On Some New Ish: Kratom & Hip Hop (Part 1)
Inside the Herb That's Replacing 'Lean' as Underground Rap's Drug of Choice
I was under the influence of Kratom the first time I covered the hip hop scene. I was inside a Manhattan hotel, waiting to be escorted to a suite where the latest indie rap god was holding a press meet-and-greet. I was perched on a stool by the lobby bar when my chest became a brick oven and my eyes went wacko.
Thirty minutes had elapsed since I'd choked down the Green Malay, a strain of Mitragyna speciosa or Kratom, as it is known in the Western world. The taste was foul and the powder formed a clump in that place where the roof of your mouth meets your tonsils. No one had told me about Kratom capsules yet.
A ding reverberated like someone singing wine glasses and I stood to meet the gaze of the rap god's publicist. That's when my eyes began clanking up and down in their sockets like some malfunctioning Kit-Cat Clock, and my center of gravity was ghost.
They call it the Kratom wobbles, and they are brought on by two prominent side effects of Kratom toxicity—horizontal nystagmus and oscillopsia. The former results in rapid up-and-down eye movements, while the latter is a change in visual perception caused by those eye movements.
These side effects, which are purported to be avoidable by dosing responsibly and eating food, tend to occur when an individual takes six or more grams of this ancient herb. I had taken eight.
“Oh no,” I remember saying as I flailed over to the publicist and grasped wildly for her hand. “This is gonna be bad.”
“Excuse me?” she said, visibly repelled by my performance.
“No, you're fine, you're fine,” I said with a rubbery wave of my hand.
I was a wacky inflatable arm tube man carelessly stuffed on to a showroom floor, but the publicist regarded me as one might regard a window washer with a handful of used toilet paper. She asked for my credentials, which only made matters worse—because I didn't have any.
After much embarrassment, she got my editor on the phone and everything was cleared up. Her vibe mellowed considerably after that. And so did mine, even if my eyelids were slow to cooperate.
We were in the metal box, zooming our way up to the top floor to meet the rap god. The gold accents around the elevator buttons gleamed immaculately and just like that the wobbles were gone, replaced by a sense of calm that only a Tibetan monk would likely understand.
That was the extent of my bad trip on Kratom. It was over in a matter of minutes. By the time we reached the penthouse and I dumped my sweat-drenched ass into a chair opposite the hip hop legend of the moment, I was wearing the grill of a sated child and drumming elegantly on the card table between us. It felt like the greatest interview in history—a meteor shower of communication flowing between two vessels of creativity.
If you had asked the rapper of the week if he agreed, he'd have probably turned to liquid and puddled his way out of the room to avoid the question. As we rapped about music, life, and philosophy it was clear to me that the man was uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that he looked fit to slump out of his chair and turn himself into a piece of paper if it meant slipping out the crack beneath the suite's door. Nevertheless, our exchange was charged with intelligence and introspection, and I still cherish that interview to this day.
I remember thinking, “If this energy could be harnessed by the grid it could power the entire country.”
I never told my new hip hop friend about the arcane substance in my Solo cup, but word reached the rap world all the same.
Teff Kratom is an East coast rapper reppin' what he calls the 8—the five boroughs of New York City and the Upstate capital region of New York State. Teff covers a lot of ground because he has to.
“I consider myself to be the forefather of Kratom Rap,” he tells me when I ask about his connections to the Kratom community.
While he may very well be the first artist with Kratom in their stage name, he is not the only musicologist mixing up Mitragyna speciosa cocktails. Nor is he the only hip hop emcee banging out bars about Kratom.
According to Lyrics.com, there are more than forty references to Kratom in modern music. They range in tone from the poetic to the profane.
“Eyes on my toes/Kratom in my cup/Time to retreat from the shit that's fucked up.”
This is just one of many allusions to Kratom by mysterious underground artist Skrrp! Their identity is unknown, but their love for Kratom is well-documented.
Kratom is derived from the flowers of Mitragyna speciosa, an evergreen tree from the wilds of Southeast Asia. Mitragyna speciosa belongs to the coffee family of plants, which explains some of its more invigorating effects.
The flower is suffused with indole alkaloids like Mitragynine and 7-OH, chemical components that purportedly possess analgesic and anxiolytic properties. Recreational users have reported sensations of euphoria and well-being at moderate doses.
The natives of Indonesia have been chewing Kratom leaves for hundreds of years, but this Eastern medicine had largely eluded Westerners until the 21st century. In recent years, this controversial substance has become as widespread as e-juice and energy shots; you can find pouches of Kratom displayed between CBD pre-rolls and crack pipe roses at your neighborhood corner store.
Domestic vendors began offering Kratom online around the same time that rappers were losing their lives to “Lean,” the detrimental and highly addictive combination of Promethazine and Codeine. What was initially viewed as a mild legal high quickly became fodder for the talking heads of TV news after the FDA shared reports of Kratom-related deaths on its website.
Despite the extenuating circumstances surrounding these deaths—preexisting health conditions and lethal drug combinations, respectively—the FDA sought to prevent the American people from consuming Kratom and its alkaloids.
In 2016, the DEA moved to classify Kratom as a Controlled Substance in the U.S., but officials tabled their efforts after receiving an overwhelming amount of public outcry.
In 2018, the FDA released a statement in which Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, claimed that Kratom contained opioid compounds. The agency based this assertion on unpublished findings from computer models. The statement concluded by encouraging Kratom users to seek FDA-approved medical treatment.
That same year the agency issued a mandatory recall of Kratom products manufactured by Triangle Pharmaceuticals LLC, a Nevada-based kratom vendor, due to an alleged Salmonella outbreak. Over the ensuing years, the agency has put pressure on additional vendors who made claims about the supposed therapeutic benefits of Kratom.
Independently-owned stores have been shut down over this substance, several tons of plant matter have been seized by U.S. Marshals, and vendors have been the victim of civil forfeiture to the tune of millions.
Despite all of this criminal action and institutional oversight, there are tens of thousands of Kratom vendors operating at this very moment. The industry is thought to be valued at well over $1 billion.
With millions of users across the country it's no wonder that Wired.com has called the scene America's hottest new drug culture. That culture is swiftly merging with that of the hip hop underground, owing no doubt to the scrutiny of the FDA and the stigma surrounding Kratom use.
Hip hop has always been a music of rebellion; a through-line can be drawn between Public Enemy's “Fight the Power” and Childish Gambino's “This is America.” The rap game is about more than its materialistic surface obsessions and nowhere is this more evident than in the music of underground rappers.
Earlier this year, New York duo Armand Hammer teamed with The Alchemist for Haram, a record that paints a gnarled picture of post-colonial trauma so gritty that listening to it can make you feel like you've just emerged from a dope den after a three-day nod. Songs of gentrification and systemic oppression serve as profound protest songs while doubling as effective bangers.
Given the ongoing legislative witch hunt being waged against Kratom it was only a matter of time before M. speciosa found its way into the sounds of the underground.
In a track by Whose entitled “Dial Up,” the young white mixer sings, “Glowing like the sun on Slauson. I know my phone can hear us talkin.' Fuck the Feds, I'm Kratom coppin' til I'm glued inside a coffin.”
For some artists rebellion is only part of the message. Rappers like Teff Kratom and his Arizona counterpart Ben Steezy are more interested in turning the public on to Kratom's positive attributes than they are in unleashing verbal affronts on those who would malign it.
“[Kratom] usage is heavily promoted within my music to reflect a healthier … alternative of living for hip hop artists and consumers,” Teff Kratom tells me.
Teff first alighted on Kratom in 2013 while earning a higher education. After hearing about the herb online, he did some research and found a smoke shop near his college campus. In a secluded corner of the store Teff found a discreet section where the proprietor stocked three forms of Kratom powder-green, red, and white vein.
As the student would soon learn, each of these vein colors produced its own singular spectrum of effects.
“My first Kratom experience was at a party,” Teff explains. He describes the level of euphoria, joy, and ease it provided. A level, he says, nothing else ever had.
“I became Teff Kratom on day one.”
The path has been a long one, as it always is when you're seeking success, but for his part Teff seems to have achieved personal fulfillment.
“Kratom has allowed me to be a better all-around artist with a constant message and ability to show society you can want better for yourself and do better for yourself by being educated and self-aware.”
For Ben Steezy, the Spotify artist from Sedona who bills himself as “the hip hop herbalist,” initial exposure to Kratom came at a crucial time in his life.
“It wasn't until I was about nineteen or twenty that I started to get into organic foods and herbalism. It's what got me off of drugs and alcohol, and I've been a Superfood junkie ever since.”
Steezy was five years sober when he had to get his wisdom teeth pulled. A friend had recommended Kratom as a natural substitute for more addictive prescription pain medications.
“It worked great!” Steezy says. “Not only did I have no pain but I healed faster than my dentist had ever seen in thirty plus years of practice. That's all the convincing I needed...this was a special plant.”
Steezy was so impressed by Kratom that it inspired him to get involved in the industry. Krizzup & Co. was founded in 2018 by Steezy and a group of friends. Ben and his buds share more in common than simply growing up together, they all share a belief in the benefits of Kratom.
Krizzurp.com serves as an online store where connoisseurs can score some of the most exotic strains on earth. It is one of the first online brands to offer Kratom giveaways and four-way splits on kilos.
“Our mission is to educate the world, especially hip hop culture, about alternatives to Sizzurp and other dangerous drugs.” Steezy explains.
“By providing the highest quality herbs and botanicals and offering plenty of free resources … we hope to not only impact hip hop culture but help shift the mainstream narrative to an accepting tone for plant medicine.”
Steezy's mission is notable for its mention of Sizzurp, AKA Lean, a controlled substance that has fueled the opioid crisis in black communities and played an instrumental role in the deaths of well-known rappers. In 2008, singer-producer Pimp C, famed for his Three 6 Mafia jam “Sippin' on Some Syrup,” died in his West Hollywood hotel suite after taking the Promethazine-Codeine cocktail.
Sizzurp has its origins in the Dirty South of the 1960s when blues musicians would mix cough syrup with beer while they were gigging. Although it had been around for decades, Sizzurp didn't penetrate the pop culture consciousness until the early-2000s. That's when numerous Houston rappers began to plug the “purple drank” in their rhymes.
The cough syrup concoction gave hip hop its very own subgenre—screw music, a choppy slow-mo sound that mimicked the drug's effects. Everyone from Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane to Drake and Justin Bieber wrote about the mixture in their music. Unsurprisingly, the syrup ended up plunging many prominent musicians into a vortex of addiction.
By 2009, Lil Wayne had publicly denounced the drug after experiencing seizures and some fuck-awful WDs. As he told MTV News in 2008, the withdrawal feels “like death in your stomach when you stop. Everybody wants me to stop all this and all that. It ain't that easy.”
Lean's prevalence among industry people has continued unabated over the ensuing years. In 2015, A$AP Mob co-founder A$AP Yams was said to have died of an accidental overdose of Sizzurp and Xanax. In 2020, Lucid Dreams rapper Juice Wrld's cause of death was attributed to Oxycodone and Codeine.
According to data released by the CDC, 70% of drug overdose deaths in 2019 involved an opioid. An estimated 69,720 drug overdose deaths in 2020 involved prescription opioids of one kind or another.
No matter what side of the argument you come down on, Kratom's track record stands in stark contrast to these numbers. A recent CDC study of 27,000 unintentional drug overdoses found that only 152 of the individuals who overdosed had Kratom in their system. What's more, Kratom was only the cause of death in 91 of those cases. We're talking about 0.34% of all drug overdoses from the study.
When I ask him, point blank, if he thinks Kratom is safer for rappers than Lean, Ben Steezy answers without hesitation.
“Absolutely,” he says. “But don't take my word for it. Look at how many we've lost to the opiate epidemic. It's hard to find any deaths that were caused solely by Kratom. As far as I can tell it's about as safe as coffee.”
For Steezy, Kratom is not the only herb on the shelf.
“At this point in my life, there's nothing that can happen that I don't have an herbal remedy for. Kratom is just one tool in my toolkit and when I find myself in severe pain I'm very grateful for it.”
Steezy dropped his solo debut Street Bangers & Bitter Herbs last year. The album—available on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify—is infused with references to cleaner living from a self-professed “sober vegan.” For all of Street Bangers & Bitter Herbs' references to red pill or blue pill reality and the evils of the establishment, it's an earlier Steezy song that stands out the most.
“Drink It, Pop It, Boof It” claps hard and claps back, with lyrics like, “Way the media make it out, they'd probably blast the door. Raid the house and flip the couch, just to take my sack of herbs. I'm just flabbergasted askin,' 'How the heck did this occur? How these docs could have the nerve, replacin' plants for Percs.'”
The song's title is an allusion to a prank initiated on the social news aggregation site Reddit. Several longtime members of the Kratom subreddit /r/kratom posted an April Fool's joke about shoving the herb up their asses to get high. They eventually came clean about their ruse, but it was already too late. Boofing, AKA butt chugging, has become a bizarre nationwide phenomenon, one that has been featured on Forbes.com.
Boofing has become so prevalent that it inspired self-parody—@countrygirlswhoboofkratom is a popular account on both Facebook and Instagram, one featuring satirical posts about hot girls in Daisy Dukes cramming kilos of Kratom in their cracks.
“I will always be a country girl who slams mitragyna speciosa straight up the ol' keister,” one post reads.
Steezy's “Drink It, Pop It, Boof It” perfectly underscores the rash of misinformation about Mitragyna speciosa and the need for Kratom-related education.
Meanwhile, Teff Kratom's album 8 Up: Kratom addresses the allure of Kratom among creative heads. In the song “Covfefe,” Teff cops to long-term use, saying that he's been “freed up” by Kratom.
This raises some important questions since long-term Kratom use has been negatively associated with an increased risk of side effects or health problems. According to American Addiction Centers' website, long-term Kratom consumption can lead to vomiting, diarrhea, hostile attitude, and insomnia. Chronic use is also considered to be the cause of rare instances of acute liver injury, with signs of liver damage occurring within one to eight weeks. Symptoms can include dark urine and jaundice.
Teff Kratom has been using Kratom for the last eight years, although it is unclear whether he takes it with any frequency. For many users intermittent consumption has provided a reprieve from hard drugs. Kentucky rapper Callon B is one of them.
“I have a history of abusing pain pills,” the Got Your Back Entertainment founder confesses. “I was shocked to discover that Kratom is actually better. It's a more pure feeling than prescription drugs without the hangover.”
In Callon's experience, there are no nasty side effects like those mentioned above. After years of Kratom consumption the “What You Need” wordsmith has yet to turn into some slobbering aggro Big Bird with bilious giblets and a case of the squirts. On the contrary, the man behind Mystic Junk is livin' his life like Midas, racking up collabs with influential regional performers and spreading messages of positivity.
“[Kratom] elevated my mood,” he tells me. “I deal with social anxiety a lot and it helps me open up and speak my mind.”
Callon takes a dose of Kratom before gigs, noting the way in which it has helped with his recording sessions and live performances.
“It takes away the edge you get right before you hit that mic or stage, and it allows you to be yourself stress-free.”
Of course, you can't appreciate the highs without acknowledging the lows. As Ben Steezy says, “Kratom is amazing, but it still has its shadow side. Just like anything that feels good it has the potential to be abused and should be consumed with intention and respect.
“Although I'd rather see you drinking herbal tea than Lean any day, the idea here isn't to just replace one substance with another. This is about living a more natural and holistic life, which includes moderation.”
To be continued...
Jump to Part II here.
Click here to take the Kratom hip hop journey.
Give Teff Kratom's 8:Kratom Town a spin here.
Dig through the Mystic Junk with Callon B.
Taste the bitter herbs and bounce to some street bangers here.
Follow the Kratom movement: @benst33zy @callonbgyb @the.kratom.twins @sunntrio @teff_kratom_
I hope you realize that by writing this article, you have encouraged addiction. And perhaps, even overdoses. Kratom kills. I have a relative who started taking it after severe lean dependence. They now have lifelong seizures, a hostile attitude almost consistently and are unable and unwilling to work. I worry about them overdosing or committing suicide daily and it's uninformed nimwits like you that write articles for hype, that have helped this along.
thanks for linking to KRATOM ROCK - ART DLR