(Editor’s Note: If you or a loved one struggle with substance abuse disorder, visit findtreatment.gov to learn about options for treatment and help. And don’t try any of this at home.)
When I was 29, there was a vape shop by my apartment where I bought nicotine pouches.
They sat on the shelf to the left of a selection of kratom products: various powders, capsules, and tinctures of a Southeast Asian plant that, in low doses, have stimulant-like effects and, in high doses, mild opiate-like effects. I’d used kratom powder to get off of vicodin and morphine — habits I picked up at 20 years old after moving into a rat-infested drug den with some friends.
But at 29, I wasn’t really thinking about opiates. I hadn’t popped a pain pill or snorted morphine in six years, and I had no real intention of doing so on this particularly cool winter day. But then, I went to pay for the one drug I allowed myself to consume on a day-to-day basis: mint flavored paper pouches of nicotine, which keep me from yelling at everyone and doing the dishes too aggressively. That’s when I noticed a little white, almost medicinal-looking box that said “Hydroxie.” I sort of laughed and said, “The fuck is that?” to the baby-faced stoner kid working the touch-screen register.
“Oh, it’s 7-OH. It’s the stuff in kratom thats fucks you up but like, super concentrated. It’s like dabs but for kratom kinda,” he replied. “Shit flies off the shelves here, man. People love it.”
“This shit’s legal? It works?” I asked, as I craned my neck to get a look at the price tag. I had butterflies in my stomach. The kind right when you crest the peak of a roller coaster, when you know what’s coming, and you’re probably going to be mostly safe. But you’re excited and scared nonetheless. That mix of energy and adrenaline and excitement.
$20 for two 20 milligram pills. I used to pawn every guitar I had for that kind of dose.
“Yea, dude. Shit’s no joke at all,” he answered.
Things in my life were going about as well as they could go, given the circumstances at the time.
“What the hell,” I said. “Throw ’em in the bag.”
The kid rang me up, but before I left, he warned, “Hey man, maybe just eat half and see how you feel. I see a lot of people roll through here for ’em. Construction guys usually. They buy me out the day I restock. Just be careful, man! Have a good one, bro.”
***
Back at my apartment, I popped the box open to find a foil-back pack with two pills, as promised. The look and feel was in every way similar to a two-pack of travel Tylenol. The pills were light brown, sort of chalky, with a large “H” stamped in the middle to resemble street-pressed pain pills and fake Oxy. I laughed a little at the not-so-subtle branding of the product and broke the pill in half; it gave way without much effort. I hesitated a bit, and a montage of bad memories played out in fast-forward in my head. Pawn shops, arguments with family, the empty half-hearted smile of the intake nurse at a mental hospital in South Austin, blood in the sink, and red in the bank account. All that went away pretty quickly, though, when I thought about how good my life had been lately. I deserved a little something for 150 days free from alcohol. That had been the last dragon left to slay after 15 years of asking, “Gee, what does this stuff do if I take a bunch of it?”
I popped the chalky tablet in my mouth, washed it back with a tamarind Jarritos soda, and got to work.
***
It starts in your legs and in the back of your chest. There’s a levity, like tilting a chair onto its hind legs and finding that sweet spot right before it falls over.
Then there’s the warmth. It’s not just the sensation of physical temperature. It’s like coming back to your apartment after a night out in the winter. The warmth of home. It’s familiar, it’s kind, and it doesn’t want to harm you.
At least at first.
Then, there’s what’s colloquially referred to as “the nod.” It’s a trance brought on by the aforementioned sensations as the endorphins start kicking in. Suddenly you’re oscillating between the alertness of a fever dream and the lethargy of that first “plop” down on the couch after a long shift. It’s both heavy and light. Like a lilt in a child’s lullaby, or the raspy vibrato of a lounge singer as she ascends and descends with the scales of the piano.
It is fucking incredible, and there is nothing like it.
I spent the next two hours drifting in and out of consciousness on my couch. Before I passed out, the last thing I remember thinking was, “There is no fucking way they should be allowed to sell this shit next to Bob Marley posters and SpongeBob bongs.”
***
I love opiates.
Starting at 20, we had an on-again-off-again relationship for a little while until my whole life went to shit, but like any boy’s first love, I think about them from time to time and wonder how they’re doing.
I loved them from the moment I tried my first vicodin in ninth grade. I was more or less the perfect poster child for the D.A.R.E. program. Weed was fine, and booze was fun, but what I really wanted was something that would make me almost die in total bliss. I was trying to turn my brain off.
At their best, opiates are a hug from a cherished, estranged old friend. A blanket fresh from the dryer on a cool winter’s eve. Sunlight that you can see even with your eyes closed, a warm orange hue that envelops the backs of your eyelids as you crest a hill to find the clearest, coolest, bluest oasis thine own eyes have ever seen.
At their worst, like anything in life that feels too good, they’ll eventually take everything from you. Yes, even that. And sooner rather than later you’re at a meeting in some rec center, repeating the serenity prayer through gritted teeth in a room full of people all doing the same. It’s a thief. They’re relief on a loan with one hell of an interest rate.
Much like a fresh-faced new quarterback, opiates have a long history of being hailed as a miracle then cursed as a scourge. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a Prussian chemist isolated chemicals in opium and created the first synthetic: morphine. Roughly a hundred years later, German chemists working at Bayer refined morphine into heroin (around the same time they invented aspirin) and began to mass market it as a wonder drug that was safer than morphine and even a cure for addiction. In reality, it was six times more powerful.
Sound familiar?
About 30 years ago, Purdue Pharma introduced OxyContin — with another opium synthetic, oxycodone, wrapped in a time-release coating and multitudes stronger than its Percocet predecessor — and aggressively marketed it as a safe and easily accessible painkiller to doctors offices across the country. Sales reps promised a cure-all for every type of pain: a leg lost in a lathe accident or headaches from being a housewife. Then addictions and overdoses skyrocketed into what the Department of Justice called “a national tragedy.”
Now more than a million people in the U.S. have an opioid use disorder, and the drug is nearly impossible to get — even for cancer patients. Though the feds have managed to squeeze some money out of Purdue for drug treatment programs, the opioid crisis has been called a colossal policy failure with no end in sight.
It is a very American thing to sell a “miracle” to gullible, desperate people — and then, in an act of mercy, take it away from them and tell them to figure the rest out as they writhe sick and sweating alone on the floor. This overcorrection and refusal to treat addicts like human beings has opened the floodgates for fly-by-night companies to ply their mystery wares. The response to the unstoppable force of Texans’ desire to get fucked up has meant big bucks for shady companies looking to capitalize on the former while skirting the wrath of the state.
This has created a not-so-black market where you can buy legal “weed,” trip the fuck out on psychedelic mushrooms without fear of jail, and even get addicted to what scientists compare to “legal morphine.” All can be found at gas stations and vape stores across the state.
Enter: a new wave of synthetic opiates.
Hustlers and hucksters have miraculously found a way to make a buck peddling knockoffs of the stuff the state has deemed too dangerous. Certain substances like tianeptine, AKA “gas station heroin,” are in a legal gray space — illegal to sell and market because they’re not Food and Drug Administration-approved (the agency has issued warnings against tianeptine products) but not a federally controlled substance. Calls to poison control centers and reported deaths from tianeptine have gone up, and crackdowns have ensued, so the invisible hand of the market got to work and started throwing stuff in the bathtub to see what would stick.
7-Hydroxymitragynine stuck like fucking glue. Mitragynine is a main compound in kratom and breaks down into 7-hydroxymitragynine when ingested, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Though not approved by the FDA, kratom has been used for opioid withdrawal symptoms. Both mitragynine and 7-OH affect the brain like codeine or morphine; they activate biochemical pathways that elicit pain relief and affect mood. Hydroxie is just one brand you can find in vape stores, gas stations, and liquor stores all across the state of Texas, as well as other 7-OH tablets called hyDROXYS, Press’d, BLOOS, and my personal favorite: PERKS.
The story of how 7-OH came to flood vape shops and gas stations across the country is a bit murky. Despite being identified 30 years ago by scientists at Chiba University, it only truly became popular with consumers in the last year.
Despite its trace presence in raw kratom leaf, 7-OH is synthetically derived from kratom and is incredibly addictive. Because of a lack of federal oversight, users have no idea what they’re getting or how much they’re taking. The Texas Legislature passed a bill in 2023 that requires manufacturers to register their products, set limits for the level of 7-hydroxymitragynine, and restrict use of synthetics.
In July, the Global Kratom Coalition sent a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton warning of the dangers of concentrates and 7-OH abuse. According to the coalition’s letter, an independent lab detected illegal levels of 7-OH found in products sold at various vape stores around Dallas and in Collin County.
“We’re concerned that kratom, in many cases, is no longer kratom,” said the executive director of the coalition, Matthew Lowe, in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. Lowe told the newspaper about the rise of 7-OH abuse over the past 18 months and the work he has done to better understand it.
“The regulatory environment is a little bit gray at this point in time,” he added. “You’ve also got a situation where the innovation, in and outside the kratom industry, in isolated synthetic products is increasing at a really, really fast pace.”
“We’re seeing it everywhere,” Lowe told the newspaper.
Some business owners want better regulations on the products, and the Food and Drug Administration has said there is inadequate information about kratom to “provide reasonable assurance that such ingredient does not present a significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury.” The agency says it has not approved any prescription or over-the-counter drug products containing kratom or its two main chemical components, mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine. Kratom is illegal in six states, but most — like Texas — have lagged behind legislating these rapidly changing drugs.
Although these substances are fairly new, they have already wreaked havoc among addicts and former addicts who are looking for ways to curb cravings. An estimated 1.7 million Americans ages 12 and older used kratom in 2021, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health. In a 2023 investigation, the Tampa Bay Times found 580 people died in Florida from kratom-related overdoses and that people with a history of drug use accounted for the majority of kratom-only overdoses. Reddit communities also have popped up featuring horror stories of addiction, overdose, relapse, and financial ruin.
I am a year into cycling between detox and retox with 7-OH. Something I told myself a long time ago I would never do. Sitting here writing this, I am, for about the sixth time, trying to taper off the synthetics and kratom concentrates. From experience, I can tell you that while the withdrawals aren’t exactly on par with pharmaceutical opiates, they are terrible and very difficult to manage, especially as the prevalence of these drugs increases and their availability becomes impossible to ignore. Imagine being addicted to heroin and you can just go to 7-Eleven to pick up a Little Debbie and some Dilaudid.
This is not a projection of my own addictive personality attempting to regulate the behavior of others, nor is it intended to be a scare tactic designed to shame people or drive them away from this stuff. Bad drug policies open up spaces for hucksters and hustlers to fill the gaps that broken people often fall through.
You can throw a fat sleeping Pokémon character on a soft-pack of pills and call it natural, but that doesn’t make it so.
***
This backroom bathtub operation doesn’t stop at opiates. Hell, this is Texas, brother. The last bastion of freedom. In the Lone Star State, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are made manifest in day-to-day life. Texans are free to be executed at rates higher than residents of any other state. It is our God-given right to dole out death as we see fit, even if the evidence doesn’t support the state’s decision to turn a guy into worm food. Let God sort ’em out.
Texans, being outdoor-loving, wild-at-heart, roamers of the rugged plains, are free to live and die outside, as assistance dries up and already strained services see a spike in homelessness, particularly among veterans and families. You have the right to work yourself silly for wages determined by your boss, who understands what’s best for you more than those pesky unions do.
But even the streets of Heaven have a few potholes. Not everything is free here in Texas.
Texas has some of the strictest drug laws in the country, and the most powerful man in the state intends to make them a lot worse. The bell of liberty rings loud as hell when it comes to owning a kangaroo, but if you want to spark up — or enjoy a nice beach day with a head full of mushrooms — you will not collect $200, you will collect suffering.
I don’t particularly care for weed. Haven’t since high school. That being said, I think as one of the biggest and most populated states in the country, we should have followed the will of the masses and made it legal 10 years ago and been done with it.
Nixon’s War on Drugs, like many Great American Wars, was sold as something that was going to make American lives better and easier, but was really done as a way to justify policing communities that the government felt needed a stern hand — in this case Black Americans, leftists, and anti-war protestors.
About half of the country, over the last 20 years or so, has done its best to undo the mess done by administrations run by Puritans. But not Texas. We march forever onward, heads held high, noses turned upward at those who find themselves addicted, strung out, and destitute; and we do the same for people just looking to have a good time.
When it comes to drug possession and use, forgiveness and compassion is for the birds. This is Texas. Culturally, it’s considered a moral failing to use drugs. It is a moral failing to suffer under a cruel and neglectful society, basically. We are duty-bound as Christians to expedite your journey to Hell. And by God, if I catch you smoking legal hemp, I am going to throw your ass in the slammer myself, then promptly throw the evidence in the nearest dumpster.
***
By letting a murky black market of drugs thrive, we’re only hurting real people.
What is there to be done?
Decriminalization, regulation, and rehabilitation is hard, I agree. Especially in our political world, where only the biggest dumpster fires get attention.
I don’t really know what the solution is, but I do know that the current state of affairs, like many things in this country, was created to punish certain groups, exploit others, and enrich some of the worst people on Planet Earth. I also know that addiction is one of those things that affects everyone, but not everyone has the resources to beat it.
To many, it is sacrilege to suggest another course of action that is empathetic in its approach as opposed to punitive, but regulation might be that answer. The worst people in the world are having the time of their lives while some of the best people I know pawn tools for mystery pills sold next to beer bongs.
If we want to truly be the last frontier of freedom, the last bastion of Bubbas on the wild plains, we should take a look at the ways that we box sick people into cycles of suffering, and then we should crucify the people responsible.
Also we should stop selling fake heroin at the gas station.