Where were you getting your kratom? Were you buying it from a vendor that also provides documentation from a testing facility to demonstrate that there were no adulterants? There are people participating in the kratom supply chain that adulterate the kratom that passes through their hands. Testing has shown kratom sprayed with opiates, or kratom adulterated with opiate potentiators (both herbal and not), and even stuff like kratom with green tea added to give it a better smell and flavor. For example, those teenagers that died in Sweden were found to have been taking kratom that was sprayed with O-desmethyltramadol (ODT) [0].

I purchase all of my kratom from a vendor that also provides documentation to prove that they're selling unadulterated kratom. Lots of vendors are resisting this, because they know the lengths some unscrupulous southeast Asian distributors will go to to get "the most fire kratom" to sell to American vendors (and lie about what they're selling). And there are known instances of American vendors realizing that they've been sold an adulterated batch, and then continuing to sell that kratom in order to not be holding a loss. I appreciate your recounting your experience, and I'm sorry to hear it was troublesome, but having used kratom for going on ten years now, and regularly taking extended breaks to keep my tolerance from building, my own anecdote is the opposite from yours: I experience little to no withdrawals whatsoever, and I take a relatively high dose. I understand kratom affects people differently, but the testing that's been done, and things added to kratom by the Indonesian or Vietnamese distributors' own admission shows that what people are buying could be anything.

As more vendors realize that regular testing and publication of the results is what consumers want, I believe we'll see fewer and fewer of these kinds of stories.

[0] http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/drug-profiles/krato...