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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

It's not just another opioid - mitragynine doesn't recruit beta-arrestin, the pathway associated with tolerance build up and side effects like respiratory depression.

I'm certainly not convinced it does cause dependence, especially not to the same degree as most opioids. As a sample size of 1, I was always able to stop taking kratom without suffering any kind of withdrawal, and there are plenty of other similar anecdotes on reddit (to be fair, there are plenty that do talk of cold-like symptoms when stopping it)

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As a sample size of 1, and a person who has used a lot of different substances (alcohol, cigarettes, amphetamines, psychedelics, marijuana flowers and extracts), been addicted to quite a few of them, and kicked all of them, Kratom has been by far the hardest drug to stop. After reading online about the potential benefits and mildness of Kratom, I started taking it occasionally, and slowly had to ramp up usage frequency because I would start feeling cold and uneasy when not on it, I pretty soon I had to take it consistently to stay at my baseline level.

I managed to taper off down to a manageable level (about half a coffee spoon every 5 hours), but going beyond that was impossible without feeling the withdrawal effect pretty much full force, I decided it was best to bite the bullet and stop cold turkey.

Extremely cold feeling coming from inside on a very hot day, awful restlessness (which made it impossible to sleep more than 2 or 3 hours a night for the first week, before I had to give up and go on sick leave), the most intense feeling of being devoid of energy both physically and psychologically, and pretty much all the symptoms of a strong cold. The extreme sleepiness and impossibility to fall asleep because of the restlessness is one of the most frustrating combos I've ever experienced, but I'm sure that's all too familiar to opioids users.

If you're trying to kick off an existing opioid addiction (or maybe have some sort of pain where the usual pain meds channel are not available?), this might make it more manageable I'm sure, but all the analogies to coffee or tea as "Just a thing you can take if you wanna calm down a bit" can be extremely dangerous to people that have essentially no need for it, and particularly people with an addictive behavior.

We all have our weaknesses I guess. For me, nothing was harder to quit than pot. I've regularly used opiates, kratom, and even tobacco and I can pick them up and put them down with ease and lack of noticable side effects (short of a few depressed days). Weed took weeks of dealing with lack of sleep, agression and obsessive thoughts before I broke free, and that was after many failed attempts.

I have personally seen several friends kick regular pill habits with kratom and they got off it OK. We should discuss the downsides but from what I've seen the folks with kratom problems just took way too much(as addicts will do, I guess).

Everyone's body reacts a bit differently to different substances, legislation should seek to inform people of the possible downsides rather than banning it completely because some people react poorly. This is well understood with other psychological pharmaceuticals, but with recreational drugs it is frequently overlooked.

Pot would definitely be second in my list. It's at the complete polar opposite of the addiction spectrum in my experience, and I had no physical symptoms beyond having a harder time falling asleep (incomparable to my experience with Kratom though) but the psychological addiction was the strongest out of all of them. Of course Kratom didn't cause any sort of substantial psychological addition in me, the feeling of warmth and general "feel goodness" I got from it was comparable and probably milder than a cup of coffee after having been off of it for a couple days, and subsided quite quickly after daily use.

Thing is, using your tea and coffee analogy, it really was much harder quitting caffeine for me - a week of awful headaches from caffeine withdrawal vs nothing after stopping kratom.

It really is strange the way many people have negligible or no withdrawal symptoms, and others report that they do. One theory is that you didn't just take kratom - there are known cases of it being sold mixed with synthetic opioids (o-des-tramadol is one such, from memory).

I don't think the product I bought was unpure, I got it from different, generally reliable, sources (and tried all the shades Kratoms came in at the time).

I fully accept that different people have different experiences coming off of a drug. I should have mentioned in my case that was about 8 months of daily use, although the withdrawal symptoms shown themselves very quickly (less than a month after I started taking it regularly).

I personally feel sluggish the first days if I stop coffee for a while, but even after drinking coffee every day for a comparable period of time, I don't instantly feel the withdrawal creep up on me as soon as caffeine (mostly) leaves my bloodstream.

For added context, at the peak of my consumption I would take about a teaspoon every 4-5 hours (consistently as this was the time it took to feel the cold symptoms again) through tossing and washing (just swallowing it down with some water). I've no experience with Kratom pills and no amount of sugar can possibly overcome the intense bitterness of Kratom tea at that dosage (and I like bitter).

I stopped cold turkey after taking it for over a year, 3.5g 4x a day, and had no adverse effects at all (well, other than the chronic pain I was taking if for coming back to the fore).

I wonder if perhaps there is some kind of genetic factor.. it's very strange in any case.

> been addicted to quite a few of them,

If you know this about yourself, maybe don't start taking opioids. There is certainly a subset of the population who, like yourself, seem to have addictive personalities regardless of the substance. That shouldn't really inform policy on any particular substance.

I also kicked all those habits. I'm curious and I was a bit of psychonaut.

This isn't me defending myself as not having an addictive personality, I'm sure I do, but I managed to stop smoking, coffee, alcohol and marijuana, some of those at the same time. Addiction is a problem that still plagues pretty much every country but even then I wouldn't say I'm necessarily in favor of banning kratom.

My original comment was only to point out that it clearly isn't as benign as a wide range of people make it seem. Of course if you go on the kratom subreddit you'll see addicts praising its benefits and rationalizing all sort of life improvements in the short term, as well as legitimate "success" stories, but most people who kicked the addiction don't repeatedly frequent and post there. I'd think this massive bias to be fairly obvious, but it might be worth repeating (this isn't aimed at your comment specifically).

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