Tag: medication

21 in 2020 – The State Kratom Consumer Protection Act Challenge

READ: American Kratom Association: December Legislative Update

Get your shit together, Rhode Island. At most, Kratom can save someone’s life. At least, it can help someone live a more pain-free life. Personally, if I didn’t have Kratom I would’ve had to cut my last NYC trip short a day.

I’m happy for the cannabis enthusiasts and all their legal victories in recent years. If THC/CBD/etc improves your symptoms that’s great, it’s very safe. However, it’s not a miracle cure. There are no “one size fits all” cures. It happens to make my symptoms worse.

Recent cannabis legalization acts are not the result of drugs being evaluated the way they should, by their medical value, safety, etc. Decisions are still made due to financially motivations and ignorance. You don’t have to look further than the misinformation surrounding the recent vaping bans to see that.

Scott Gottlieb used to post all this bullshit on Twitter about how dangerous Kratom is, even stating that people inject it (nobody fucking injects Kratom, just a scare tactic). He blamed Kratom for the deaths of individuals that were found to have multiple drugs in their system – drugs which posed a much more likely explanation for their death.

Why is does that matter? Because Scott Gottlieb did this all while he was the HEAD OF THE FDA! Where does he work now? For Pfizer, an opioid-producing pharma company. Shocking!

You may not care about any of this shit right now, but mark my words – I’ve been telling my friends this for years: When I rant about things like Kratom, you may not a shit… but one day, the DEA/FDA/CDC is going to interfere with something you DO feel passionately about. Something that really helps you or a loved one. For many, that particular thing was vaping. What’s next? Anything they deem a threat to their profits.

Adderall – The King of Prescription Stimulants

My life completely changed when I first started taking Adderall. For the first time in a while I had an abundance of energy and motivation. I thought I was cured.

Unfortunately, strong stimulants come with some side effects. The most obvious one is that it’s difficult to sleep. You don’t need as much sleep when you’re on drugs like Adderall – you can get 4-6 hours and wake up feeling ready to go, but after a few days of this it starts to creep up on you. Your muscles get more tense and a variety of ticks can develop which vary from person to person. Some rub their fingers together, some make facial twitches, and worst of all some grind their teeth together.

Tolerance develops very quickly with stimulants. I recall looking up a drugs experience site for people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and all the reviews for Adderall were either “I just started taking it last week! It’s great! I’m cured!” or “I started taking it a year ago… it’s not working as well anymore. I’m tired and my brain is getting foggy again.”

Doctors prescribe Adderall for daily use, but in my experience, using it daily just makes all the negative effects listed above much worse. I learned this the hard way. I took it daily for many years and it helped me live somewhat of a “normal” life for a while. At the end though, I was sleep-deprived, my muscles constantly felt like they were on fire, and my fatigue/brain fog levels were getting pretty high again. I realized there was nothing to do but stop it, so I did. After a year of withdrawal (sleeping up to 15 hours a day, only getting out of bed to use the bathroom, only being capable of watching TV) I began cycling it.

Cycling helps reduce side effects and prevents tolerance. Some people take “Adderall vacations” on the weekends. I take it 2-5 times a week depending on how much I need to get done.

Adderall is fairly easy to get prescribed from a psychiatrist. It’s cheap for insurance companies, it’s their go-to stimulant drug. In fact if you try to get a perscription for a wakefulness-promoting agent like Modafinil, they’ll refuse to cover it and say “Why not just take Adderall instead?”

I’ve seen some members of the CFS community say they don’t like stimulants due to the side-effects and crash. While it’s true that there are some uncomfortable side-effects like muscle stiffness, ticks, and insomnia, it’s done more for me than I ever could have imagined.