#99: Cannabinoids, Immortal Cells, Baby Teeth, and a Passion for Helping Others

Jill James:

This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by HSI. This episode was recorded December 15th, 2022. My name is Jill James, HSI's Chief Safety Officer. Today, my guest is Chris Garza, EHS Manager for Benuvia Manufacturing and principal consultant for Feather & Mane, EHS consultant. Chris is joining us today from Round Rock, Texas. Welcome to the show, Chris.

Chris Garza:

Ah, thanks for having me, Jill.

Jill James:

Chris, based on our previous conversation before we agreed to do this podcast recording, I believe you said your story with EHS starts somewhere in a box of comic books. Do I remember that correctly?

Chris Garza:

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny to think about it now. They always ask you what you want to be when you grow up, what do you want to do, all that stuff. My hero was always my dad. My dad gave me this box of comic books. This is what he had all the time. That was what I was able to play with. Reading through all of them, one of the ones that connected with me was Spider-Man. I wanted to be a scientist and a hero, somebody who helped people. It's funny how I didn't really know all through my life how that was going to play out until I got into my career. Now I get to do just that. I get to help people. I the community around me and hopefully the world.

Jill James:

That's awesome. It sounds like you did it through the door of science, thinking back to Spider-Man. What did that look like? I mean, you get your inspiration from your dad and your comic books. You're a little kid. What's the next step you take that sort of leads you into a life of dedicated to health and safety?

Chris Garza:

Well, he was good at everything. My dad was great at everything. I followed suit. I tried everything. I learned a little bit of everything. I eventually went into life guarding when working in high school. That felt good at the time and I did it through most of college. In college, I got into the lab finally and was able to start working in the lab.

Jill James:

Yeah. What were you studying that got you into a lab, Chris?

Chris Garza:

I was studying biochemistry. It's funny. I was going for something to do with what went into our bodies. I was really concerned with thinking about what we were putting in our bodies, how it was affecting us, so I wanted to know about nutrition. more than just what to eat, the right things to eat, I wanted to know how the molecules of it were going into us and affecting us. I went into a weird track that was called Molecular and Experimental Nutrition.

Jill James:

I have not heard of this before. Okay.

Chris Garza:

It's funny because every time it's on my transcript as Molecular and Experimental Nutrition and looking at it, it's biochemistry. It's just what the molecules do in your body. That put me into a biochemistry lab with one of the best. That was at our school. I was working as an undergrad there. I got to work there for three years.

Jill James:

Where did you go to college, Chris?

Chris Garza:

I went to Texas A&M in College Station. Well, I grew up all over. I was an Air Force kid. My mom was in the Air Force. She took us all around the southeast, to Colorado, to Memphis, Tennessee, to Gulfport, Mississippi, and finally we landed in South Padre Island area in this little town called Los Fresnos. I got to spend high school and middle school there. Then after that I went over to Texas A&M.

Jill James:

Okay. Okay. Finally you're in the lab, and are you thinking, gosh, I've found my groove and this is answering some of those questions I had?

Chris Garza:

I did. I thought that that was going to be what I was going to do. I thought that I was going to do experiments for the rest of my life and do these cool things with chemicals and chemistry and all this fun lab equipment. I mean, being in the lab, it was a lot of fun. All the new stuff that you got to see every day, it was fun. I will say though, I didn't enjoy doing any animal studies.

Jill James:

Yeah. I mean, yeah. Animals contribute to science, yeah? Do you want to talk about that? What was that like or what did you do?

Chris Garza:

We worked with mice and rabbits. We even had bats and frogs. One of the things we were looking at was fish oil and what it did for cancer.

Jill James:

Fish oil? Okay.

Chris Garza:

Yeah. We did a comparison between fish oil and corn oil. We also used these types of mice that had some genes knocked out, and different ones. That was very interesting, was the designer mice, how they had different genes knocked out, different genes were over expressed. It was really cool to see. We ended up, our study showed that taking fish oil over corn oil had an anti-inflammatory effect for these cancer markers that we were looking at. I spent three years working on all those. I was one of the few in our school to do an undergrad research project in the lab, because most of the time you have to be in a master's program to get your own project that you're working on.

Jill James:

Anyone who's listening right now who also consumes fish oil for an antiinflammatory response, it sounds, Chris, like in part, we can thank you for some of that research.

Chris Garza:

Yeah. Yes. Dr. Chapkin, the lab that I worked in, he did a lot of work on that. We had a lot of papers produced on it.

Jill James:

Fabulous. Yeah, so what else about the lab and/or animals? You started talking about animal studies.

Chris Garza:

Yes. After I got out of college, I was looking for what I was going to do at that point. I knew I wanted to be in the lab, but I didn't know what labs did outside of academia.

Jill James:

Sure. Right.

Chris Garza:

I had no idea. At this first job, you get tasked with you make an immortal cell.

Jill James:

Immortal?

Chris Garza:

It's an immortal cell. This thing, I mean, you used the word immoral. Immoral? Immortal. Think about, I've already mentioned comic books.

Jill James:

Yeah, I was just going to say this sounds a lot Spider-man. Okay.

Chris Garza:

Yeah, you talk about talking about a word used in comic books that strikes intrigue. They said, "Well, you can make this immortal cell that will help us out by being able to detect certain toxins in food and in biological systems like our bodies. The technology apparently had been used for a while, but they were starting to try to use it for, at present, the viruses that were coming out, like H1N1 and RSV and African Swine Flu. They tasked me with making these things are called hybridomas. What you do is you take a mouse and you give it whatever you want them to make antibodies for whatever you want to start an inflammatory response in their body, and they start making these antibodies against it. Then once they're making these antibodies, you can harvest the spleen, take their B cells, and fuse them with a cancer cell. Once they fuse together, now they're this immortal cell, it has the characteristics of immortality from the cancer cell, and then it has the characteristics of the antibody factory from the B cell. So, now until the end of time, the cell will sit there and pump out these antibodies. From there you can harvest them, purify them up, attach them to some sort of Sepharose bead or anything. Then you can run a sample over it, like let's say that you were concerned what was in your Wheaties, and you can run those Wheaties through this thing, and at the end, it'll tell you whether or not you have a toxin in it if you were looking for this toxin.

Jill James:

Fascinating.

Chris Garza:

Yeah. We were doing the same thing for African Swine Flu and RSV and H1N1. It was really cool.

Jill James:

Do you think that the work that you did there, Chris, I mean, I know that science is telling us we're maybe a year from a vaccine for RSV. Would be considered some of the foundational work that science has been doing to get to that kind of point?

Chris Garza:

This would be considered the foundational work of detection of it.

Jill James:

Got it.

Chris Garza:

We are detecting it. But they do the same thing with their vaccine, although I know it's changed a lot with RNA, and I've been out of the game too long for the new technologies that have come along with that one. But this stuff was all detection of it, so detecting whether or not somebody had it. One of the other things that we did was all these mycotoxins. These mycotoxins that are produced, they can negatively affect animals and people in their food. There were these different mycotoxins that I had that I also made these antibodies for and put them into kits. They were quick kits that you could take out to a food and feed area and they could prep the sample right there and run it over this thing and read it.

Jill James:

Fascinating. I mean, this is important. This is important work, Chris. How did you feel about your career at this point? I mean, you set out in our conversation today talking about know, wanted to make a difference, help people help the world. What were you thinking at the time when you were doing this kind of work?

Chris Garza:

I felt amazing about it. I loved doing it. Unfortunately, it was one of those things where it was so much fun and because it is easy to love doing it, that it didn't pay very good for my first job out of school.

Jill James:

There's always that, okay?

Chris Garza:

I did have a family that I wanted to start and I had goals for that one. I ended up getting an opportunity. I started working a night job while I was doing that one. The night job was doing dental pulp stem cell harvesting and research.

Jill James:

Holy cats. All right, Chris, you're going to have to unwind that one. You just said dental pulp stem cell?

Chris Garza:

Mm-hmm.

Jill James:

Okay, yeah. Unwind all those words for our audience, because I don't think anybody has said that before here.

Chris Garza:

It's funny, because it's a night job, too. Right?

Jill James:

Yeah, right?

Chris Garza:

I start this job right at 6:00 PM and don't get out until midnight. But it's this company called BioEden, and there's other companies that do this, not very many of them, but they discovered that they can harvest stem cells out of teeth, like baby teeth that kids lose.

Jill James:

Phenomenal.

Chris Garza:

You can take the tooth that your kid loses and we used to put it into milk.

Jill James:

Into milk, okay.

Chris Garza:

It had to be sent to us within a timeframe. We would take it out and then we would go through and scrape these teeth, and scrape the inside of these teeth, and put them into our matrix that we had, and it would grow up these stem cells.

Jill James:

Wow.

Chris Garza:

We'd grow them to a certain point and then we would go through and freeze them down, cryogenically freeze them down so they could have them for later.

Jill James:

Okay, so for all of us who are listening and wondering, how'd you the teeth? I'm like, did you have a call center saying, "Hey, you want to donate some baby teeth?" How did the actual getting of the teeth go, or were you not on that end?

Chris Garza:

We always made fun, we always joked about this at home as well. It's funny. You can do it with adults as well for their wisdom teeth. There was a few times that I made runs to a dentist office and collected teeth. The dentist put them in the milk. The dentist gave them to me. I didn't go through and physically take them out myself.

Jill James:

Right.

Chris Garza:

We had a sales force that would go through and tell people about this and let them know that this was a thing that you could do. From there, they would partner with different dental groups and they would send us the teeth. We would get these FedEx packages we had, and we would get them by tens, sometimes. In a day you had these 20 packages that came in and you would go through and just harvest. You'd be in the lab sitting there looking at each one of these and harvesting them.

Jill James:

This is next level tooth fairy.

Chris Garza:

It absolutely was. It absolutely was. But it was really cool, because we could make them differentiate into different types of cells. By the end, we were making them into liver cells, pathogens, they were going into bone cells, they were turning into bone cells and cartilage, cartilage as well. We could also make him go into fat cells, but I don't know if there was a reason for that one.

Jill James:

Yeah. The end product that you're talking about, I don't know if that's the right terminology, I'm just saying end product, is that something that's still being done in actually utilized or is this something that's still an experiment phase as far as you know?

Chris Garza:

They're still doing studies on it. We supported clinical trials in mostly South America. They were a lot on cleft palate where we had really good results from taking ... It's really nice that you hear about people talking about using genetics to make a cure for somebody that is specific to them. This is using your own cells to fix things specific to you. The worry about your body rejecting them and things like that was taken down a whole lot on it. These cleft palate studies that we were doing, we had a lot of success in that it formed it to a matrix and they put the matrix in there for the cleft palate, and they had a lot of them that closed up. That was really cool. We also had some where we were looking at diabetes and seeing if we could cure that. The patients who took it, their quality of life really went up. It's not a quantitative study or quantitative result, but it was still good to see and good to hear. It made me feel really good doing those things as well.

Jill James:

Yeah, I mean that's helping around the world, Chris. That's awesome.

Chris Garza:

We did. We got stuff from, again, South America, Mexico, the US, the UK. we were in all those different markets and they were sending us all their teeth.

Jill James:

Amazing. Who knew?

Chris Garza:

I got that night job. I did it at night for about half a year before they gave me the opportunity to come work for them full-time for a very great increase in my quality of life. I took it and I got to work there for five years. I remember they closed down.

Jill James:

When you're working there for five years, you were doing what you were describing, or were there different facets to that job that were leading you kind of more into the EHS realm?

Chris Garza:

both companies, small companies. The first company was about 30 employees. The next company was about 15. Working with a small company, you do everything. it's fun. I love doing everything. I told you at the start of this about my dad and how he was great at everything. I always liked just doing it part of it, doing the marketing part of it, doing the customer service part of it, and doing everything. In that first job, well, there was the hazardous waste part of it. There was the HAZMAT response. I really didn't know that these were safety terms at that point, like a HAZWOPER. I didn't know what that was, but I knew that when this chemical dropped on the floor, you cleaned it up this way. Starting with that at the first job, going through and doing the hazardous waste, and then the second job, I had already done it at the first job and done it in the lab in college before that, so it was just easy for me to say, "Oh, y'all are trying to get rid of that? Well, this is the way that you do it." Like, "Oh really? Because we've been just doing it this way," which this way is not the right way.

Jill James:

Right, right, right.

Chris Garza:

You're just like, "Stop doing that. Stop doing that."

Jill James:

Can't be throwing that in the trash.

Chris Garza:

Exactly. "Stop doing that. This is how it's supposed to be done." Becoming the lab manager over at the stem cell research place, the dental pulp stem cell research place, which is an important distinction to make when you're talking about stem cells. Becoming the lab manager there, I was in charge of all of that, in charge of this. At that point, I was giving talks on the hazards of liquid nitrogen from our liquid nitrogen doers, our cryogenics that we were doing there. I was telling them how to use the autoclave. The autoclave is a thing that heats up super high and sterilizes these things. It can build up pressure in it. Basically, if it gets some of its pressure relief and stuff blocked, it turns into a bomb.

Jill James:

I bet you learned a lot about biological safety cabinets if you were working under what people class classically call a fume hood or a [inaudible 00:22:12].

Chris Garza:

Oh yeah. Yep. Both jobs. Both jobs. Both jobs were biologics. A lot of biologics jobs. Some had animal safety in there. But I still had no idea what I was doing yet that I didn't realize that I was doing the job of an EHS manager because I had no idea that there was even such a thing.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Drum roll here on when that awakening occurs. You're at that job, then what?

Chris Garza:

They go out of business. Luckily my chief safety officer at the time had a good enough relationship with us where he gave us about a four to six month warning that this was going to happen. I started looking around. I was looking for lab manager positions. I'm a lab manager. This is what I do. I work in the lab. I came across this job that said environmental lab manager. I was like, "I can do that." I mean, it's not biologics, it's not something, I've never done it before, though, it should be all right. I applied to it with this company called Solomon. They did transformers and electrical grid equipment.

Jill James:

Okay. Very different from anything you'd done to date.

Chris Garza:

Yes. Yes, so come to find out that these transformers, back in the day, they used to make them with a fluid inside that had PCBs in them, which is polychlorinated biphenyls.

Jill James:

A not good thing.

Chris Garza:

No, no. The word is bio. They build up in the environment. Bio accumulator. They're a bio accumulator, right? They don't go anywhere. They only break down from the sun over, it takes it them, I want to say it's like decades. Don't quote me on that. It them a long time to get out of their, bio accumulator. Then it's shown that they affect the breeding of certain animals. They're a suspected carcinogen at this point. But the talk I always gave was that it starts out small in the smaller animals of krill and shrimp and it ends up accumulating in the body fat until it's gotten all the way up to orcas. Now they show that orcas have lower birth rates because these PCBs are messing them up. I found out that with these transformers, I think it was, well, it was back in the day, they used to put this special fluid in some transformers where they needed ... It was a option. It was an option like you pay for leather seats on a car. You could get PCBs in your transformer fluid and they were really good because they were really good at taking on heat and dispersing it. Even there was a town that Westinghouse had gifted a bunch of these transformers because the town had a fire, something like that, that was related to these transformers, that they gifted them a whole bunch of these transformers with PCBs in them.

Jill James:

Holy cats. I mean, with good intention that turns into catastrophic results.

Chris Garza:

Absolutely.

Jill James:

Yeah. Do we know, does this community have really high rates of cancer?

Chris Garza:

No. No, so they took them out. When they figured out all the stuff with them, they took them out. That was part of my job was I had a team that looked At all these transformers that rolled in, because we recycled transformers and we repaired them. So when they came in, my team would look at them to see what year they were made. Depending on the year, they would fall into the suspect list, and then we'd go through and sample them, and sample them and run them on our lab equipment for PCBs.

Jill James:

How did you protect your employees and how did you decide how to protect them when they're doing that?

Chris Garza:

They had a whole, well, bunny suit that they wore when they were doing it, complete with gloves. Yeah PCBs will go through latex, so we had nitro gloves for them. Everything needed to be looked at all the time. We needed to make sure there was no holes in it. That oil from those transformers, It just gets into everything, too.

Jill James:

Yeah. What kind of respirator or is that not aero?

Chris Garza:

No, it doesn't really aerosolize. It doesn't go into the air very easy. They tend to be kind of heavy.

Jill James:

Yeah, okay. Makes sense.

Chris Garza:

We didn't have to worry about anything there. As long as somebody wasn't licking the transformer, we were good.

Jill James:

Yeah, and washing their hands before they had lunch just in case.

Chris Garza:

Exactly. Exactly. We had a lot of procedures on how to decontaminate things like that, which was basically just washing. Right? But going into that, so I started doing this environmental lab, environmental lab coordinator or manager. They said, "Well, you know, you can do this and you're good at it, so how about doing the safety thing for us? We need safety on our forklifts. We need safety for our slings and hoists that we have everywhere. These guys are working, there's a bunch of ergonomics, we're going through and tearing these things apart. We have bombs." When these transformers come in, one of the ways that I got involved in safety was that the transformers, when they came in, especially these old ones, their pressure relief valves can be just gone, to the point where they've fused in to where they're no longer relieving any pressure. So, now these transformers have turned into big bombs. You've got to get to the fluid, right?

Jill James:

Sure.

Chris Garza:

Our procedure for it started out with us putting a bunch of straps over the top. I don't know if you've ever looked at a transformer on a power line and kind of seen how they're built, but they're big cylinders with a top on it.

Jill James:

Yeah, I can imagine it. I can picture it in my head.

Chris Garza:

We put a bunch of straps over the top that were strapped.

Jill James:

So it couldn't pop.

Chris Garza:

Yes. Yep. We'd go through and undo the screws, and go through and pop it to relieve relieve the pressure.

Jill James:

Oh man, that sounds tense.

Chris Garza:

It was really tense. One of the things we looked at was going through and taking a drill with a self-tapping screw and putting it into the side of these transformers at the top, where once you did it, the fluid wouldn't just come spurting out. They had tried it before, but when they did it, they had a flash occur with it.

Jill James:

Sounds like that would happen because of the friction of the bit, I suppose.

Chris Garza:

That's what we were thinking. But looking at it further, it wasn't the bit that was doing it, this self-tapping screw that was doing it, it was that we weren't using intrinsically safe drills. The motor inside had a spark, the gas coming out right when you made the hole, that gas would expunge out at the drill and that spark would hit it. That's what caused the flash. Once we started using intrinsically safe drills, this became a really good way to do it.

Jill James:

Chris, for anyone who's listening who might not know what intrinsically safe tools are, do you want to explain that?

Chris Garza:

Yeah. Yeah. They're built in a way that keeps any sort of spark, anything that could cause a ignition, it keeps it all housed and contained. That way if you're using it next to, let's say that you have a flammable atmosphere that you're in, you're using a bunch of ethanol, you're at an ethanol-filling station for a food and drug place, and it's just this room where you feel ethanol in, everything in that room would be intrinsically safe.

Jill James:

Yeah. Same is true with dusty environments where dust could be explosive. It's very, very common in the grain handling industry. I'm just thinking of a sugar beat-processing facility where certain pieces of the process, intrinsically safe tools and equipment needed to be used in those areas, too. It's not uncommon in our professional practice, but it's not like everywhere you go.

Chris Garza:

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny you bring up the grain and dust. Right after this, I ended up in a supplement company for food and drug that we had to, luckily the intrinsically safe stuff came over from my experience there at Solomon into that next company. The Solomon one though, just a few things to mention there I think y'all would find interesting is, these transformers come in from the countryside. They come in from everywhere. We had them coming in from all over Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana. They would come in with bullet holes in them.

Jill James:

Oh. Because people, this is a for funsies thing, let's go shoot up a transformer so we can watch it blow?

Chris Garza:

I had no idea until I started this job that was a thing, but it happened more than it should, for sure. You had them come in with bullet holes in them. You had them come in where they had been tampered, where the bushing looked like it had been hit off by something. I had no idea how anybody had done any of this.

Jill James:

Then in those cases, had the PCBs leaked out, if they contained it?

Chris Garza:

If they contained it, they would've.

Jill James:

Dang.

Chris Garza:

They did. They did, and then that's a whole remediation part. I got very good at all my environmental stuff there at Salt Lake.

Jill James:

I bet you did. I bet you did.

Chris Garza:

Working on SDCCs and doing my aboveground storage tanks and underground storage tanks. Yeah.

Jill James:

In those areas where people were shooting up transformers, there's probably little mini cleanup sites in those areas.

Chris Garza:

Yep. Yep. I got to go talk to linemen about and give presentations on PCBs. That's why I talked about the orcas and the bioaccumulation of it and how it could affect them and their families, that when they saw this, that they needed to be careful and they needed to decontaminate themselves or put on PPE before messing with these transformers, because they didn't want to take it home to their kids or their dogs or their animals, any of them. Solomon was the first time that I figured out that there was such thing as an EHS manager. I started doing the job there. After doing that for a while, they decided that they were going to move their company up about an hour away north. Yeah.

Jill James:

This doesn't sound like a good work-life balance.

Chris Garza:

Exactly. Exactly. I said earlier when I was talking about my first job that I wanted to start a family, well, by this time at Solomon, I had my first kid. I had my son and my wife at home. My parents actually live with us at the house, too.

Jill James:

You have a multi-generational family.

Chris Garza:

We do. We do. It works out great. I have beautiful understanding wife who is very appreciative of my parents and my family. I kind of hit the jackpot there because it could have been a whole lot different with trying to keep the family together with my wife. But family is really important to me, and trying having to do the drive to spend more time away from them, I didn't want to do it. So I found a job being a safety director. This job was looking for all, it was just a safety director. That was the job title. There was no environmental put in there.

Jill James:

Except it contained it. Yeah, so many of us have had so many different job titles that didn't include the things you eventually ended up doing. I think that's really because so many leaders still don't understand our work function. You know? It's like we're just going to throw this safety title on there, but it's also going to be environmental and it's also going to be health and it's also going to be DOT and it's also going to be name it. Yeah.

Chris Garza:

Yeah. But the cool thing about our profession, and when I meet other people from our profession, I find this true, is that we are good at everything. They find out, management finds out that we're good at this, we're good at this, and they're like, "Well, can you help out with that project?" It's like, "Well, sure."

Jill James:

Yeah. I'll figure it out.

Chris Garza:

I'll figure it out. Yeah, so I went to this other place as a safety director, which included the environmental as well, and they were a supplement company. They were a supplement company. To this point, I had always felt really good about what I was doing. Even at Solomon doing the electrical grid stuff, we were helping people without power. We were helping them, we were repairing them, getting them out quick. When hurricanes hit or some other natural disaster happened that wiped out the electrical grid of a place, they would send us all their stuff, we'd go through it and repair it. A lot of the times we would stay overnight and try to repair all this stuff and send it back out to them so they could get their power on as soon as they could. I was always feeling really good about what I was doing.

Jill James:

Yeah, for sure.

Chris Garza:

This place, I went to the supplement company and we got to see a lot of people that their life was improved by this as well. I know supplements is a whole topic in itself whether or not they work or they don't, but the placebo effect or if it's not a placebo effect, has a lot to do with it. If somebody says they take this pill and it improves their quality of life and it's not hurting them, then it's good. I got to see a lot and I got my first taste of what it was like being in food.

Jill James:

A whole different animal. Okay.

Chris Garza:

It was. It was a whole different animal being in food. To me, it wasn't as interesting as the other stuff that I had done. But I did get to learn a lot. At every place I go to, I usually just fall in love with the people. This place was no different. They were awesome. I really liked working with every one of them, getting to know everything about them. It was a lot of fun on that aspect.

Jill James:

But it doesn't sound like that one lasted, huh?

Chris Garza:

That one did not, just because I always had questions of where we were going, things like that. I also had one big thing bothering me in all of my career, which was that I had always been left to figure out most of the things on my own. I had been left to figure out, okay, well this is the problem. This is our safety problem, this is our safety issue, what do we do about it? Then through my research, through everything, then I would come up with an answer. I never got any sort of pure peer confirmation on anything of that.

Jill James:

Yeah. I mean, that's so common in our profession. That piece is unfortunate that so many of us are solo operators. It's also why many of us are very well networked outside of our organizations, because we need that. We need somebody to be able to say, "Am I on the right path here? What do you think of this?" Is that what you set out to do was to find a mentor, if you will?

Chris Garza:

I did. I did. I had an opportunity where somebody contacted me and said, "Hey, I need a EHS manager under me. I am drowning." They were making the shift to a project manager on the operations side. They have just a plethora of experience, they were in the CDC for years. They've worked at Gilead when it was just starting up. They're really good. I agreed to come work with him. I have learned, or at least got confirmation in the things that I'm doing, in this past year and a half that I have felt like my career and my confidence has skyrocketed at this point.

Jill James:

That's beautiful. What does this particular company do where you have the opportunity to have that person?

Chris Garza:

This is the company I'm at now, and it's called Benuvia. What they want to do, I love the mission behind it. How they're doing it is so interesting as well. They are using cannabinoids or cannabis and psychedelic drugs to try to improve diseases. We're using cannabis. We have the only FDA approved THC drug on the market, which is called Syndros, which is used for cancer patients and HIV patients experiencing anorexia. They take our product and it helps with pain and it also helps make them hungry so that they're able to eat. That one, it's really cool.

Jill James:

Yep. That's helping humanity, Chris, for sure.

Chris Garza:

I feel like it. I don't want to get into the conversation about drugs and all that other things, but I do want to just, the psychedelic part of it, we make MDMA, which is ecstasy. We make ecstasy onsite, and LSD as well. We're slated to make psilocybin. We have these things scheduled with the DEA. We have quota with the DEA to do these things. The goal is that we're feeding clinical trials, and we only sell to clinical trials. We are only feeding these clinical trials that are dealing with, God I blanked out for it, but depression, PTSD, anxiety. They're dosing with these to figure out if they can help these people that suffer from these ailments.

Jill James:

Wow. Gosh, Chris, this has been an interesting career path. Outside of the transformer industry, you've really stayed true to your roots in a family of biochemistry, right?

Chris Garza:

Yes.

Jill James:

Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. And a lot on leading research, including where you are today, which is fascinating, and hopefully proves to be life changing for people who are suffering.

Chris Garza:

Yeah. I really believe in what we're doing right now here at Benuvia. I really hope that it does what they hope it will do.

Jill James:

Yeah. At your current position, are you doing a little bit of E, a bit of H, a little bit of S?

Chris Garza:

Yes. Yes. I get to do it all again. It's on a whole different level now because we have LSD is a potent compound. There's other safety things that are involved with the potent compound stuff. My boss has been a great mentor on that one. He is very smart and he worked with some very smart people in the past that have built this whole safety program around potent compounds. Where it's potent compounds and also compounds that don't even have any toxicity studies on them yet. Normally you would look at a chemical, you'd look at the SDS and say, "Okay, we need to do this and this and this." Well, some of these chemicals, what they developed them for, they don't have an SDS. They don't have any LD50, so they don't have any talk studies that say that at this level it'll kill you or harm you. They built this whole program up on how to handle these things and learning about that has been great. Learning the DEA stuff, the DEA, how they regulate the pharma industry and how they regulate these drugs, how they regulate marijuana and these psychedelic drugs has been really interesting and fun.

Jill James:

For anyone who doesn't quite know what DEA is or DEA compliance, which is what you're talking about, Chris, DEA stands for? Oh yeah, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Yeah.

Chris Garza:

They're on site. They're onsite every two months.

Jill James:

Okay. Right. Okay. This is good. In our work as EHS professionals, the automatic one that everybody goes to is OSHA. Right?

Chris Garza:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jill James:

Then the next one people think of probably next is, oh, maybe EPA or the local equivalent, maybe DOT, depending on the industry that you're in, maybe MSHA, depending on the industry that you're in. DEA is yet another one. We think about a regulatory compliance, FDA, another one, if you're in the food industry. You're talking Chris about the DEA, and onsite every two months. That's a lot compared to say, oh, OSHA. Yeah. they're looking for specific things. I'm imagining you have to produce some pretty interesting paper trails and they're doing some onsite auditing?

Chris Garza:

Oh yeah. Every bit needs to be accounted for. Right? They call it diverting. They call it diverting. You can't have anything. You don't want anything diverted from the chain. The DEA has this chain that they say like, "Okay, it's produced. Now it needs to go here. Now it needs to go here." If it ever leaves the chain, it's saying it's been diverted, and that's a huge issue.

Jill James:

Sure. It's got to be accounted for the entire time.

Chris Garza:

Yep. Yeah. With the DEA, you're talking about jail time at that point. You're talking about something much worse than just the fine.

Jill James:

Fascinating work, Chris. Fascinating. I heard you mentioning maybe two jobs back. Oh, maybe it was when were working with the transformers and you said you went into communities and you did some speaking engagements. Is that a piece that kind of launched what we might call public speaking or training for you? Is that something that you liked to do and has that grown for you in your career?

Chris Garza:

I like to do it. I loved going out and meeting the linemen, the guys out there working in our communities to keep the power on. I loved helping them, talking to them, and that did open up my public speaking part of it. I haven't got to do it as much as I would like to. Sometimes you get that, I mean, we all get it, and it's a hot topic in our career is the imposter syndrome type thing where you don't feel like you should even be speaking about this thing. That's probably been part of what's kept me from doing too much of it. But in an effort to get out into my community more, my number one value is my family. What I think really supports your family is being in touch with the community around them and being a positive influence on that community. It's cliche, but be the change you want to see kind of thing. Right?

Jill James:

That's right. It's not cliche, and that's beautiful, Chris. I have a feeling that we're going to talk about your consulting work now in that regard.

Chris Garza:

Yes.

Jill James:

If anyone remembers when I introduced Chris, his second gig, if you will, is a principal consultant for an organization called Feather & Maine EHHS Consultants. Talk about what that is and what does that mean in your region?

Chris Garza:

I put together Feather & Maine to reach out to my community. I felt like the work that I'm doing now, I believe in it. I love it. It's a lot of fun. But I feel like there's a lot of underserved small businesses out there, like the small labs that I worked for coming up that are doing the things where I came in and told them, "You shouldn't be dumping that there," or, "You shouldn't be doing this," or, "You had your employees move that whole fume hood by themselves?" There's a lot of those underserved companies that can't afford a full-time EHS person. Maybe can't even afford some of the bigger consulting groups that are out there. I came up with this consulting group for the purpose of positively affecting my community and helping them out. I want to know more of the people who worked and live around me. I want to help them come home because some of these people could be my sons, friends, parents. Then on the environmental side, I want these companies to do the right thing and have the right resources or at least have the knowledge how to do the right thing. I started this consulting business to do more and help out around here. It's not just limited to here. My main goal is to affect locally, but if somebody needs help, I'm not going to tell them no.

Jill James:

That's right. Yeah. That's beautiful, Chris. What a way to give back to the community, obviously. Is this a nonprofit or how are you running this?

Chris Garza:

It's not a nonprofit, but I do at least know the going rates of some of this. I've been there myself. I have used consulting companies. I know how much they charge on some of this stuff. I also know that some of it, and especially for the smaller companies, I know that it doesn't have to be that much for them. If I can help out and just keep afloat, that's all that it really needs to be. This is like a hobby for me. It's something that I love to do and a goal. It's what I want this community to be.

Jill James:

Yeah, that's a beautiful way to give back, Chris, a beautiful way to give back to your community and to help our future generations be able to have a safe place to live and work and play. Yeah. Chris, I'm looking at our notes from the last time we spoke, and I have something called EnvironMentor Program. What is that?

Chris Garza:

Texas has this program with the TCEQ where they take volunteers from the EHS community, mainly environmental professionals, where somebody gets in trouble with something, they're not adhering to some regulation. The TCEQ needs them to get in line with this regulation, and they might not have the money to do it. They're like a mom and pop. A lot of the times it's a mom and pop natural gas line. They take environmental professionals and who are volunteering their time. They connect them with these places that need help. Me, I'm a part of it, so I will go through and help them get into compliance. Whether or not their flare height is too big, or maybe let's say that they didn't know they needed a storm water plan and now they're in trouble with storm water part of it. I go through and help them build that stuff and do it for free as a volunteer basis.

Jill James:

Wow. Wow. That's beautiful. What an interesting program. That is wonderful.

Chris Garza:

I like it.

Jill James:

Yeah, I love to hear that. Yeah, Environ. All right. Is that the name of the organization?

Chris Garza:

No, it's just the EnvironMentor program.

Jill James:

Okay.

Chris Garza:

The TCEQ put it together through their small business help line. All the people that you meet who work in that thing too are people who have such interesting stories themselves.

Jill James:

Yeah. Is this something that serves all of Texas?

Chris Garza:

Yes.

Jill James:

Yeah. Okay. If someone wants to Google this, if they're listening and thinking, hey, I live in Texas, I work in Texas, maybe I want to volunteer with this organization, what would they search for?

Chris Garza:

They would search for the EnvironMentor Program with the TCEQ.

Jill James:

Okay, perfect. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Garza:

All one word. Okay. EnvironMentor. Yeah.

Jill James:

Okay. Chris, you have a full and busy life, and it sounds to me like since you've opened that box of comic books way back wanting to be able to do good for your family and your community, it sounds like you are maybe edging up on that Spider-Man level. As we get ready to close for the day, is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience regarding our career or anything else?

Chris Garza:

Our career, it's special. I had no idea it existed. I had no idea that there was even the letters CSP out there or any of that stuff going into this, not until even maybe five years ago is when I first heard the term CSP.

Jill James:

You've achieved that too, correct?

Chris Garza:

Yes. It's really special what we do and the career itself is special. We get to do everything, anybody that's involved in this. I mean, we met at that conference, and talking with anybody there, I mean, they're all just some of the best people to talk to.

Jill James:

Yeah. Chris is talking about a conference that he and I met at early this fall.

Chris Garza:

Yeah. Talking with anybody that works in this position, I mean, they're so interesting. They all seem to be just great people. I really couldn't have asked for a better outcome for what I was going to do, starting back and opening up those comic books figuring out what I was going to do to being in college and trying to think about what path I was going to go down.

Jill James:

That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Well, Chris, I really appreciate your time today, and thank you for sharing your story and the really important work that you've been doing throughout your career and how your efforts are impacting the greater good. Thank you so much.

Chris Garza:

Thank you.

Jill James:

Thank you all for spending your time listening today. More importantly, thank you for your contribution toward, as I just said, the common good, making sure your workers, including your temporary workers, make it home safe every day. If you aren't subscribed and want to hear past and future episodes, you can subscribe in iTunes, the Apple Podcast app, or any other podcast player you'd like. We'd love it if you could leave a rating and review us on iTunes. It really helps us connect the show with more and more EHS professionals like Chris and I. Special thanks to Naeem Jaraysi, our podcast producer. Until next time, thanks for listening.