Kratom, the legal drug that's destroying lives & the community that's providing hope

There are lobbies in NC devoted to this drug.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/the-legal-drug-that-is-destroying-lives-and-the-community-thats-providing-hope-6025850

After Decima Davis started taking kratom, a tropical plant often billed as a healthy pick-me-up, she couldn’t stop.

Whenever she tried to pry herself loose from kratom’s grip, her torment only intensified.

“Every morning, I’d wake up drenched in sweat, already in agony, knowing relief was just two minutes away at the local gas station” that sold the products, Davis, 51, of Mississippi, told The Epoch Times.

“I spent my mornings throwing up, desperately redosing just to be functional enough for work. That desperation is what led to three overdoses and grand mal seizures.

“I reached a point where I couldn’t even look in the mirror; I didn’t recognize the person looking back. I felt completely gone, just a hollow shell of myself living a daily nightmare.

“It was a relentless, soul-crushing cycle.”

After many failed efforts, something finally clicked for Davis after she and two fellow kratom addicts formed the online community “Quitting Kratom Support—There Is A Way Out.” Since its inception in 2017, the peer-guided group has drawn upward of 15,000 unique online visitors, said Davis, its president.

“The group replaced my isolation with accountability. In the past, I was surrounded by negative messages and self-loathing, but this community drowned that out,” she said.

“We use a ‘collective tools’ approach—people bring what they’ve learned from various programs and share it. Peer support is backed by the ‘helper therapy principle,’ which suggests that when we help others, we heal ourselves.”

Now, at least three times a day, dozens of people quietly tap into a reservoir of hope at KratomQuitters.com. In the past two months, online attendance has grown 17 percent, Davis said.

Many group members, including Davis, credit the online community with saving their lives.

“We want people to know: Hope is out there; there’s help,” Davis said, noting that she and a handful of other volunteers—all unpaid—keep the group running. They often absorb website costs and other expenses themselves, defrayed by some contributions.

Davis said being around others “who actually understand the specific pull of kratom” is key.

“Being surrounded by people who truly want to see me win changed my internal narrative from ‘I’m a failure’ to ‘I am part of a family that cares about my well-being and loves me,’” she said.

“This community is the family I chose. It didn’t just help me manage the withdrawals; it gave me my soul back.”

Increased interest in groups such as Davis’s parallels the rise of kratom use in the United States, along with higher numbers of reported adverse effects among users—and additional legal restrictions.

Last year, a Journal of Psychoactive Drugs survey found that about 9 percent of Americans were using kratom. That’s a ninefold increase over the 1 percent that an American Journal of Preventive Medicine survey estimated in 2019.