Act I

It’s September 2022. I’m in the Lake Merritt neighborhood of Oakland, California. I’m having a rough night, and feeling existentially sad—not abnormal for me. I walk into a corner shop and ask the clerk for some CBD. He suggests I try something new—a kava-kratom blend called Feel Free. It comes in a blue vial. I try it. Twenty minutes later, I am feeling amazing. I happily think, “I’ve found a shortcut out of my depression!”

Narrator: But there is no shortcut out of depression.

I start doing that every day. Same corner shop. Same clerk. Same blue vial of kratom. And it makes everything better. Stressful work meeting? Kratom. Hanging out with friends? Kratom. Chilling out playing video games? Kratom and a bag of jalapeno potato chips.

Narrator: This is how his addiction starts to take shape.

Act II

After a few months, I lose my ability to enjoy my day without these blue vials. Otherwise normal activities, like “being awake in the morning” and “sitting around,” seem dull and lifeless without kratom. Answering emails? Unbearably mundane—take kratom. Is it afternoon already? Take the edge off. Chicken for dinner again? You know the drill.

Narrator: Textbook addiction spiral. How tragic.

It gets bad. After six months, I actually can’t live without kratom. Not without excruciating withdrawals. These withdrawals are so brutal that I stop taking kratom for pleasure; I take it for pain. My daily life becomes terrifying. I have realized that I can’t function without taking a drug. It feels like I am seeing the world through the eyes of a caged animal. It’s a waking nightmare.

Narrator (in fatherly voice): He should’ve known better.

Yes, I should have known better. I should have recognized what was happening to me and stopped going to that corner shop. But addiction is an ingeniously clever trap. Step foot in it, and you’ve got a brief window where you can remove your foot before the trap springs and its jaws clench down. But you don’t want to. It feels too good. Looking back, I should’ve known that a blue vial sold next to boner pills at a corner shop isn’t a miracle cure for depression. I probably did know. But I didn’t step out of the trap. And I paid the price.

Narrator: Yikes, ladies and gentlemen.

Yikes is right.

Act III

Narrator: Now folks, we ask the question, how did he set himself free from the trap?

I think about this every day. I tried to quit two times, cold turkey, and failed. Then I tried a third time, this time with the aid of Quit Kit, and walked out of the addiction. By my third day clean, I forgot I was quitting kratom. So, what was different between the quit that worked and the quits that didn’t?

Firstly, I absolutely credit Quit Kit with helping make that third quit successful. But did Quit Kit cure my addiction? No. I did that on my own. And I still don’t really know how I got to the point, mentally, where I could simply and comfortably stop taking kratom. What I do know, from quitting a variety of other addictive drugs (fun, huh?), is that when I quit them, I was ready. As in, both my conscious and subconscious minds were done with the addiction. Flat-out done. There was nothing left in me that wanted the drug.

This alignment of the conscious and the subconscious is the pot of gold at the end of the addiction rainbow. It is the true cure to drug addiction. Once our consciousnesses have aligned against the drug, the addiction is all but over. To achieve this alignment, I had to honestly believe, consciously and subconsciously, that kratom offered me zero benefit, but instead was demonstrably and obviously ruining my life. It took me a year under the influence to reach alignment. A year to internalize the blatantly obvious. It sounds insane. But addiction = a trap. Traps trap. When I was trapped, the obvious didn’t matter. The drug mattered.

Narrator: Traps trap. Watch out, Shakespeare.

It is what it is.

Narrator: How does the story end?

It hasn’t ended. I now run Quit Kit full time. It’s my mission to get it to as many people who need it as I possibly can. I regularly get updates from my customers telling me that they’re 6, 7, or 37 days clean. A few have told me that Quit Kit has saved their lives. Or that they had “tried everything under the sun to quit” until they found Quit Kit. If I die tomorrow, I will be immensely proud of the impact the Quit Kit has had, even though it took going through hell to create it.

But I don’t want to die tomorrow. I want to figure out how to help people struggling with addiction to get to that pot of gold: conscious and subconscious alignment. In fact, I’m obsessed with it. Over the past few months, I’ve devoured so-call “quit-lit” books from authors—all former addicts—who offer their own take on overcoming addiction. Allen Carr, Annie Grace, Catherine Gray, Craig Beck, William Porter, and more. I’m looking for the phantom thread that ties all their success stories together. I’m also diving deep into books on mental mastery. Robert Greene, David Goggins, Brian Tracy, Stephen Covey, and Joe Vitale give a wide variety of perspectives on how to control your thoughts so that they don’t control you. Generally, these authors show that the life you have is a product of your conscious and subconscious desires. Until the conscious and subconscious desires align, you will suffer, psychologically. However, once they are aligned, you will positively flourish.

All this to say, I look at Quit Kit as half of the addiction equation. The other half is alignment. put them together, and you solve the problem of your addiction. You step out of the trap. You can no longer be trapped. If I can find a teachable way to achieve alignment, and successfully teach it alongside Quit Kit, then I suppose I can die tomorrow.

Narrator: Circle of life.

Right.

Or, wait what?

Narrator: That’s all folks, check in with us next time!

End