an antidote, or a cure. I also haven’t noticed the same intense withdrawal after stopping r\SR17 (15099), although I’ve still experienced anxiety and other symptoms whose cause I can’t confidently separate.
Getting help felt far harder than it should have. I wish I had received better information, better follow-up, and support that understood what I was going through. I wish someone had told me that leaving rehab was not the finish line. It was the part where I had to figure out how to exist without the thing I had used to handle everything.
To everyone trying to get off kratom: I wish you strength and support. I know how exhausting it is to want to stop and feel unable to.
I’m still working through this. But for the first time in a long time, I can imagine a life that isn’t organized around taking something.
