I quit drinking (daily 15 years) for about 3-4 years with kratom. It was magical. Now I started drinking again a bit. About 20% of previous. It is much more controllable. I can completely stop if I want (I take 1-2 week breaks regularly) and it’s more situational than built into every routine of life.

You can find out if kratom would help you by getting some leaf (powder) from a reputable online source and taking it starting about 1 g up to 3g in the afternoon. Do not take too much, it sucks. There used to be a good sidebar on /r/kratom with details. You won’t get a physical dependence after a few days which is all you need to find out if it would even work. What I mean by “work” is that you would find yourself disinterested in drinking. If you drink you will be done after half a glass instead of 9. You forget to drink. It doesn’t feel good anymore. It is very strange at first.

If it doesn’t work then you don’t worry about it. If it does work you can decide what if anything to do about using it. There is extensive folk knowledge regarding “t breaks” to avoid withdrawls. Personally every time I tried to do that I just ended up drunk off my ass. And I was physically dependent on alcohol so the choice was real, strong, dangerous, disruptive dependence vs mild, transitory dependence. Some people don’t get it at all. I get wet eyes and sniffles mostly. A few people get prolonged symptoms.

People run into trouble using extracts. Stick to the plain leaf. Do not buy from gas stations or head shops. They are known to be contaminated with lead. And other things. You are way more likely to have dependence with extracts.

However, it will not help you sleep.

I have a z-drug for sleep because I can never sleep on my own. Trazadone worked for a little while but I would wake up totally ravenous and eat literally anything and gained like 40 lbs.

Maybe the whole thing is just a way to have various/specific militaries use up all their artillery for some secondary goal

even better is the captchas checking you are not a scam on the website