DOSE: T+ 0:00			Kratom	(ground / crushed)
T+ 1:00			Kratom	(ground / crushed)
T+ 0:00		vaporized	Cannabis

BODY WEIGHT:

130 lb

Two experiences with Kratom: A beautiful stimulant

At the time of this experience, I was a 20 year old university student. I should note that I am quite skinny and affected by all manners of substances much more than most people. These were my first two times using kratom. Before this I had used psychedelics, weed, prescription stimulants, MDMA, and nutmeg.

A friend of mine told me he had a bag of kratom. He told me it gave him the feeling of “having your eyes pulled back” like weed did. Later I looked it up and saw lots of people using at as an opiate substitute. I was a bit turned off by this, but then I saw people talking about how at low doses it acted as a sort of stimulant. Now, I was an avid consumer of anything that would get me to do more. I drank multiple cups of coffee a day and took Ritalin 1-3 times per week. The latter was starting to cause problems with my mood and appetite, so I wanted to try kratom as an alternative. I went back to my friend and got some off of him.

The kratom was this really fine green powder. It smelled vaguely like tea. I didn’t have a proper bag or container to contain it (there was a lot), so I ended up dumping it out on a paper plate. I knew how much was on the paper plate in total, but didn’t have any way of measuring exactly beyond that. I used a credit card to push around the powder into roughly equal sized sections. Each one should theoretically have half a gram.

A few days later one of my friends from out of town was visiting. We were going to be hanging out in my dorm room, with no one else present all day. We decided to break into it, each of us starting off with a quarter of a gram to be safe. We mixed our doses up in water and drank them down. The taste was pretty awful, like you’d expect dirty tea leaves to taste. We had to fill our cups up a second time to get the residue that stuck to the bottom. Somehow it tasted worse when it was more diluted.

We hung out for a bit, just chatting and catching up. After about 45 minutes I noticed I was out of my chair and pacing around more than usual. Talking to my friends always put me in a good mood, but I was just a step beyond that. My friend said he didn’t feel anything different. Another 30 minutes or so passed and he was a bit more smiley than normal. I asked him if he wanted to work on something and he eagerly assented. There wasn’t anything that really needed doing, so we ended up disassembling my coffee machine and arranging all the parts out neatly. It was a pretty long process, lots of unscrewing and changing screwdriver heads and all. Perhaps the whole thing took us an hour.

At this point my mood had gotten just a bit higher. I was a bit more energetic and witty. My legs felt a bit stiff. Perhaps it was vasoconstriction. I wouldn’t describe the feeling here as being “high”. I was feeling pretty great, but how I was feeling seemed like it was obtainable without the kratom. Sure, it was a lot better than I normally feel, but I’m sure I’ve felt just as good sober before. There was a slight body high in my chest and upper arms, like soft bits of light gently moving upwards through me. It was very subtle, I could forget about it if I got distracted. At this point I decided to have another quarter of a gram, then some extra amount in addition to that. I wanted the effects to get stronger.

A while passed and we decided to vape some weed. I didn’t really feel much of anything at the point I usually would, so I had way more than usual. I think the weed and the extra kratom both kicked in at once. My friend and I were sitting down on the floor chatting. All of a sudden it seemed like all of the kratom’s effects shifted from being uppers to downers. I laid down, nominally still listening to my friend. At this point I was feeling pretty stoned as well.

It was very hard to disentangle the weed from the kratom. Their mixture felt very muddled, thick, and dirty. Normally I have a hard time visualizing anything. I can do it with great concentration, but the default mode of my brain is to think in words. Now I was absentmindedly imagining a bunch of vivid images. Most of it was random shapes and lines. Occasionally I’d imagine other things, like my girlfriend smiling or a fluffy dog. It was all very chill, pleasing stuff.

After a while my friend noticed I wasn’t really listening. I mumbled that I was “downered out.” My friend helped himself to more of my weed. My skin slowly started to feel warm in a strange way. It felt hot, almost enough to bring me to the edge of sweating, but somehow the feeling was only present on the outermost part of my flesh. Everything but my skin seemed to be of normal temperature. This warmth was vaguely pleasant, but I thought it seemed kind of like what people said opioids felt like. I felt a bit uneasy with this.

Five or six hours passed, with us gradually coming down the whole time. My friend left and I still had a huge plate of that stuff on my desk.

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Three weeks later I decided to use Kratom to boost my productivity. I figured I had too much last time, so I tried to guestimate a dosage that was 25% lower. I think this would translate to about 400 mg, but all of this was so inaccurate I wouldn’t put much faith in my numbers. I took my kratom and started wrapping up some foreign language studying I was doing. I was more trying to get it done before the kratom kicked in than trying to do it with help. I was 95% finished when I started to feel my mood rise. I finished my work and looked fondly at my books. It really was a beautiful language. I thought about all the cool things I could do when I became literate in it. I could understand whole new sections of the internet, read new books and plays…

I remembered there was a specific task I took this for. I stood up to go get my laptop, but stopped when I saw a photo of my girlfriend on my wall. I thought for a moment about how nice and sweet she was, then sent her a very affectionate text message. She appreciated it.

I got my laptop out and started on my intended task. I was writing a computer program. I’ll spare you the details of what it was or how it worked, but I had been stuck at a point where I hadn’t even written a line of code in weeks. I knew what problem I was trying to solve, but I had not idea how to even begin approaching it. Now with kratom on my side I flipped through my notebook of ideas I had ruled out. I very quickly realized that I could combine two of my failed ideas in a certain way to solve the problem. I scribbled down my solution, then got to work coding it.

Kratom is a strange stimulant, in that it doesn’t really make me focused, but it really makes me motivated . Frequently I would space out while writing code, but I wouldn’t go off to do something else. I had a very strong sense of emotional motivation to work on my project. I was somehow even more excited about working on it than when I came up with the idea in the first place. I thought about how cool it would be to finally have it work, how I’d be able to show it off to my friends and professors and tell them all about it. It was the thought of final success that motivated me.

My coding style was markedly different under kratom’s influence. I didn’t particularly care about all the details, though I was aware of them. I jotted down a bunch of little notes in my code to do monotonous coding tasks later. I was much more focused on the big picture and wanted to see my ideas realized as fast as possible.

When I was finally done, I was giddy. I couldn’t help but giggle at how good I felt having finally broken through the problem. Kratom is certainly a creative stimulant. Perhaps it’s an emotional one too. I seemed to always get lost in a sense of fondness or optimism. It gave me good vibes and lots of energy. The next day didn’t have a hangover or an afterglow, but I did have a finished program to show off.

Helped with creative problem solving. In later experiences I also found it to be quite conducive to creative writing.

Exp Year: 2019	ExpID: 113198
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: 20
Published: May 19, 2019	Views: 2,658
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Kratom (203) : Combinations (3), Glowing Experiences (4), Performance Enhancement (50), Retrospective / Summary (11), Various (28)