Introduding Earth Kratom from Long Beach, California

Today, I'm talking with Earth Heart Kratom, co-owner Brandon Bryant is a spirit technician who has a passion and expertise in plant medicines based in Long Beach, California.

Brandon, Tell me about your new business.

I'm importing kratom concentrate. Mood elevators
seem to be kind of hitting right now, people are finding
that they are effective.
I already work with other plant medicine
modalities so this seems to be a natural
expansion. Our source
for it is from the Netherlands, they do the processing and concentration.
The Kratom plant is usually from
Indonesia, but the strain
we sell is from Thailand. I put my order in for our
first large shipments, I have the
capsules and tools and hopeful to start sales in about a month.  

Kratom isn’t a session based medicine,it isn’t a psychedelic, it’s sold like a Tylenol.You can buy it in vape shops in California right now. We want to sell it with online marketing through our yet to be developed website; right now we are just selling it to
people we know.  I’ve bought a website. The plan is to import it, weigh it, and capsule it.
I can test for fentanyl and other research chemicals, so I make sure that none of that is in there.

Ibogaine is a session facilitated plant medicine that has helped many
people get off of opiates, including Brandon himself.

What is the big difference between Kratom and other opiate
kicking plant medicines?

It is illegal to offer services with Ibogaine, so Brandon
feels this fact, plus the ease of distribution are two
reasons to get into Kratom as a business.
In a Scientific American article, someone had been
using 10 ml of Dilaudid, a very strong opioid everyday.
His wife found out he was injecting and so he started on
Kratom and the story is that
he never had any dope sickness/withdrawal.
When he finally went to
the doctor, he wanted him off the kratom. The doctor
wanted him off kratom because, this is America and its
not FDA approved. When they took him off the kratom,
he STILL didn’t have withdrawal. It has a lot of promise
for me, as a recovering opiate addict, i often fear if I ever
get into an injury accident, then what am I going to do.
Kratom could be an alternative for that. It does affect
the opioid receptors in the brain, but so does coffee,
sex and everything else worth doing. I think in the same
sense it can be addictive like coffee is addictive, but I haven’t
found any research aside from headaches
and crotchiness as side effects.

It's great for my irritable bowel syndrome, i find when work

gets stressful and i get an episode of stomach cramps,

if I take 500-600ml (one capsule). I don’t currently have
chronic pain, and advil wouldn’t really help

with IBS problems. OTC painkillers don’t really help with
anxiety or depression, but Kratom seems to hit both; it works like
a standard painkiller and a mood elevator.

How does it compare to uses of medical marijuana?
I haven’t seen that cannabis is as effective as a pain killer,
CBD has some promising studies but there are some
psychosomatic stuff going with it.   

Do people get  high from doing Kratom?
Personally, i have not gotten high off it.  I’ve read stories
of people taking heroic doses off it so that they get high.  
There is some responsibility that the user has to take.
There is a potential for abuse but i believe it is way safer
than alcohol and safer than acetaminophen as far as what
it does for the liver. Any time we bring something into our
bodies, it should be to correct something and it should have
an end date.  We should always be striving to improve
our health. I measure [intake of anything] by the amount
of harm, and i do not believe that Kratom depresses the
respiratory system in the same way opiates do. Fibromyalgia
and other chronic pain conditions seem to respond well to it,
for people who rely on benzos for anxiety this could be a good
alternative for them.

Tino Fundraising for Strips

Tino,is a harm reduction outreach friend that I met once in person outside of the Sex Worker Cabaret in NYC that I performed at. Since then, we have been Facebook friends following each other for possibly 7 years since that event. Though we never saw each other again in person, I was inspired to chat with him online about his latest project fighting the fentanyl opioid crisis through one on one outreach as far as his feet can travel. He purchases ph testing kits that use the residue of street drugs mixed with water to test for the synthetic opioid fentanyl. The first fentanyl lab, according to Tino was discovered in the mid 90s in Kansas City but he thinks that now much of it comes from Mexico and possibly from China. Indeed, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, illegal drug labs are concocting fentanyl from scratch,and authorities have raided several labs in Mexico that were receiving chemicals from China and Japan to create the drug, according to the DEA. The quantity needed to create a drug that is 50-100x stronger than morphine is much less cargo to smuggle, and someone with basic knowledge of chemistry, pharmaceuticals and the dark net can start a booming business. "Drug dealers are in the business of making money and I've heard it's very easy to make, so that means they can save money [by doing it themselves]," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if there were real Walter Whites out there. Chemists and pharmacologists can turn to the dark side, just like in Breaking Bad. Tino has traveled to places well known for opioid crisis like Ohio, Philly, and DC, with his strips and naloxone kits. Everything in Ohio tested positive for Fentanyl. Dealers are trying to phase out heroin and bring in Fentanyl. Tino has tested samples of crystal meth, cocaine, and even pressed Xanax pills and found Fentanyl in them. This means that casual recreational drug users that most of us know could also now be affected by overdoses when they thought that they were doing the "safer" drugs. This means most sex workers who party with clients are also at risk! The biggest difference between heroin and fentanyl is that a person can stop breathing within 1 minute and die. That is why the epidemic is what it is exploding to on the news, as well as he said that its affecting a lot of white folks in ways that it hasn't in years before.

Fentanyl was an opioid originally developed for the terminally ill person. It is a quickly administered pain killer, that comes in the form of lollipops, patches and other forms like sprays and lozenges. The formula was discovered as cheaper and easier to make than heroin and it soon became one of the most dangerous and profitable street drugs responsible for more overdosing deaths in 4 states than the U.S had seen in years before. To make matters worse, the war on drugs is being multiplied with Sessions and Trump, who as a team are hell bent on reversing California's newest win of statewide legal marijuana the same as every class of drug. So the hope for new money to help fund harm reduction supplies or safe injection sites is not likely in this administration's mindset, considering that in October Trump declared addiction a "public health emergency" not a "State of emergency" intentionally. Trump's declaration, which will be effective for 90 days and can be renewed, will allow the government to redirect resources in various ways and to expand access to medical services in rural areas. But it won't bring new dollars to fight a scourge that kills nearly 100 people a day. "It's a lot cheaper to have a safe injection house than it is to fund Emergency Room services for an overdose. A safe injection site would supply testing strips, clean needles and help the user access treatment if that's what they wanted. They would be monitored so that they wouldn't overdose and die. Canada has a few and pop up ones.

"Nobody should die because they use drugs. Where at one time it wasn't a white suburban mom's problem, suddenly a loved one dies and now it becomes their problem. Harm reduction like testing strips is not a solution, its just giving someone another day of life."

Tino has reverse overdosed over 100 people, none of whom he knew personally outside of a few that were clients of agencies he had jobs with. "Its about educating people about how to do drugs better...test a small amount for the strength first, get off in pairs; watch each one person for five minutes, have naloxone on hand after getting trained on how to administer the life saving anti-overdose medicine which now comes in a nasal spray that requires no needles at all to use. All it takes 6 to 10 grains, (like a grain of salt)of Fentanyl to kill you. Part of the work that Tino does is educating users about better and safe drugs use. It isn't about prevention or prohibition, to him, it is about saving lives. You can support Tino's work by contributing here.