Image source: https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/kratom-wha...

Ever heard of kratom?

I hadn't. Until about 2015. It's a collection of tree species in Southeast Asia. If you dry and crush their leaves into a powder, mix that powder with water, then drink it on an empty stomach, the Asian locals report sensations of delicious internal warmth, persisting for several hours. Apparently kratom has been a local SE Asian delicacy/recreational-drug for centuries, and only recently started penetrating various US subcultures. People crow about it. By all accounts it's the serious tits. So I figured I'd order some and try some.

And god yes. It seriously was. It perked my mood up something wonderfully.

I researched further. Turns out its internal active ingredients are a mixture of alkaloids, a chemical relative of caffeine. Its proponents tote it as a milder and healthier alternative to the opiate epidemic sweeping much of the USA. Quitting even legally prescribed opiate drugs is by all accounts hell on earth. But take some kratom and your internal hell deflates to mere mild discomfort.

But that's another story. I'd ventured near neither opiates nor alkaloids. Yet kratom seems fab nonetheless. I persisted.

Fast forward to 2022. At the time, I'd had slightly-longer-than-shoulder-length hair. I'd not ever been able to grow it longer, and not for lack of trying. Popular opinion seems to be that everyone has different rates at which they shed their hair, or break it, or get split ends, or damage it in some other way, and no-one's damage rate is exactly zero: if you grow your hair, then as it lengthens, one's opportunities increase for damage and breakage and shedding and overall follicular attrition, and eventually the attrition rate and the growth rate reach equilibrium.

Okay fair enough. I'd figured I'd hit this equilibrium. Don't we all? I'd never had cause to wonder if kratom might affect this.

Until I discovered reddit.com/r/quittingkratom.

And man oh man. Its users claim prolonged kratom usage has a gazillion awful side effects. Not only hair damage and shedding (and some women were bemoaning losing up to three quarters of their hair), but all kinds of other crap: inhibition of vitamin uptakes and nutrient absorption, tummy microbiome damage, dehydration, skin damage, premature aging, loads of other stuff.

Geez. In the last year or two previous, I can't deny I'd received or overheard comments from more than a few well-meaning family members, remarking on how apparently I'd visibly aged. Again, at the time I'd figured this was just regular ol' passage of time. Come on. Don't we all age eventually?

Sure. But /r/quittingkratom's consensus is that this kratom gunk vastly accelerates it. I pored through comment thread after comment thread, page after page, of people all crowing the same two claims: (1) long-term kratom usage seriously messed up their health; and (2) within a few months of quitting, their skin resumed its former radiant glow, their hair thickened and strengthened and shot down their backs, and their health cleared up in a ton of other ways.

That does it, I vowed. Time to quit for good.

And I did. That was back in May '22.

So. Had I experienced these same health resurrections? Well. One of my more morbidly hilarious domestic habits at that time had been to use my shower's drain clogging from all my shedding hair to signal that perhaps it's time to clean the entire shower. Takes about three weeks.

Until I'd quit kratom. At some point in September '22, I discovered myself thinking: "huh, the shower's looking a bit grubbier than usual. When did I last clean it? I ... honestly can't remember! It's been ages! But the shower drain is draining perfectly ... wait ... oh, I've stopped shedding hair!"

Yup. Thicker hair, growing faster, shinier, tougher, fewer breakages whilst combing, it's awesome. Additionally, I started also witnessing the growth of thousands of new hairs. I was combing my hair, standard practice ... and for the life of me could not figure out why my hair had suddenly become so much more frizzy. No amount of combing would flatten this extra frizz. It took bloody ages to realise that this wasn't my existing hair getting frizzier: no, it was entirely new hair-strand growth, all 1-2 inches in length.

My head was resembling a shoulder-length wig over the top of two inches' growth of my real hair. It's insane.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily against slight-to-moderate kratom usage. Once in a while is probably fine. But sure as hell not daily. I was putting away ~60g/day for a while. No longer!

It's also rather expensive.