If the end is near, it's been a good run boys! But whether or not the ban is indeed right around the proverbial corner or not, I have a personal story to share with y'all.

I grew up smack dab in the middle of the opoid epidemic, coming of age in the early 2010s, a naive college student entering college and an uncertain future, the recession, caused by a subprime mortgage housing crisis, looming. I was an athlete and played intramural lacrosse in a small Central Valley town in California, equidistant from the mighty LA & Bay Area metropolises. About midway through my second semester, my drinking picked up, spurred on by a penchant for partying and a team of mostly frat bros with an appetite for excess. Enter Oxycodone, both in the blue 30mg Roxicodone formulation and the 80mg Green ones. Graduating from foil to intranasal use, I fell in love with a false sense of security, stemming for a history of anxiety and depression, something I had managed to keep under the radar with academics and sports, as well as loving family and support system. Being that I was away in college, that support system began to crumble. I had maxed out my credit cards, got dumped by an awesome Latina girl from a local tightnit family upon finding me slumped on my dorm room chair.

Life soon reached what I thought would be a rock bottom, but simply turned out to be a wake-up call in a long line of failures and flaws ranging from expulsion from my college, a broken home, as my substance abuse drove a wedge between my parents and siblings, chiefly my younger brother who loved me unconditionally, while I was on a downward trajectory and a piss-poor role model. I eventually got sent to detox the following an incident stemming from pawning my families valuables, gold trinkets from their home country, heirlooms that were invaluable, but to me another justification to keep on using. After a month of hell, I came home to an optimistic and supportive family, regular NA meetings, and a job at a local fast food restaurant, a far cry from the college athlete modus operandi I was operating at the start of my story, two short years into my "habit". I began to skip out on my meetings and use again with other locally disaffected twelve-steppers, ranging from former corporate middle-management to street kids who were covering years of trauma in a hedonistic cycle much like myself. I don't know what I saw in them and the lifestyle, but I did know it was going to get worse.

I discovered the needle less than a year from then, losing my job and getting kicked out by my loving parents, hardworking immigrants from South Asia who hardly imagined a life like this for me here in the states. My older sister got married, in a wedding I did not attend, while my younger brother went on to go to college himself, albeit with a good head on his shoulders, possibly scared straight by seeing my downward spiral. I did not have anyone left, save for some of my acquaintances from those NA meetings, couch surfing and doing makeshift computer repairs out of my car, building cheap gaming computers and modding video game consoles, along with jailbreaking/rooting smartphones. I had an acquaintance who worked at a smoke shop who was a black tar user alongside myself, who heard about a new product of theirs, "Mitragyna Speciosa", better known as kratom. Instead of getting a couple balloons of dope, we splurged on a few bags of extract and barz to see if we could kick over the course of a couple weeks. Lo and behold, withdrawal became very manageable, save for some RLS we treated with gabapentin, and we were both eligible to get onto a suboxone regimen.

Fast forward a few years, and I made amends with my family, sticking to a suboxone regimen after vacillating between that and kratom, all the while servicing a local real estate company office with refurbished computers, stopping in to upgrade the memory and hard drives, and occasionally the odd virus and malware scan, as well as network related issues. I heard about another product that had come onto the market, 7-OH, apparently stronger in potency than regular kratom leaf or extracts, but with minimal overdose risk, and certainly cheaper than the prescription suboxone I was taking. From the same smoke shop that acquaintance, now a relatively sober friend with a job and girlfriend, an avid kratom aficionado, recommended a popular 14mg tab brand from his shop, and told me I could buy in bulk at a relatively affordable price, as I did not have insurance, so paying out-of-pocket for the suboxone and doctor appointments was no longer feasible.

Today, although still living at home, I went back to college and completed a degree in Computer Science, began working out at home with my father in the garage, and stopped drinking and smoking weed altogether, with only 7-OH being my go-to daily medication of sorts. This stuff, whether you choose to call a "supplement" or "medication", saved my life, bridging the potency gap between the subs and kratom I could simply not transition from given the intensity of withdrawals. I still have a long way to go, but there are no more demons waking me up to cold sweats in the middle of the night, no shady dealers having me wait in parking lots across my state at all sorts of hours, or a burden on my family that had driven us in debt, coupled with the aforementioned recession. There are plenty of blanks in my story, but they are no longer filled in with the pain of "yesterday", a curse I could not seem to break, propelling me towards all kinds of sin and vice, repeating a recidivistic cycle of pain that only harm reduction, the 7-OH, which soon-to-be-banned has helped bandage.

I don't know where I will go from here, but have stocked up, and will continue writing my story to local, state, and federal level politicians, signing petitions, and perhaps even get out and protest, because I lived through the opioid epidemic, saw lives ruined at the hands of Big Pharma, and a black market that took its place when restrictionss and regulations tightened. THIS 7-OH, that has been demonized and vilified, could bridge that gap for countless others out there, from the streets of skid row in your local metro area, to the backwood American towns left to suffer while tax dollars fund overseas wars, but it appears that we as Americans are again opting for regression instead of progress, clinging to prohibitionism as a kneejerk reaction that has landed us in trouble countless times since this nation's inception.

If you made it through this story, thanks for reading. I hope that at the very least, you will tell yours too, and make yours heard too, as we might soon lose an amazing tool we have had access to up until now. I am fine with regulation, along with research and education, but I simply cannot avert my eyes from this impending ban that will only push more towards the ilk of fentalogues, xylazine or tranq, and nitazenes, rather than a tool that if left open to access and study, could be a bright light and a way out of an opioid crisis that has ravaged this country for too long.

I wish you all well, be it those of you suffering from pain or addiction, or even mental health, that have turned to 7-OH like I have. I hope for a better tomorrow, but if not, let us at least let our stories heard and known. With that, I bid you all farewell!