DOSE:	30+ g	oral	Kratom	(daily)
	50 mg	oral	Pharms - Sertraline

BODY WEIGHT:

95 kg

I became addicted to Kratom a few years ago after initially becoming rather too fond of codeine (in its various OTC concoctions) after being prescribed it for some minor injury. At the peak I was taking 10+ Solpadeine Max pills at a time, twice a day, and I was beginning to get concerned about the effect this was having on my liver (10 pills is 5 grams of paracetamol, whereas the recommended limit is 4g in a 24 hour period).

After a year or two of taking the pills I was starting to feel ill if I missed a dose, and also found myself having to travel further and further to different pharmacies so that I wouldn’t be recognised and refused service; also some pharmacies (not many though surprisingly) were starting to clamp down on selling codeine OTC and would interrogate you as to why they were needed, with ‘safer’ alternatives offered. Knowing that I couldn’t keep this up for ever, but worried about what would happen if I stopped, one day I happened across the green Godsend which was Kratom when reading about ways to help with quitting opiates. The idea was that I would stop the pills, use Kratom as and when required to help with any illness, and then eventually I would be free.

Three and a half years later, and I was well into a 30+ grams of powder per day habit. By this point I had been visited by the police due to customs seizing one of my orders (Kratom isn’t strictly “illegal” here but it is illegal to import), found myself in hospital due to severe stomach pains (which I put down to the amounts of powder I was swallowing – after this I started brewing tea with it and the pains subsided), and my social anxiety had gone through the roof to the point where I don’t want to go out and I had to miss work due to panic attacks. Despite all of this, even though I was telling myself I needed to cut down or quit, I carried on brewing litres of Kratom tea every single day just to get through – but that was about to change abruptly.

After talking with my doctor about possible medication to help with my social anxiety (at this point I didn’t know that it was the Kratom that was making it worse), I was prescribed Sertraline (an SSRI, sometimes called Zoloft). That night I took the first dose and went to bed, then when I woke up I had my usual first drink of Kratom brew.

Despite having only taken a single 50mg dose, it was going up against years of chronic Kratom build up. As the Kratom kicked in I began to feel confused, highly anxious, I couldn’t sit still or even control my own thoughts. I was pacing around my house in a state of confusion and panic, not knowing what was going on. I felt like I was on the verge of losing consciousness while feeling wide awake at the same time, if that makes any sense. It was like a bad psychedelic trip but with only the psychological effects. It felt like I could taste the sertraline in my face and on my breath. A panicked call to the doctor resulted in her telling me it was probably just a bad reaction to the SSRI and as long as I wasn’t losing consciousness or having trouble breathing I would be fine to just wait it out.

Well, wait it out I did. After about 48 hours of no sleep, constant fear, and having to move around constantly, the Kratom withdrawals finally started to take over (funny how reacting like that can suddenly make you not want to take it again!). I felt so sick I was jamming my fingers down my throat in order to make myself vomit to get some relief from the nausea, which didn’t work. I was vomiting blood in the end. I still couldn’t sit still, but now it was because of the restless legs and arms making my bones itch relentlessly, relieved only for a microsecond by moving/jerking them, which inevitably caused severe chills to run through the affected limb as it was moved away from its warm spot on the bed sheet. The insomnia meant I only managed a couple of hours of sleep per night, but despite all this my brain barely felt tired even though my body felt like it had just ran a marathon.

All of this lasted for about a week before I began to physically feel somewhat normal again. Now in the post acute phase, I found myself to be mentally very low, very bored, very tired, very apathetic and unable to feel any joy. Relief from this feeling came sporadically in the form of overwhelming emotional reactions (read: crying my eyes out) to things like films, music, people around me being kind to me, the sun coming out, etc. Strangely I haven’t once felt any sort of craving for Kratom, but reading others’ accounts of post-withdrawal, I know that there is a very real chance it could come just when I am at my weakest, or even when I believe myself to be over it. Knowing this I took my 3kgs of powder, 1kg of loose leaf, my scales and brewing equipment and threw them in the bin outside a McDonalds.

A few days later as I write this (16 days since my last dose), things continue to settle down a little bit every day. I am so, so glad to finally be free from it, but if it wasn’t for a bad reaction with sertraline then I know I would still be taking it today – I would never have been able to summon the will power to stop on my own.

tl;dr - don’t abuse Kratom, for a ‘mild’ drug it gets hold of you and you might just have to go through hell to get away from it.

Exp Year: 2025	ExpID: 118729
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 42
Published: Dec 23, 2025	Views: Not Supported
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Kratom (203), Pharms - Sertraline (88) : Combinations (3), Retrospective / Summary (11), Hangover / Days After (46), Multi-Day Experience (13), Addiction & Habituation (10), Alone (16)