Psymposia spent the last month diving headfirst into the mysterious and complex world of ibogaine. We discussed iboga’s traditional use with people who have been initiated in Gabon, listened to a reaction from Bwiti healers, talked to a MAPS researcher about ibogaine for opioid addiction, and asked patients and providers about medicalization, regulation, and safety.

We opened the series with the testimony of Amy, a Canadian nurse who used ibogaine to detox from heavy opioid addiction. We chose to lead the conversation with her story because of how well it speaks not only to ibogaine’s transformative power, but also its shortcomings. As we bring the Ibogaine Conversation to a close, we wanted to revisit Amy on her path to recovery.

“I felt the benefits of the ibogaine almost a year after the treatment. I didn’t have any cravings,” she tells us, retrospectively. “Then, you know, things started to change in my life, and I wasn’t coping well. I still didn’t know how to deal with my issues in a healthy way.”

Eventually, about a year after her ibogaine treatment, Amy was reintroduced to painkillers through her doctor – and her use escalated to a point that it had never reached in the past.

“The last relapse was really quite serious. I ended up having issues at work. I wasn’t fired, but I was put on leave while they did an investigation into my drug use.” She continues, “I didn’t know what to do, so I made a feeble attempt at suicide, and that was my way of saying I needed help. I’m a nurse; if I really wanted to do it, I wouldn’t still be here. I just wanted help.”

One of the recurring themes brought up by those we spoke to was the necessity of aftercare. Despite the narrative that ibogaine is a “quick-fix” for addiction, long-term success seems to hinge on access to strong support networks, therapy, and integration of the experience.

“I think the first time I went into ibogaine treatment, I didn’t really have a healthy outlook on what I was hoping to achieve. I just wanted an easy detox from the drugs because at the time, I still believed that quitting the drugs was the solution to my problem,” Amy says of her experience. “I couldn’t see any further than that. I didn’t think there was any more work to be done afterwards.

“The second time I went to do ibogaine, it was more to help me with what I needed to do after, rather than just detox. I wanted the mental shift that I had the first time, but this time I was prepared to take advantage of that in order to get better. I realized that ibogaine is just a tool to get me where I needed to go. It wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t going to fix everything for me, but it was going to allow me the ability to think clearly in a shorter amount of time.”

Amy was once again able to detox from opioids after her second ibogaine treatment, and she’s remained drug-free since then. She says her success is, in part, owed to continuous exposure to ibogaine. Amy has been taking ‘booster doses’ – that is, low doses of ibogaine – for over 2 years now, and she swears by this method.

“I really feel like the ibogaine does for you what it needs to do at the time, and in my opinion, having taken booster doses after a flood dose, I’d go as far as to say that it’s not worth using ibogaine if you don’t take booster doses afterwards.”

Sustainability

Now of course, we weren’t able to highlight everything that’s happening in the ibogaine community, and we weren’t able to include every perspective that’s out there. As the editor, I wanted to end the series by addressing some of these shortcomings.

The long-term sustainability of rising demand for iboga is a hot topic in the ibogaine community. From the beginning, I felt it was important to include this ongoing and controversial discussion for the Ibogaine Conversation.

I hadn’t quite realized how controversial it was.

The vast majority of those I spoke to about the status of iboga in Gabon were hesistant, and often unwilling, to offer their commentary on the subject. The few people who engaged with the question all had different responses.

Some of those I spoke to early on in the series, who have spent time in Gabon, said they never got the impression that iboga is becoming more scarce. Others maintain that urgent action is necessary to prevent what they see as a rapid decline in the plant’s population.

“You used to be able to find iboga very easily in the wild,” says Yann Guignon. “Now, in these areas where it used to exist, you can’t find it anymore.”

Yann is the director and founder of Blessings of the Forest, an organization working towards a sustainable model for iboga cultivation in Gabon. He says that while growing demand for ibogaine poses the largest threat, larger social and environmental issues such as climate change and deforestation have a significant impact on iboga’s ability to thrive in its natural environment.

“Iboga needs 5 to 10 years to grow. It will take years and years to be ready for the market,” Yann cautions. “But the demand is now, so meanwhile we have to find a solution.”

Others cautioned me about the potential pitfalls of a kind of cultural paternalism when dealing with issues surrounding sustainability. Citing the historical example of French colonialism in Gabon, which largely depended on forced systems of agriculture, some ibogaine advocates aren’t comfortable with the assumption that Gabonese communities should just start growing surplus iboga to export.

After talking to numerous people, my own opinion is that it seems to make the most sense to look towards alternative sources of ibogaine. Voacanga africana is a plant similar to iboga that’s already cultivated in an existing agricultural framework, and from which ibogaine can be sourced relatively simply. Chris Jenks, a notable chemist in the ibogaine community, has published an accessible and user-friendly guide for obtaining ibogaine from Voacanga.

The truth is, I don’t think we have all the facts. There seems to be no real consensus about the status of iboga in the wild, and the impression I got from working on this series is that there needs to be some kind of coordinated effort to determine the scale of the environmental threat facing iboga.

Yann’s organization, Blessings of the Forest, is currently working on a project to do exactly this.

“Right now, we’re organizing a mission to count the [iboga] trees, to make a complete national inventory of iboga,” Yann told me. “One year after that, [we’ll] come back and count the trees again.”

Until then, we should acknowledge that iboga is a limited resource embedded in a rich and dynamic cultural context. Therefore, we should proceed responsibly and with accountability to the land and peoples from which this plant comes.

Regulation, the Medical Model, and Safety

I’d also like to address that a number of the opinions expressed throughout the series were controversial, specifically surrounding regulation, the medical model, and safety.

The goal of Psymposia’s conversation format is to provide a platform for a diverse range of perspectives on a single topic. Not everyone agrees, and that’s the point. Without endorsing any one opinion over another, we want to create space for the exploration of contemporary issues that are often nuanced and challenging. With the Ibogaine Conversation, we hope we did that effectively.

Of course, the dominant theme of this particular series has been that ibogaine isn’t really like anything else. Ibogaine can kill you if you’re not well-informed about complications that can arise from its use.

Recently, unfortunate news has come out that underscores the serious nature of safety risks associated with ibogaine, even with experienced providers. The same day we published the previous article of this series, one of the featured panelists was arrested after a death at his clinic related to complications from Xanax and ibogaine. As discussed in our interview with Clare Wilkins, the subject of ibogaine and benzodiazepines is a controversial ongoing debate.

While we hope that we were able to provide a glimpse into some of the dangers to consider before taking ibogaine, we want to emphasize that what we’ve presented here is simply that, a glimpse.

“It’s a tricky subject and a tricky drug,” says Doug Greene, who’s been involved with drug policy activism for 30 years. He served as the former Patient Advocacy Coordinator for the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance (GITA) and co-authored their safety guidelines.

A recurring topic in this conversation has been regulation. Given that ibogaine can be dangerous, and has the potential to radically transform the lives of those it touches, it occupies a unique position in the debate between skeptics of the Western medical model and those who insist it only be used in a supervised setting with medical professionals.

But it’s not quite that simple, according to Doug.

“I think some people conceptualize this as a dichotomy – basically between the professionals and the system that they’re a part of, and grassroots self-help and neo-shamanism. I don’t think anyone is fully satisfied with the [Western] healthcare system, but I don’t think that dichotomy is real.”

There’s clearly dispute even among experts in the ibogaine community, and the responsibility is on any individual who wants to work with the drug to look beyond these articles when doing their research. We’ve done our best to provide further resources, but there’s a wealth of information out there that we simply don’t have the capacity to cover here.

One such resource is the guidelines established by GITA, which we referenced elsewhere in the series.

We spoke with Jonathan Dickinson, the former executive director of GITA and another co-author of the guidelines, about safety protocol with ibogaine. He brought up some interesting points that are relevant to the spirit of individual choice and autonomy that’s expressed by many in the ibogaine community, as well as the need for some kind of cohesive approach to harm reduction.

“I became involved with ibogaine because it was psychedelic therapy without a lot of pretense, and it was just happening already,” Jonathan told us. “Because treatments are being offered in unregulated spaces, they almost offer an example of what could happen with decriminalization.

“What we were working on with GITA was to provide a basic form of patient advocacy, which is what a community needs to provide for itself without a regulatory authority. Our goal with the guidelines was, rather than arbitrarily saying, ‘This is how you have to do ibogaine treatments,’ we wanted to create a resource to identify the risks and how they could be mitigated, in stages. From there, it was training in the most important areas, building up the genuine efforts people were making.

“I think it’s important that people are able to understand what the risks are that they’re taking, to have the freedom and ability to make choices about their bodies, and the proper support to make those choices well. I think if the ibogaine movement has been focused on anything, well that’s at least a big part of it.”

We cannot be responsible for how you choose to engage with ibogaine, but we strongly encourage anyone with a serious interest to act responsibly.

So What’s Next?

When I asked Dana Beal, an iconic figurehead of both the ibogaine and medical marijuana movements, he suggested ibogaine research should be the next big thing for the psychedelic community to focus on after MDMA.

“Ibogaine is the most cost-effective change you could make to address both the opioid crisis and the drug war,” he told me. “Nothing else abolishes heroin withdrawal, and it’s non-habit forming.”

Murtaza Majeed does work surrounding drug treatment, advocacy, and policy reform in Afghanistan, where he’s attempting to open the country’s first ibogaine clinic. In his view, ibogaine is simply one small fix to a much larger social problem.

“We need to change our culture’s perspective towards drug use, so that it’s recognized as a part of the society we’re living in,” Murtaza says. “We need to talk more about the benefit maximization of drugs. We need to start remodeling our philosophy of harm reduction to be more focused on bringing integrated services to anyone who is using drugs, regardless of why they’re using, the route of administration, or whether or not they’re linked to the production or distribution of drugs.”

For Amy, it’s also all about how we treat people who use drugs in our society.

“We take one of the most suffering subgroups of our population, who’ve been traumatized, and we marginalize them and we browbeat them, shove them down, tell them they’re shit, they’re useless, and they serve no purpose.”

She goes on, “Then you go to a traditional treatment center, and they nail it into you that you have no control over your life. They don’t focus on trauma; they don’t focus on the root of your addiction and where it comes from.”

Amy is currently attending weekly meetings with other healthcare professionals who deal with addiction. She’s never shared the fact that she used ibogaine for her recovery because of the potential repercussions (she could be kicked out of the group for using drugs and lose her job as a nurse), but once her contract with her current employer expires she doesn’t have to worry as much.

“I can’t tell you how eager I am to come to the end of my contract and sit in the room with all those doctors and nurses and finally share my story,” she tells me. “It’s gonna happen.”

I’ve never taken ibogaine, and quite honestly I don’t know if I ever will. But even without having tried it myself, I’ve developed a deep respect for the molecule solely through my interactions with individuals whose lives have been profoundly touched by it. You can hear it in their voices when they share their stories. It’s not just earnestness; it’s much bigger than that.

So what is it? After our expedition into the world of this strange substance, what have we learned? What’s the deal with ibogaine?

As Amy finishes her story, I ask her to summarize the role that ibogaine has played in her life. Is it all it’s chalked up to be? Is it really the solution to addiction?

“Ibogaine is helping me stay clean. It’s given me purpose. It’s giving me passion and motivation.

“It wasn’t an instant fix, and we know it doesn’t work for everyone. There’s a lot of people who take ibogaine and go right back to using within days. There’s no easy or quick fix to addiction, and I think people tout this as a magic cure, but it’s just a tool.

“It shifts your perspective on things, and not in an abstract or unhealthy way. It feels like this is how we’re supposed to think. You can feel it. There’s something, a connection that happens with people who have taken ibogaine.

“I’ve seen it time and time again. There is this odd subconscious, subliminal kind of thing that goes on – something there that helps you connect with people.

“And I truly believe the solution to addiction is connection.”

Clare S. Wilkins is a former intravenous drug user & methadone patient who shed her chemical dependencies with the aid of ibogaine. As founder of Pangea Biomedics, she has facilitated over 700 treatments and collaborated with MAPS on the Mexico study. Since 2010, Clare has been an active board member of the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance (GITA) and is a co-author of the Clinical Guidelines for Ibogaine-Assisted Detoxification. Clare is currently collaborating with ICEERS, developing a clinical trial for methadone for ibogaine-assisted detox.

We’ve mentioned that ibogaine can be dangerous, and we even saw what can happen when proper safety precautions aren’t taken. Here, we take some time to speak with Clare and go more in depth about the risks associated with ibogaine.

While we hope that this interview offers some insight about the safety protocols one should consider before taking ibogaine, we want to stress that in no way should this be considered a thorough safety guide. Simply reading this interview is not adequate preparation, and we strongly encourage anyone thinking about working with ibogaine in any capacity to take the time to do further research.

Would you like to start us off by introducing yourself? What’s your story?

I was an injecting heroin user before switching to methadone. I come from a very traumatic childhood with a lot of violence. I discovered heroin at an Ivy League university, and it seemed to answer every question I ever had.

I spent the next 15 years trying to resolve that answer.

Methadone maintenance treatment worked for a while. It was my lily pad for 9 years. It saved my life. It made me not a criminal, not sick. I had a job, and I was able to get my life together.

Anyway, my sister and I had both been using heroin and she had already detoxed, yet she learned about iboga through Rick Strassman’s work with DMT. It was back when there were just a few clinics in the world. I went to a clinic in Tijuana, which, at that time, was the Ibogaine Association. There, I was freed from the lock of methadone.

After my experience, I saw what may have been lacking in the treatment protocol. I didn’t really have anybody to process with during the experience. I went home, and I was in withdrawal for a month. I couldn’t even do my job. So, I called up the clinic and told them that I’d like to talk to patients who perhaps needed to understand the process from a peer perspective. I was in LA and they were in Tijuana, so I’d take the train down and I’d just sit with people because no one who had taken ibogaine had ever sat with me.

That was the beginning. I volunteered until I was brave enough to purchase the Ibogaine Association name and create Pangea with a full team in a new location. It was a calling, and it seems to be a calling that happens with a lot of people in the drug users’ movement.

Since then, you’ve become prominent in the ibogaine community as a provider and consultant. In your professional opinion, is ibogaine actually safe?

That’s like asking if electricity is safe, in my opinion. You can cook a warm meal, light up a room, or electrocute someone with electricity, as they say.

It’s similar with ibogaine. Ibogaine, in and of itself, is not unsafe. There are both risks and benefits.

Ken Alper, Jeffrey Kamlet, Deborah Mash, Bruno Rasmussen, Roman Paskulin, and Jamie McAlpin are doctors and experts regarding ibogaine safety. There are many published journal articles and presentations of theirs online. To be clear, I’m a lay therapist that’s worked with an integrative team of MDs, naturopathic doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and somatic and peer therapists for 12 years.

So, what are some of the specific risks? You mentioned the heart, but could you go into detail about the screenings people should get before they consider taking ibogaine?

Ibogaine increases electricity in the heart, which is one of the reasons reputable clinics do cardiac screenings – to assess how the heart conducts electricity. Ibogaine has some features that require vigilance, and most experts conclude that thorough pre-screening and medical monitoring during the experience is crucial to its safety as a treatment for detoxification.

Ibogaine also induces bradycardia (it lowers heart rate, normally by about 10 beats per minute during a typical dose of 12 – 20mg/kg). The risk of bradycardia is that the heart rate can go very low. If the heart rate stays too low for too long of a period, this can require immediate administration of atropine. This is a serious life-threatening situation that requires medical intervention.

QT prolongation is another major risk with ibogaine. The QT interval is a measure of the heart’s electrical cycle, or the time it takes for the ventricle to get ready from one contraction to the next. During this period, the heart is vulnerable to cardiac arrhythmias and other serious complications. Other legal medications prolong the QT interval, such as methadone. Benzodiazepine and alcohol withdrawal both result in QT prolongation as well, so combining ibogaine with an alcohol or benzodiazepine detox can be extremely dangerous.

Many people who seek out ibogaine for detoxification are poly-drug users. For best outcomes, complete blood and urine panels need to be drawn and analyzed as close to treatment as possible to assess for infection, electrolyte levels, and of course, a toxicology screen. What drugs/medications has this person been taking that they may not have told you about?

Hepatic function and the specific liver enzymes are essential. Many ibogaine patients have liver issues, are diagnosed with hepatitis C, etc. However, this doesn’t preclude them from treatment, in many providers’ experience. Still, the liver enzyme count is crucial to consider. I believe Howard Lotsof’s last patent application was for the use of ibogaine to treat hepatitis C. He had data demonstrating a dramatic decline in viral load counts in those with a diagnosis of Hepatitis C who had taken ibogaine.

Electrolyte count is crucial as well because ibogaine is a potassium hERG channel blocker. Potassium plays an important role in cardiac function, and blocking this channel can lead to prolonged QT intervals, arrhythmias, and insufficient electrolytes for the heart to function as it needs to.

Noribogaine, the metabolite of ibogaine, is an important topic as well. It seems to stay in the system longer than ibogaine, providing the “window of opportunity” we hear about. Noribogaine has similar qualities to ibogaine in terms of decreased self-administration of opiates. According to Ken Alper and others, it’s important to consider the concentration of noribogaine over time, which resembles a curve. Multiple doses of ibogaine in one evening increase the area under the curve, indicating a higher concentration of noribogaine in the system for longer periods of time, which could or could not be predictive of more danger.

In your time as a provider, did you ever have any adverse events?

Pangea had 3 fatalities, on separate occasions, as well as numerous events that required intervention. Thanks to mentors, experts, and teachers, Pangea learned from them. We haven’t had an adverse event since because we do completely different protocols now that have been worked on diligently for the past 8 years.

We don’t just pull the rug right out from under the client upon starting treatment. No need to arrive in withdrawal. Before treatment, we develop specific protocols to treat conditions underlying their dependencies. We continue with this process during treatment.

Our work with ibogaine is done in a specifically timed manner. For example, with opioid dependencies, we give morphine and then ibogaine, then less morphine, and then ibogaine. As the ibogaine accumulates, there’s less and less craving for opioids, and more time to include the adjunct therapies we use. With stimulants, we don’t use the method of co-administration, yet we do use repeated cumulative dosing. It takes an extreme amount of vigilance, but it’s much more successful than anything we ever did before while following the traditional model.

Why did these adverse events occur?

Well first, we were following the traditional model. In the conventional paradigm, you come to treatment in withdrawal and you get ibogaine that night, before trust is developed with the team, soon after an EKG, and usually after a long flight.

We had a staff of 12, including 4 doctors. We essentially had a hospital in a villa; it wasn’t for a lack of equipment or personnel. These were extremely unfortunate and difficult aspects of the learning curve. The fatalities were the result of pulmonary embolism, the presence of residual cocaine in the blood, and hypertrophy. All preventable issues, as we now know.

So, do you think your current model helps prevent adverse events?

Not think, we know.

No deaths and no hospital visits in the 8 years since we have changed our protocols. We’ve had someone who experienced a hypertensive attack, who already had high blood pressure, and we controlled it within an hour. And someone else was vomiting so much they needed an IV, but that would happen almost every week when we administered ibogaine the previous way.

Psychologically, it’s a different story. Clients can regress to their childhoods, start acting child-like, screaming, crying, or behaving violently. Staying in an alternate reality for a prolonged period of time, this comes with safety issues as well. 

What’s so different about this alternative protocol?

Well, the traditional treatment model is rapid. Patients come in, they take their ibogaine, and they usually return to their same environment shortly after treatment.

We now emphasize pre-treatment at least a month before they come. Many people focus on aftercare, but nobody seems to talk much about strong preparatory care.

We’ve had numerous clients follow our preparatory protocol who end up not needing to take ibogaine. We worked with naturopaths and developed specific orthomolecular protocols for the 5 most significant physiological issues that occur with drug dependence. Those are depression, pain, anxiety, liver issues, and chronic fatigue.

What we do is called repeated cumulative low dosing, which results in a saturation, or a “flood”, by the end. So instead of giving a single flood dose in one night, we do it over days. What that does is it shows us how someone reacts to the medicine, how they metabolize the drug – versus just going from a blood test result. So how do they react at first? Do they cry? Do they feel nothing? Do they say it feels good? Do they see their dead grandparents? Do they feel calm or anxious at first? Then, as a team, we form a specific protocol based on their body and mind. They teach us.

Is ibogaine safe to take with any other medications?

There are many contraindications. Ibogaine potentiates not just morphine, but it seems to be a potentiator of almost everything. One cup of coffee with a microdose of ibogaine in the morning can feel like 4 cups to some people. Antidepressants and antipsychotics are another category that are restricted with ibogaine. I highly suggest people do a lot of research regarding this issue, as it could take a while to go through all the medications. The GITA Guidelines have information as well.

Working with a physician who supports the use of ibogaine and tapering from other medications, or continued use of them, is strongly encouraged.

It seems like there’s a lot of controversy and misinformation surrounding ibogaine and benzos. What’s the deal? Is it safe to detox from benzos using ibogaine?

Ibogaine doesn’t work as well for benzos as it does for opioids and stimulants.

Remember, ibogaine electrifies the body. Yes, with the correct dose it can place a person into a para-sympathetic state, where he or she is no longer in fear. Yet it’s extremely dangerous to use ibogaine to decrease the dosage of a benzo, especially rapidly. We refer people to the Ashton manual. Heather Ashton is the world’s expert on benzo tapering.

Of course, one can combine various therapies to detox from benzodiazepines, but we’ve seen that a slow taper, over time, is the safest with long-acting benzodiazepines. Withdrawal from benzos includes QT prolongation, anxiety, fear, insomnia, seizures, and even death. When a person who is dependent on benzos takes ibogaine, they need to be stabilized on a long-acting benzo to keep the QT interval in a safe range. A short acting benzodiazepine can leave the system during a “flood” quickly, increasing the risk of seizures and arrhythmias. It can also stay in the system and be potentiated by the ibogaine.

This all depends on an individual’s body and their metabolism, as well as dosage of the benzos. We don’t know unless we go slowly. There’s debate around this issue, so it would be wonderful if the clinics who work well with benzodiazepine patients can come together and share their knowledge with other providers and patients.

Many people hide their benzo use, even if it’s only occasional, to be accepted to clinics, and this is dangerous. If you look at Ken Alper’s fatality paper, you’ll see benzodiazepines are connected to many of the deaths associated with ibogaine – specifically you’ll see that they weren’t used while in treatment, yet were found in the toxicology report afterward. I call benzos the snipers of ibogaine fatalities.

This subject is controversial because you have a doctor saying one thing and a clinic saying another thing, and so on.

 How about other psychedelics? That seems to be a growing trend, taking ibogaine with other visionary substances. How safe is this?

Ibogaine is safe to take with certain psychedelics. And completely unsafe with others.

Dangers seem to occur around the administration of 5-MeO-DMT, kambo, MDMA, and ayahuasca in close proximity with ibogaine. There have been grievances, including a fatality, associated with the use of these medicines alongside ibogaine.

Ayahuasca and kambo are both purgatives, so the issues of dehydration and over-stimulation can be factors in relation to safety with ibogaine treatment. There’s been a surge of the use of these medicines with one another in the past few years. A few practitioners seem to combine the higher risk substances well, with no adverse effects reported. There’s a lot that still needs to be researched.

There’s also debate around using ketamine, which is a dissociative, while taking ibogaine or shortly after. Many clinics have witnessed clients moving from heroin/opioids to ketamine after taking ibogaine, and from stimulants to 5-MeO-DMT and/or DMT as a form of psychedelic substitute. Aside from the physiological complications that may arise from these combinations, there is the psychological component.

Experiences with certain substances can take months, or more, to fully integrate. Often, ibogaine is not enough to get the mission accomplished on its own, to treat years of a chronic condition. It’s essential to use adjunct therapies to create an integrative experience for the client. This, of course, takes time.

A lot of people are talking about microdosing ibogaine. Are the risks the same as with a larger threshold dose? Should someone still get screened before starting a microdosing regimen?

The risks can be the same, yes. They are far less significant, of course, because the dose is so much smaller than traditional “flood” doses.

Yet, there are people who just simply cannot and should not take ibogaine, period.

Even small doses can exacerbate a heart condition, anxiety, or insomnia. Ibogaine is cumulative, so as it builds up (if you’re microdosing regularly), it eventually saturates the body and it feels like you’ve taken a larger amount that day than you actually have. I know of people who used it daily, with a day of rest per week, and others who had a panic attack with a first dose of only a few milligrams. Although not a microdose, a fatality occurred recently with a dose of only 200mg ibogaine HCl, which is considered less than a “booster dose.”

It’s important to rest, to integrate, to sleep, to dream, and to allow the cascade effect of ibogaine to work its wonders. A guide or facilitator is highly recommended. Others prefer finding their own inner guide – their inner doctor, so to speak. Ibogaine leads us back to the root of our inner voice, which we lose sometimes in this cacophony of modern life.

 It seems like there’s a lot of misinformation out there surrounding ibogaine, specifically regarding safety protocol. What do you think are some of the most common misconceptions people have about ibogaine in general?

That they will be liberated from addiction for life. That they will understand the root causes of their dependencies and be able to easily move forward from those realizations. That they’re able to integrate their experience back into their regular life, like it’s easy peasy from there on.

A myth is that everything is fine and perfect after it’s over. With ibogaine, yeah in a night, over the course of a few hours, you’ll be devoid of most withdrawal symptoms and cravings. But after that is when the real work begins.

Those are some of the main ones. Most people don’t know how to integrate what happened to them while taking ibogaine into their life. It’s tough. That’s why if you look on our website, we have a page called ‘The Family’. The family is an organism, and if we notice a family member doesn’t want to talk and be included in therapy, we start to understand that the user may be the scapegoat. Dependency is a family issue that’s complex to traverse.

 So all in all, would you say ibogaine is worth taking even despite the safety risks?

Ibogaine is for the person who feels called to it, who resonates with it, just as you do with a food, a country, a friend, a plant, a potential lover, an ally.

One can feel more of the world around them after taking ibogaine, see more clearly, and experience a new awareness of themself that grows or suddenly appears.

We need more people who feel right now. Who see more deeply. It’s urgent. The risk is worth it.

It certainly has been for me.

Read Part 10: Ibogaine treatment comes with risks. We had a discussion about safety with medical providers.

Juliana Mulligan is a former heroin/opiate dependent person, formerly incarcerated, and an overdose survivor. She has also worked as an ibogaine provider and is currently an ibogaine educator who has presented at multiple conferences. Juliana is studying to be a therapist at the New School in New York and is developing a new project called the Peer Counseling Network, which will provide free peer counseling to individuals who have had ibogaine treatment and cannot afford therapy.

You had a pretty remarkable encounter with ibogaine. What was your experience like, and what led you to try it?

I was an opioid-dependent person for 7 years, from when I was 20 to when I was 27.

I had been through all of the typical mainstream treatments. I went to jail and was sent to rehab there, and of course I went to a million 12-step groups. I kept trying, but none of it ever really clicked for me.

I would have periods of time where I wouldn’t be doing opiates. When I was 25, I went to India for a while and wasn’t doing any drugs there, and then after that I moved to Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. I wasn’t doing any drugs when I first got there, but I figured out pretty quickly that I could buy whatever prescription opioids I wanted over the counter with no prescription, which was quite a discovery for an opiate enthusiast.

I kind of just went to town. I had all the fentanyl I could want, all the morphine, Dilaudid, all of it.

Somehow, I had always been close to psychedelics from a young age. My first acid trip was at 15. I don’t know why, it was just like a random thing, but I always had these people around me who were very interested in psychedelics. So I had actually heard about iboga maybe like 3 or 4 years before I used it.

When I was in Colombia, I was on really high amounts of fentanyl. I finally got to the point where I had as many drugs as I could want and I was like, “You know, this actually sucks. I’m in a really dark place and it’s time to get out of this.” I knew I needed to figure out how to take ibogaine.

I didn’t really want to tell my family what was going on because I had already put them through so much and I thought they were probably exhausted with me. A good friend talked me into telling my mom that I wanted to try ibogaine, and my mom said, “Yes, let’s do it.” No question about it. She just knew that it was the right thing.

So I called around and found this clinic in Guatemala City, and I clicked with the guy on the phone more than I did with people at other clinics. He has a bad reputation in the ibogaine community because he has a lot of adverse events and fatalities, but I didn’t know that at the time. So I pretty much left my life in Colombia and flew to Guatemala.

I arrived in Guatemala City and…knowing what I know now about ibogaine, the clinic staff basically did everything wrong. My drug of choice was fentanyl. Someone should be off fentanyl at least 2 weeks before taking ibogaine. They gave me some OxyContin when I got there so I wasn’t sick, and the next day they gave me ibogaine – which is not what you should do. You really need to stabilize people and watch them for at least 5 days to see where they’re at health-wise, see what their tolerance is, see if maybe they were doing some other drugs that they didn’t tell you about.

So they began giving me ibogaine. [They said] the withdrawal would subside – but it wasn’t subsiding, so I started freaking out. The doctor gave me a bunch of Valium and I don’t really remember anything else after that, until I was throwing up and being taken to the bathroom by the nurses.

I had a kind of whiteout. When I came out of it, they had called paramedics because they couldn’t get an IV in my arm. I guess my EKG wasn’t good, so they took me to the hospital.

It was a state-run Guatemalan hospital and it was like a warzone inside. I remember trying to ask for water and they told me they didn’t have any. They X-rayed me, which seems like an odd choice of test given that it was a problem with my EKG, and then they said, “We can’t deal with this right now,” and they sent us on our way.

We went to a second hospital that turned us away, and the third hospital was like a smaller private hospital. They kept me for maybe like 6 hours and did a series of EKG’s. They seemed to get better, so they released me. We went back to the clinic and I vaguely remember trying to Skype someone, and then they were saying my EKG was really bad and I don’t remember anything after that.

I was told later that we got to a fourth hospital that wasn’t really taking us seriously. We were in the emergency waiting room and apparently I went to the back and just collapsed.

What happened was that I went into cardiac arrest. This is something that’s completely avoidable if you follow safety protocols with ibogaine, but they didn’t follow any of them. Come to find out later, I had about twice the dose of ibogaine that you should ever give anybody. So my treatment is basically ‘How Not to Do Ibogaine 101’.

I had 6 cardiac arrests over a 24-hour period of time and I was put on an external pacemaker for about 10 days in the ICU.

When I woke up, all I could think was, “I’m not in withdrawal right now. How is this possible?”

I didn’t care that I’d had a medical emergency. I just knew that I wanted to work with ibogaine in some capacity. I felt like something really huge had been lifted off me, like I had broken free from something. I didn’t feel guilty, I didn’t feel bad, I just felt as if I had found the final piece of the puzzle.

So even though I didn’t have that huge visionary experience that a lot of people have with iboga, it was like a lightbulb finally got turned on, and I was just on fire about life.
They took me off the pacemaker after about 10 days in the ICU. I was fine. There was no damage to my heart.

I guess it would have been a year later, I went to my first ibogaine conference. I remember figuring out, “Oh, my treatment went wrong because they totally screwed it up, they didn’t do what you’re supposed to!”

You didn’t have any visions at all?

I did eventually remember a vision maybe like 3 months later, as I was falling asleep one night.

When I was getting all that Valium, the room looked like it had turned into this decaying hospital room, and I was on a table with a bunch of wires going into me – which is interesting because that’s how I woke up at the end of the ibogaine experience. In this vision, I got up on the table and pulled out all of the wires. I went over to the window and looked out onto this grey-brown, post-apocalyptic, decaying city. I went to climb out of the window, and I knew that I was escaping from the psychic trap I had been in with opiates.

So even after all that, you’re still an advocate for ibogaine treatment?

100%. Especially for opiates, I think it’s the future. It’s the only thing in the world that takes away withdrawal, other than more opiates.

Not only does it do that, but, for me, I felt reborn after. I was so excited about life. I got out of the hospital, and I was cooking food for the whole clinic. I was just excited and motivated and filled with a new life force. I had quit opiates maybe 30 other times before, and usually you do not feel excited about life. Even 6 months later you don’t feel excited about life because of the way that opiates fuck up your brain chemistry. Ibogaine resets everything somehow, and we don’t really understand how it works, what the reset mechanism is, but something big happens. It takes years to happen coming off of hard drugs usually, but this happened overnight for me.

This drug is miraculous.

Do you know if that provider is still offering treatments?

Yeah. I’ve heard through the grapevine of 2 other fatalities he’s had over the past 3 years. What’s hard for me about this is I don’t actually want to villainize him because even though they didn’t do my treatment right, he stayed with me the whole time I was in the hospital. This guy has a really big heart and my experience really affected him deeply.

But he is not practicing safely and people are dying, and that’s obviously not acceptable. It’s tough because ibogaine is in this legal grey zone, so anyone can open a clinic, but if you’re not following safety protocol, anyone could die – even if you have no pre-existing conditions. I didn’t have any pre-existing conditions. This is not a do-it-at-home type thing. I don’t even suggest doing it underground, in the US, with experienced people. Just go to a medically staffed clinic.

Given that you had to fly to another country for ibogaine treatment and had this adverse event, what are your thoughts on its regulation in the United States? What would the ideal regulatory framework for ibogaine treatment look like?

It’s complicated. First of all, the FDA doesn’t approve one-time treatments like ibogaine. If ibogaine gets approved, they’re gonna figure out a way to make it something that you have to come back and do a bunch of times, and they’re gonna charge 20 grand each time. That’s what concerns me about bringing ibogaine into our medical framework.

There’s already doctors trying to make a maintenance patch out of 18-MC [a non-psychoactive analog to ibogaine], and anything that helps with opioid detox is great, but the total experience of ibogaine is so important. So already they’re picking it apart to make it profitable.

I think, for ibogaine treatment to be adapted in this country successfully, our whole system has to shift. I’m conflicted about it. I want as many people as possible to have access to it, but I don’t want to see ibogaine exploited for profit the same way every other medical treatment is.

Though your experience with it was different from most, how would you compare the visionary aspects of ibogaine to other psychedelics?

Well I did do it again 2 and a half years later. I went to go work at an ibogaine clinic in South Africa and did another flood dose there.

Comparing it to other psychedelics, it’s just totally different. Ibogaine is an oneirogen [causing waking dream states], so it’s a whole other thing. That second experience was harder for me psychologically than my detox treatment. It unraveled a lot of anxiety and depression that I was dealing with, and I was kind of spun out for a few weeks. So I actually think that ibogaine is potentially a lot harder than other psychedelics.

I didn’t have a lot of support or people to talk to after that experience in South Africa. I think it’s really important to be in therapy or have some kind of group to be there with you afterwards. You really have to be prepared. If you take ibogaine thinking, “I want to fix this,” the way ibogaine helps is that it’s going to bring up the worst of that issue, put it all in your face at one time like, “Okay, here you go.” Sometimes people do have that miraculous ibogaine experience, but pretty much everyone has at least 3 days of having a really hard time afterward. It’s not a weekend thing, you really have to be prepared for this.

What are you working on these days?

I’m in school right now to become a therapist, to do ibogaine related work. I’m also starting this thing right now called the Peer Counseling Network. People go and take ibogaine, and a lot of people barely scrape together enough money just to go and do it. They come home, and they don’t have the resources to go to therapy, and the only free support available is with 12 step meetings, which has like a 5% to 8% success rate and doesn’t recognize ibogaine as being legitimate because it’s a drug. So what I’m trying to do is to build a network of people that are basically going to be amateur therapists to help people integrate their ibogaine experiences over the phone.

So far it’s me, Kevin Franciotti, and a couple other friends who are all in school to do therapeutic work. The main focus is for people that have done ibogaine, but I would be open to bringing in other psychedelics as well in the future. I really want to focus on ibogaine for now because a big question facing the community is, what do we do with people afterward?

A lot of people do it, they go home to the same life they were living, and they relapse because they thought ibogaine was just going to be magical and fix everything, and it’s not. You really need to have a plan for afterwards. I hate hearing about people going home and not having any support, so I really want to offer this as a free form of support.

Read Part 9: How safe is ibogaine? We asked Clare Wilkins who has facilitated over 700 treatments

Dimitri Mugianis is well known in the ibogaine world for his work as an underground provider in the early 2000’s, and for his fiery no-nonsense approach to psychedelics, drug policy, and social justice. Dimitri currently works at the New York Harm Reduction Educators and is the founder of We Are The Medicine, a group working to center conversations surrounding spirituality and drug use.

What follows are the highlights of our conversation. Knowing that Dimitri infuses a political praxis into his work, we were particularly interested in his perspective on the regulation of ibogaine in the United States.

So, what’s your relationship with ibogaine?

I first heard about ibogaine probably in 1991 or 1992. I was injecting heroin, getting high with some people, Greta and Adam Nodelman. They were involved with Howard Lotsof in Holland. Adam was American and Greta was Dutch. They were involved in the anarchist movement, the squatters movement, and so forth. They told me about this thing called ibogaine that they had both taken. They said it was a life changing experience. That was the first time I ever heard anything about it.

It took me probably about 10 years before I actually took ibogaine. I was around it in New York, so I ended up contacting Dana Beal and he told me where to go. I went to Holland to do it. At that point I had been using for 20 years, injecting heroin and cocaine. I was also on methadone, so my habit was very big. My pregnant common-law wife had died, many of my friends had died, so I just made the move.

I did the treatment right outside of Amsterdam, and afterwards I never had a desire to use again. It was an incredibly grueling process. I went right off of methadone into the treatment. I took iboga actually, not ibogaine, for the first time. It was a powerful experience. I didn’t go through the process of physical withdrawal that I knew would be associated not only with heroin withdrawal, but methadone withdrawal – which is crushing. I spent the next 3 months in Greece, where my people are from.

I came back to the States and continued in my recovery. I enrolled in 12 steps, but I had a burning desire to help others who didn’t have access to this treatment. So I began to administer ibogaine to people in the underground. For some of that I worked with Eric Taub, one of the pioneers in the ibogaine world, and we handed out fliers in front of methadone clinics. I treated over 500 people and was eventually initiated into Bwiti, in Gabon. I went back 6 times, studying and being involved in ceremony, and eventually I incorporated the ceremonies into my work.

And then in 2011, I was preparing for the last treatment I was going to do in the States before burning out, and I was arrested by the DEA – and that’s a whole other story.

Have you remained in touch with any of the people who you provided treatments for?

I’m still in touch with a lot of them. Many people that I’ve worked with have framed it in a positive light. Not everyone, some of them just say they threw up a lot and saw weird shit, or didn’t see anything.

But I can tell you one story about a guy named Marcus. When I met Marcus he was kicking methadone and in really rough shape. We were doing the treatment and on the 2^nd day he ended up running off. This was very early in my practice and we didn’t know how to keep people in, and it was just a bad scene.

Weeks later, I was really worried about him and happened to see him in the park. He was carrying CD’s under his arm, to sell for money, and he was wearing the same t-shirt he was wearing when he ran out. He was greasy and looked tired. And when he saw me he dropped the CD’s, burst into tears, put his arms around me, and told me it had changed his life. But he was still using, and Marcus eventually OD’d and died. He’s been dead maybe 6 years now.

I’ve stayed in touch with a lot of people and some haven’t used. Some have. I think the idea of a linear healing, with sobriety as the final result, produces shame. When people come back from these experiences, there’s all kinds of things that can be learned. Whether it’s around abuse and trauma, identity, sorrow, grief, all those things.

I’ll tell you something. Tomorrow I’m going to the funeral of someone who’s done ibogaine more than anyone I’ve ever met. I mean he probably did ibogaine over 20 times, flood doses. He died from an overdose last weekend, and he was like my little brother.

So I think that yes we need more maintenance. Methadone, Subutex, etc… should be more available. Yes, we need more treatment facilities. Yes, we need 12 step models and alternative models for those folks whom 12 steps doesn’t work for. Yes, we need harm reduction facilities. Yes, we need holistic healthcare. Yes, we need psychedelics.

But this brother did it all. And he still couldn’t stop.

You’ve been on both sides of the coin, so to speak – as someone who’s personally faced addiction and lost friends to it, and as a provider for people who didn’t have access to traditional treatment models. Given your experiences, and your politics, what are your thoughts on the movement to regulate ibogaine in the United States?

I think it’s a really complex question. My first thought is that it could be a helpful drug, but I think the existing medical paradigm is extremely damaging. Not only the medical paradigm, but our economic structure, which I think the psychedelic movement is desperately trying to be a part of. To me, it really shows the limitations of these drugs and these practices. The problem is that we come out of these powerful experiences and we immediately try to find a way to reintroduce them to these destructive paradigms that are destroying life on the planet.

So I think we need to have a structural analysis and approach to any sort of treatment modality. You have to look at what that system is looking for, and that system is not looking for detox – it’s looking for maintenance. There’s a lot of good reasons for maintenance approaches, but we also have to look at the prospect of turning someone into a perpetual consumer.

Many of the proponents of ibogaine are calling it a cure, but they’re looking at it in a linear way – with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In my experience with iboga it simply doesn’t work that way. How many people have actually taken it and changed their lives, or have stopped using drugs permanently? It’s in the thousands. Not the hundreds of thousands, and I don’t even think in the tens of thousands. So the numbers aren’t even there.

And if it were to get through the entire legislative process it would be put into a clinical setting. So what I would ask your readers is, “Why is the best place to take psychedelics with a shrink?”

I think that if you look at it, we’re handing these tools over to folks who have not stood the test of moral authority. I think they failed it drastically. I don’t think that the medical establishment has the moral authority to be the gatekeepers of this or any drug.

Again, when we talk about sobriety as the final result, it produces shame. It produces the same toxic relationship to oneself that brings people into addiction in the first place. I call it “psychedelic gaslighting”, the idea that there’s no such thing as a bad trip. That if you had a bad experience it was because you didn’t “work” hard enough, you didn’t let go. Fuck letting go. It’s just more shaming. We shouldn’t always try to reframe the experience when somebody has a bad time. We should stop the gaslighting.

So do I think it’s a good thing? I think that almost everything that comes out of the system at this point is just poisoned fruit. Say we bring ibogaine into the for-profit medical model we have now, that gives insurance companies the power to decide who gets treated – so who’s got good insurance, who’s got bad insurance, right?

We have to remember that prescription is not about accessibility, by definition it’s all about restriction. Unless we start to use psychedelics as a way to tear apart these structures and build new ones in their place, then I think this is all a revolving door.

You mentioned that someone may only take ibogaine a few times throughout their life, but microdosing is a hot topic right now. How do you feel about microdosing ibogaine, and how does it fit into a regulatory model?

I don’t think we can look at it in a vacuum. Let me just say that microdosing has been happening for thousands of years in Gabon. People take small amounts of it – and it’s great.

I just want to say it out loud. These drugs – psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, iboga, ayahuasca – are drugs that get you high. And they can be fun. I know it’s not politically correct to say that. No matter how many fucking naked Burning Man parties you’ve been to, you’re Protestant and you want to call this shit work. Ibogaine is a great aphrodisiac, it’s great to dance on, and it’s great to just walk around on.

We’re always looking for work. You know, all this shit about LSD helping people in Silicon Valley be more productive; I would hope that the opposite is true. I’d hope that we take psychedelics to be less productive in this system. Again, we’re in a Protestant, capitalist society and we can’t think outside of that.

So what I’d say about microdosing is let’s take the professionalism out of it. Why do we have to professionalize it? You don’t need a professional to microdose. I’ll break it down for you: take a little bit. If it’s not enough, take a little bit more. If it’s too much, take a little bit less next time. End of story. You don’t need a fucking shaman. You don’t need a fucking shrink. You don’t need a doctor, or a social worker, or a corporation to tell you how to do that. Real simple. And if it doesn’t seem to be doing you any good, stop taking it.

Microdosing done.

Do you have any closing thoughts for us?

Although ibogaine can be dangerous, I think the greatest impact from it will come from access without the even more dangerous contact with professionals. I think one reaction to the over-medicalization and high price of boutique ibogaine clinics is that a lot of people are just getting it off the internet to dose themselves. I think this is the most important trend in the movement today, and something that’s not really being talked about – or is only being talked about negatively.

Obviously there are great dangers involved, but there are also benefits. It’s a great failure of the ibogaine community, that we often fall into prohibitionist attitudes such as “Just Say No.”

Collectively, we need to come up with a harm reduction strategy for self-administration. People are taking ibogaine themselves and will continue to do so, so we need to address it.

I’m heartened to see folks being able to buy the drug online and self administer; however, I don’t believe iboga has the potential to significantly impact the so-called heroin epidemic. The plant itself is in great danger – some people are even saying it’s on the verge of extinction – so we need to be mindful that with accessibility comes exploitation.

Yet, despite my misgivings about the medicalization and commodification of ibogaine, the truth is that my life has been transformed, my body transmuted, and my spirit forever changed by this molecule. It set me on a journey of healing that has taken me around the world, even to jail. And it continues to inform me, challenge me, and propel me. I am blessed.

Read Part 8: How Not to Do Ibogaine 101 with Juliana Mulligan

Patrick Kroupa is an ibogaine treatment expert, hacker, and activist. Having developed a heavy dependence on heroin early in life, Patrick was one of the first participants at the Healing Visions experimental treatment center using ibogaine to detox in 1999. He went on to work with Dr. Deborah Mash at the University of Miami and eventually began providing ibogaine treatments in the early 2000s. He co-authored the first (and only) paper ever published on microdosing ibogaine.

Kroupa is a well-known and outspoken advocate for ibogaine. His work has been featured in magazines like Wired, Forbes, Time, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, and he’s made regular appearances in television and film. He is a consultant to Clear Sky Recovery.

How did you first hear about ibogaine, and what led you to eventually work with it to the extent that you have?

I was active in these hacker meetings called TAP, which stood for the Technological Assistance Program. It was actually this initiative by Abbie Hoffman in the 60’s, and it was mostly about phone phreaks. Phone phreaking was basically taking control of the phone systems, and there were different things you could do. It gradually transitioned into hacking during the late 70’s, early 80’s, as computers became available.

Anyways, I went to these meetings because I was one of the hacker kids. I knew absolutely nothing about counter-culture politics, what the 60’s were, who the fuck any of these people were at all. They were just like these really old weird people who were at these meetings and they were always smoking a lot of pot, and it was exciting. Through that I was beginning my experimentation with a lot of different mind-altering substances, including heroin.

And that was when I first heard about ibogaine.

I didn’t do it back then because it was impossible to get and it sounded like the textbook definition of snake oil. It’s like this mysterious substance from a far off land that only a very few people have ever done, and it will magically cure any kind of drug addiction that’s ever existed. Um, ok sure.

As years went by, we did this start up called MindVox, which was actually the first internet access provider in New York City. We went online in ’91 and we opened to the public in ’92. And basically it blew up. Everything positive that you can think of was happening in my life. It was like I had successfully turned being a participant in this strange subculture into an extraordinarily successful company that was right at the cusp of this whole explosion called the internet.

My problem was at that point my personal life was kind of falling apart. I fell in love, I got married, and my wife at the time went from being very intense and exciting to being borderline schizophrenic and having psychotic breaks. I was 22 years old at the time. Essentially, my drug use got out of control and I [developed] a very heavy habit. At that point in my life, to be honest, I was extraordinarily grateful to heroin. It was like the superglue that held my entire life together and made it possible to continue. I mean everything was just falling apart and heroin fixed that.

When you first get a habit and start doing heroin all the time, it makes everything in your life perfect. Food is better, sex is better, all of your relationships are better, and nothing bothers you. But it doesn’t last.

So time passes, and the honeymoon ends. Then I started all my different attempts at detoxing. I tried literally everything that was available at the time, and we’re talking about the 90’s at this point. I tried ultra rapid opiate detox, twice. It did not work. I mean it worked in the sense that you wake up and you’re clean, but you’re also sick as fuck. You’re fiending. The only thing in your head is, “I gotta get the hell out of here, go get some dope, and get straight.” And that’s what I did.

I tried a lot of different tapers. I tried methadone to taper down. I tried methadone maintenance. Spread across all the years, I spent probably half a decade on methadone. I was in the very early clinical trials for buprenorphine. All substitution therapies work in the sense that they provide some stability to your life, but none of them actually solve your drug dependence issues.

I was friends with this guy name Fred Gotbetter – who had a cool name but he never did get better. He ultimately died. But at the time, I would be sitting in the shooting gallery with this guy and we’d be banging up. We both had really heavy habits. And then he’d vanish and come back a few days later, and he wouldn’t have a habit. It was like this guy who’d be banging up 5 to 8 bags all at once, he would come back and he’d do a bump and I’d see him get all fucked up. I remember asking, “How are you doing this? What the fuck are you doing to detox?”

He said, “Oh, I’m doing ibogaine.” And basically that was the start of me trying to connect with ibogaine to reset my habit.

So, to make a long story short, I tried to get it. I knew about Howard Lotsof, and I started talking to him. He was no longer able to provide treatments in Panama at that time, and was dealing with a lot of his own health issues. This guy named Bob Sisko ultimately turned me on to Dr. Deborah Mash, who had been granted permission by the FDA to do clinical trials on ibogaine.

I ended up going to Healing Visions on [the island of] Saint Kitt’s, where I met Deborah Mash. I was one of their very first patients when I took ibogaine. There were medical people all around me, and it was the weirdest environment I have ever done a psychedelic drug in. For the first half hour or so I was in withdrawal. It felt like my spine was being smashed in a vice. I would be hot and sweating, and then freezing. I wanted to jump out of my skin. And all of that just kind of faded out. It was like being suspended in this ocean of warm energy. After about 30 to 45 minutes, that’s it, my habit was gone.

And after that I started tripping, so I was kind of busy for a while.

My experience with heroin went from age 14 up to age 30, and taking ibogaine was as close to a miracle as I have ever experienced in my life.

Were you able to kick your habit after just a single experience with ibogaine?

Quite honestly, for me it took 2 experiences. After my first experience I was clean, but as soon as I got to an airport in San Juan, Peurto Rico, I went and copped heroin. When I did that bag, this is a terrible thing to say, but at the time it was fucking awesome. It was like, “Oh yeah, this is why I started using heroin in the first place.” I could really feel my drugs for the first time in a decade.

So after that, I went back for the next round, and I took ibogaine a second time. What was different this time was that I understood what ibogaine could do for me. It could absolutely clean me up. But I still needed to process all this stuff in my head, how I was living, own my shit, and move onwards.

My aftercare plan was to immediately travel to live in an ashram just outside of Bangkok for 3 months. It was a really beautiful experience for me. It was completely different from any drug treatment program I had ever been to. I wasn’t surrounded by people telling me that I was diseased and flawed. I was just welcomed by a bunch of people who were extremely accepting and gave me a lot of unconditional love and support. It’s very hard to find that in the real world – there really was no judgment, there was no shaming you for your drug use.

I got back to the States and was hired by Deborah Mash, and I ended up at the University of Miami’s Department of Neurology.

Is this around the time you developed the low-dose ibogaine protocol for MAPS?

I was working at the University of Miami at the time, but [the protocol] was not associated with them in anyway whatsoever.

The whole microdosing thing started because I was doing underground treatments. I was basically helping out my friends who were strung out. What I noticed with a lot of junkies – and I don’t mean that pejoratively, I was a junkie and I identify with that label – a lot of drug dependent individuals don’t like to trip. They don’t want this whole huge avalanche of emotions and things that they’re supposed to process. They prefer very gradual slow changes.

I first started microdosing myself because any time I felt cravings I would just do a really small dose of ibogaine. I don’t need to do an entire flood dose. I can just do 50mg, I can do 100mg, and you know what? The whole world is suddenly different. I feel good, all the cravings have gone away, and it’s a beautiful day today – why don’t I just go to the gym and not worry about shooting dope? What I discovered is that this worked for people who were actively doing drugs, so you could microdose down somebody’s habit.

Ibogaine potentiates whatever molecules you’re taking, which is where you gotta be careful and take very small doses. And it decreases tolerance. So if you don’t want to take a flood dose, you can take microdoses spread across days or weeks at a time. Your habit will eventually decrease down to nothing, until you literally have the option of just stepping out of your drug dependence.

It’s really hard for me to judge what anyone should be doing with themselves. I don’t believe everyone on earth needs to be clean. There are people who have chronic pain management issues. There are people who just have a tremendous amount of trauma. I’m more coming from a harm reduction/benefit maximization kind of paradigm. Whatever you want to do, here are the tools to make your life better. Microdosing with ibogaine can accomplish that for people who are drug dependent.

At the time I was working for Deborah and I understood the basics – like how do you collect data, how do you do research, how do you document whatever it is that you’re doing? And that was the inception of the protocol. I worked a lot with Hattie Wells who is currently with Amanda Feilding at the Beckley Foundation, and we had one paper published by MAPS back in 2003 and the microdosing one we published in 2005. Publishing the work with MAPS was kind of seminal because that was the first publication about ibogaine microdosing.

Do you think anyone considering microdosing should be subject to the same kind of safety screening as someone who’s going to do a flood dose?

Here’s the thing, I personally have never encountered adverse events from microdosing in myself or anybody that I’ve ever worked with. But that’s not to say it isn’t a valid concern because when you keep microdosing, it essentially builds up in your body. Eventually you’re going to hit a state where it feels like you’re doing speed, at which point you should slow down and give it a rest for a couple of days before doing more of it.

But in my opinion, yes. You should get your liver function checked, you should get a comprehensive metabolic panel test, basic bloodwork, and get an EKG – make sure your heart is okay. I would basically say to take all the same precautions that you would take if you’re going to do a flood dose even though you’re probably not going to have any problems.

I’ve microdosed ibogaine because I want to enjoy my work more that day, or I want to have a good workout, or quite honestly because sex is great on small doses of ibogaine. But you’re not supposed to say that.

We’ve been talking to a lot of people who’ve been involved with the ibogaine movement in different ways, who have differing perspectives on if and how it should be regulated in a medicalized framework. What are your thoughts on this?

Well personally, I’m a libertarian and I tend to believe that if there’s anything on earth that I actually own, it’s the body that my consciousness resides within. It isn’t the government’s business what molecules I choose to attach to my receptors. I don’t want to live in a nanny state, or country, or whatever.

But there’s a dichotomy between what my heart says and what my head says. Coming from my heart, everyone should have the freedom to do whatever substances they feel like they need to experiment with at any point in time, in a safe environment. From the head though, I think that without medicalization, without working within pre-existing regulatory frameworks, as annoying and tangled up as all of that might be, ibogaine is going to get shut down country by country. Instead of being a treatment that’s available for people who need it, it’s going to be driven underground and stay there. The most recent example of this is in Italy, who just banned ibogaine.

On the obverse, you have Dr. Bruno Rasmussen Chaves working with it in Brazil; you’ve got New Zealand, you’ve got Canada. In Canada their response was amazing. They had a problem with an adverse event, so ibogaine got put on some watch lists; then they had another problem with an adverse event, and their response was to make it a prescription medication, which was fucking awesome. So the reality is that now it’s a prescription drug, and if you want to do it in the underground you can go ahead and do that anyways, it’s not like the underground suddenly vanishes.

In countries where ibogaine is legally available, treatment can cost several thousand dollars. Recognizing that drug users sit at the intersections of the most marginalized and disenfranchised populations, how might the regulation of ibogaine impact its accessibility to those who need it the most?

With the scenario right now, you can either afford high-end treatment or you’re on your own in the underground. So what if you’re poor? What are your options?

The whole point with medicalization is, well, you have insurance. If you don’t have very much money, unless Trump destroys it, you have Medicare. If ibogaine is medicalized then insurance is going to pay for treatment. That’s the whole end goal. All these people who don’t have a hope in hell of ever coming up with a few grand to go to a high end clinic, and are otherwise left with information they pick up on the internet, where a typo can kill you, medicalization would make ibogaine available to this entire spectrum of people. So that would be a good thing, in my opinion.

And no it will not be absolutely ideal, I personally don’t want to trip in a medical environment. But having said that, as a medical procedure to end your drug dependence and reboot you, safety would be the primary concern.

Within the context of society as a whole, having worked with ibogaine for roughly twenty years, and the perspective that comes from becoming an old guy whose been alive for nearly half a century at this point and has worked with hundreds of drug dependent individuals, it seems like the rational and reasonable [thing] to do. Make it available to anybody who needs it because obviously what we’ve got right now isn’t working. America is in the midst of the worst drug epidemic in history. As of 2017 the leading cause of death for people under the age of fifty is OD’ing on drugs.

What would you recommend to anyone who might be considering taking ibogaine?

Just do some research. There’s a large mountain of information available. And by research I mean don’t just go to a bunch of treatment sites whose content is mostly generated by marketing departments plagiarizing somebody else’s work which they don’t actually understand. Check out Erowid, check out the old ibogaine MindVox website, check out the non-commercial stuff, check out what ICEERS and GITA have to say.

As with any substance, do the best that you can to educate yourself about what you’re going to take and what to expect. That’s really about it. Ultimately, getting clean is taking responsibility for your own actions. You gotta drive the bus, you can’t just get on the bus for the ride. You’re gonna have to figure out your own recovery, your own path through life, so just get as much information as you can. Everybody’s going to do whatever they’re going to do anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to have as much knowledge as possible before taking action.

Read Part 7: Former underground provider, Dimitri Mugianis, on the regulation of ibogaine

Thomas Kingsley Brown began conducting research on ibogaine treatment for drug dependence in 2009, when he carried out interviews with patients at a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico. In 2010, he began an observational study with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) on the long-term outcomes for individuals who received ibogaine for the treatment of opioid addiction. The study was published in 2017.

Psymposia had the opportunity to speak with Kingsley about his work. Specifically, we explore the methodology and outcomes of the study with MAPS, ibogaine’s mechanism of action, and we pick his brain about the future of ibogaine research and ibogaine’s non-psychoactive analog, 18-MC.

Thanks for talking with us. So, when did you first hear about ibogaine?

I didn’t know about ibogaine before 2008. A friend of mine was working as a counselor at one of the clinics in Baja, California, and she started talking to me about it. She actually was the one who got me into the research, because she knew I was interested in psychedelics. She introduced me to Rick Doblin at Burning Man one year, I think in 2008, and about a year later MAPS was looking for somebody to do their ibogaine study in Mexico. I was well situated here and I had already started doing interviews with people at the clinic in Tijuana. That was Pangea Biomedics, where Clare Wilkins is director. Anyways, I said, “Well, I’m here in San Diego.”  It was a good match, not only for them, but for me.

Could you talk about that study a bit?

We were looking at a treatment for substance abuse, more specifically we were looking at treatment for opioid use disorder. We were looking at opioids in particular for a couple reasons. Opioid addiction seems to be more intractable than pretty much any other kind of addiction, and more people go to treatment for opioids than for any other [substance]. The number one thing that people are going to ibogaine treatment sites for is to treat their opioid addiction.

So we enrolled 30 people in the study, whose primary problem was with an opioid. Roughly half of them were using heroin and the other half were coming in with problematic use of some kind of prescription opioid painkiller, like Oxycontin. We did pre-treatment measures and then did after-treatment by following up in the days after the treatment. I followed up monthly, for 12 months, to see how the treatment was working for them in the long term. That was the basic set up.

And was it effective? What were the outcomes?

We were looking to answer 2 main questions. One is to see if ibogaine is effective for detox, that is the short term efficacy in regards to whether or not it’s reducing withdrawal symtpoms. We used the SOWS measure, which is a scale of subjective opioid withdrawal symptoms, before treatment and after treatment to see if there was an effect after ibogaine was administered. We looked at 1 month following treatment, and then we followed up at later time points. The second question is, is it effective for reduction in drug use and other associated problem narratives for 12 months after treatment? We found that yes, it’s effective for both detox and reduction in drug use for 12 months.

We found at 1 month that there was a strong effect in terms of drug use severity. We were using what we call the addiction severity index. There’s about 7 different problem areas, including drug use severity. Areas where we found that it had increased were treatment effects in family and social status, and also in legal status. Legal status is asking if you’re in trouble with the law, family/social status is asking how well you get along with people in your life that matter to you. We saw a good treatment effect at 1 month in all 3 of those areas – drug use severity, family/social status, and legal status.

We looked at the time after 1 month and found that the treatment effect was still significant. The scores in those areas were all significantly increased throughout the follow up period, although the strength of the treatment effect did drop off after 1 month, particularly drug use severity. Even though they continued to do well throughout the 12-month period, relative to the pretreatment baseline, the effect wasn’t as strong at later time points as it was at 1 month.

That’s interesting. Could follow-up treatments be useful here for maintaining the initial effect of ibogaine treatment?

I think getting another treatment within 3 to 6 months of the initial treatment is useful for a lot of people. It seems to be effective for people when they relapse or just need to have a booster. The animal studies that were done also show that if you have more than 1 treatment, its more likely to be effective. So on the whole I would say, yeah, if you can get multiple treatments – that’s a good idea.

Another thing that’s also effective is following up with smaller dosages, but there isn’t any research that’s been done with people to see how often that’s necessary.

Was there anybody in the study who it didn’t work for at all?

That’s a good question. Out of the 30 people in the study, there were 3 whose SOWS scores actually increased from pre-treatment to post-treatment. You might say, “Oh, this didn’t work for them.” But those 3 people, their baseline SOWS scores were among the lowest, and they had the least severe withdrawal symptoms going into treatment. It also could be that they were coming off of longer acting opioids like methadone, so it’s not clear what’s going on there.

Everyone in the study stopped using for at least 3 days to a week. There were 15 people in the study who at 1 month had not used any opioids at all. And everybody reduced the amount and the frequency of their opioid use in the months following treatment. So from that perspective I’d say it worked for everybody but it really depends on what you define as efficacy in this case. Some people might say if you relapse at all then it didn’t work. But they did actually stop using for a while, and when they go back to using, the dosage they’re using is a lot less than it was before they were treated. So all in all, I’d say it works for everybody – it’s just a matter of how well it works for them.

What are the potential implications of this study for the future of ibogaine research?

Well, I think the implications are that the Mexico and New Zealand studies are both showing that ibogaine is effective for detox, and for allowing people to significantly reduce their use of opiods. So that’s a big deal all by itself.

In the Mexico study, at least in some ways, it was sort of a worst-case scenario for giving ibogaine. You’re giving somebody this treatment, and then typically 5 to 7 days after, they’re going back home. This is not what you usually want to do if you’re trying to get somebody off of opioids, is put them right back in the context they were using in on a regular basis without any follow up at all. So even though we got good results there wasn’t any follow up.  I think one thing that we should be looking at is the potential impact of any follow up care, whether it’s a second or third ibogaine treatment following up with microdosing, psychotherapy, any kind of follow up care. What would be the impact of that?

There’s 2 parts to this next question. Firstly, what do we know about ibogaine’s mechanism of action? Secondly, do you think ibogaine’s psychedelic effects play a role in its ability to interrupt addiction, or is it strictly pharmacological?

So to answer the first question, we know a lot about the pharmacology of ibogaine. We know enough to be sure that it doesn’t act in the same way as conventional treatments. It’s not an opioid agonist like methadone or buprenorphine. We also know that it’s acting at many different receptor sites and doesn’t have a strong affinity for any one receptor type. So it’s kind of a dirty molecule in that respect, that it doesn’t really have a clean profile in its activity in different receptors.

That said, we don’t know what its mechanism of action is at the pharmacological level. We don’t know why it’s reducing withdrawal symptoms or why it potentiates the activity of opioids. We don’t know why it reduces cravings either. There aren’t any real clear answers there. So that’s the big question, how is it working? I think there must be some kind of pharmacological mechanism, at least with the reduction in withdrawal symptoms. I just don’t imagine the psychedelic effect having any direct impact on withdrawal symptoms. We know it’s not a placebo effect because placebos aren’t effective for opioid withdrawal. So there’s some kind of underlying biochemical effect that hasn’t been elucidated yet.

As far as reducing people’s use of opioids in the long term, I think there must be some kind of impact from the psychedelic effect. The experiences people have with ibogaine, and the insights they get, must have some kind of effect – but that’s something that hasn’t really been studied very much. There’s a bit of data in our study that seems to indicate some kind of correlation between positive treatment outcomes and the intensity of the effect, in terms of psycho-spiritual impact. But the main reason I think there’s some kind of impact from the psychedelic effect is that people tell me. They have regrets about the way they’re living their life, they have regrets about their relationships with other people in their lives, they see the impact of their behavior and they see where they’re heading if they continue on their current path. It seems like there must be some effect when people have these powerful transformative experiences. That’s my sense of it, anyway.

That’s actually a good segway into the next question. Could you explain what 18-MC is?

18-MC is a synthetic congener to ibogaine, so it’s structurally related. It’s basically using the same chemical backbone that ibogaine has, the same basic ring structure -but its got some different functional groups on it. It’s also been tested in animal studies in the same ways that ibogaine has, and has been shown to be effective in the same sort of ways, reducing withdrawal-like symptoms in animals and also reducing the self administration of drugs.

So it seems to be effective in animal models, but it’s thought that it’s probably not psychoactive. That’s a question that still hasn’t been answered, to my knowledge. I don’t know of anybody who’s ingested 18-MC to be able to say whether or not there’s some kind of psychoactivity. It’s quite possible that there could be, but we don’t know for sure. The company that got a grant to do human studies with 18-MC haven’t released anything about it. I don’t know if they’ve actually carried out the study.

Are there any major barriers to further research with ibogaine?

It’s kind of a complicated answer, but essentially ibogaine is made illegal because it’s psychoactive. So that’s obviously a big barrier to doing research in the US. We’re not allowed to do research on it without getting permission, which hasn’t been granted. There’s also the fact that there are risks associated with ibogaine usage. The estimates are that around 1 in 300 or 400 people will die. That’s actually cited by the FDA as the main reason why they won’t consider taking it off schedule 1.

It’s a legitimate concern, but I think it’s overblown. The risks of not treating people in the midst of this opioid crisis are much greater than the risks of administering ibogaine, especially when you can have medical personnel present during the treatment. There’s no reason not to make ibogaine treatments accessible and available to people in this country. They probably aren’t taking it off schedule 1 anytime soon, maybe ever – but there are states, such as New York and Vermont, looking into possibly allowing its use. They’ve both introduced some legislative efforts attempting to allow ibogaine treatment and research. So maybe at a state level those kinds of changes can be made, and we can work around the federal regulations.

That’d be interesting to see, if different states started to challenge the federal laws on that. It’s one thing to go after medical marijuana; you know the federal government can go into Oakland and shut down a dispensary, but it’d be another thing entirely to try to stop people from getting ibogaine treatments when you have hundreds of people dying from overdoses everyday.

Is there anything you’d recommend for people who’re interested in getting involved with psychedelic research?

For someone who’s interested in psychedelic research, I would say choose a program that will allow you to follow that interest. My advice is to find a graduate program where you can work with somebody who is, if not doing something directly related to what you want to do, at least somebody who you can talk with freely about these substances.

The main thing is don’t give up. If you say, “I’m gonna study psychedelics,” don’t let anybody else tell you that shouldn’t do it.

Read Part 6: Patrick Kroupa, hacker and ex-heroin ‘junkie’, on microdosing and the medicalization of ibogaine

At the European Ibogaine Forum, we got the chance to learn from German couple Süster Strubelt and Uwe Maas about their experiences in Gabon undergoing initiation into Bwiti, a diverse Gabonese spiritual discipline that uses iboga.

Süster is a clinical psychologist trained in systemic family therapy and hypnotherapy. She wrote her MA thesis on iboga healing in Gabon and was initiated into the Mabandji women’s cult in 2003.

Both Süster and Uwe have an interest in traditional music and trance states.

During our conversation, we learned about some of the differences between ceremonies for men and women, and Uwe and Süster shared some of their observations about Bwiti with us.

Thanks for taking the time to speak with me. Could you start by bringing us up to speed? How’d you end up in Gabon, and when did you initially hear about iboga?

UWE: I worked in the old Albert Schweitzer hospital, named after a German-French doctor who founded a hospital in the forest in Gabon in 1914. Normally they have two pediatricians in the ward, but one was on leave for a few months and the other was severely sick. So they were desperately looking for someone working in pediatrics who could speak French. I thought this was the chance of my life to do that. This was in 1999.

A few weeks later I was there and I thought, because I was always interested in traditional medicine and traditional music, I want to do music with Gabonese people and I want to learn something about their traditional medicine.

So it took some time until I learned to know my father of initiation, who was called Antoine. He was a traditional practitioner. I watched him doing his work and treating different patients behind his house in the afternoon. So I asked him what he was doing and what it means on a symbolic level.

And he told me, “I will try my best to explain to you, but if you want to understand you have to get initiated.”

I asked him what that means, and he said, “Well, you eat something and you will die and you will be reborn, and nothing will be the same anymore for the rest of your life.”

That was exactly what he told me and that seemed to be a bit shocking because I liked my life as it was, y’know

SÜSTER: And he told you [that] you would hear music differently.

UWE: Yes, he told me that I would see people differently. Exactly what he told me was that I would be able to look inside their head.

Would you say he was right?

UWE: Um, in a way, yes. He told me I would look differently at colors, at nature, at animals, at music. I’m a violinist. I played music together with them and he told me, “Now you’re playing violin just for fun, but afterwards this will be the most serious thing that ever happens.” 

SÜSTER: And then you did initiation.

UWE: Yes. I got initiated into the Missoko cult.

So you’re both initiated into different traditions?

UWE: Yes. 

SÜSTER: They have different cults in the same village in the Mitsogho tribe. There are different rituals for men and for women. 

UWE: Well at first we thought that this is a male and female thing, meaning it depends on sex or gender or however you define it. In the meantime we were told that there are also different purposes of the initiations.

Are there major differences in the structure of ceremonies between each group?

UWE: Well there are differences between groups, or tribes, and there are differences between cults. There are also differences between individual healers and neighboring villages.

SÜSTER: The men’s cult is 2 or 3 days count where you are taking iboga.

UWE: High dose.

We’ve seen a lot of women’s initiations, but we haven’t seen any really 100% traditional male initiations after mine. So we can share much more about the female initiations. Which is interesting because male initiation is obligatory while female initiation should only be performed if there’s a problem. Nowadays there are men who are not initiated, but they still say that every man should get initiated.

Me, I was eating iboga in fresh strips. [They cut it] right in front of me.

Oh, so right off the live plant?

UWE: Yes, exactly. And I was eating a lot of it. I felt nothing. Then an hour later, an old man came with a second root. I didn’t really understand, so I was eating a lot of the next one. And then maybe something like 2 hours after the ceremony started, suddenly the visions started.

I was supposed to tell them everything I saw. I don’t know if this is obligatory.

I was going out of my body and I felt very clear that my ego was something like an energetic ball, like a basketball. I was floating around over water, underwater, through rooms, meeting people – but as that energetic ball, not as a person anymore. And I had some difficulties because I had no hands, feet, speech, whatever. They told me I should open the doors that I saw; I should get into the water that I was floating over.

In the end I found out that I had to imagine it, or I had to wish it, and it was possible. But that took at least an hour until I understood how I could move, how I could talk to people – that I could spiritually talk to people that I was meeting in my visions. But I was still able to communicate with the initiated people around me, in French. That was easy, I was still aware of the situation.

In the physical environment?

UWE: Yes. I would even say I was over-aware because I had the very clear impression that I could read their minds. During the initiation that was very, very clear.

SÜSTER: In the women’s ceremony you are asked afterwards about what you have seen. And they asked me if I had seen an airplane, and I had actually seen an airplane.

And later on I read that the Mitsogho, in the ethnological literature, see airplanes. This is not a very common iboga vision. So there are really certain things that they want you to see. Then they know you are initiated. The proof that you are initiated is that you have seen certain things.

That’s really interesting, that people experience similar imagery.

SÜSTER: They know that you’re seeing personal things they aren’t aware of, but that you’re also seeing [specific] things. You saw certain landscapes.

UWE: Yes. They found it very important that I saw landscapes with high mountains at the edge. There were a lot of things they found very important that I saw. And the interesting thing was that they were guiding me. And if I didn’t have that guidance I’m very sure that I would have been stuck in many situations.

Would you say at any point you felt frightened or overwhelmed? Did you ever just want it to end?

SÜSTER: In the first night, after having taken a small amount of iboga. The first night I had some fear, yes. I had some negative emotions. And then after taking the flood dose, it was really… no it was not frightening.

I had taken ayahuasca before and I found it much more difficult. Really, I found ibogaine much smoother than ayahuasca. Also vomiting, it was not a problem. I just vomited and then I got on with my trip. So I was not frightened.

How many times did you dose throughout the whole experience?

SÜSTER: The women’s initiation starts during the first night with the possession trance. If you can’t perform it, you better not eat iboga. At least they say that they wouldn’t give it [to you]. We’ve never seen this because everyone does a possession trance. It’s easy for them to induce it, even in a European person.

Then you take a small dose in the middle of the night. I told you that was a bit frightening for me at first.

And then the day after, in the evening but before dawn, you take the large dose. And this you take more or less in an hour because they feed it in different ways. They take some leaves, they take some root bark. Part of it is a mixture you can roll in balls and eat.

UWE: There’s wild honey in it and different leaves.

SÜSTER: And then you sit down and you have the visions.

UWE: And you don’t drink with it.

SÜSTER: The first night you usually try not to drink for about 6 hours. You don’t rest for a long time. You are sitting for [a few] hours but then they want you to have another possession trance and they bring you outside, and they ask you questions. You have some time to rest and then in the morning you are running around again.

UWE: But I think this might be specific for the Mitsogho tribe, where we were initiated, because the Fang are giving a much higher dose.

SÜSTER: Yes, and then you really can’t move for a day. The Mitsogho tribe are not giving much iboga.

UWE: I think the time that you can’t walk on your own is limited to maybe something like 6 hours or 8 hours, something like that.

SÜSTER: I think the idea is that they’re not giving much iboga but there’s an additional effect because you are dehydrated and you haven’t eaten the whole day, and you are influenced by the music the whole night. We found that moving and dancing is also followed by more visions.

UWE: It’s very consciously done.

SÜSTER: Yeah. Because with the test doses you have no appetite. You don’t eat anything. And you don’t drink and you’re in a trance-state, and then you have the music and lots of movement.

UWE: I didn’t have any water for at least 24 hours.

Wow. Do you think that’s safe?

SÜSTER: We had heard about the dangers of iboga. When we first came to know about iboga we read a lot. For me it was important because I’m not a person who would [normally] be willing to follow a ritual, but I trusted them.

I think they know what they are doing because they [intentionally] avoid certain risks. For instance, you’re not allowed to go to the river to take a bath. This is a kind of heart protection. Jumping into the cold water might not be very good.

We knew that it’s very dangerous to take other medication with iboga, and we saw that they were really controlling this. They forbade it. They said you are not taking ANY other medication when you are taking iboga. So they really know the risks and they’re very rigid.

Do the healers take any iboga with the initiates?

SÜSTER: Yes they do. I think they do it because when they want to dance, it’s better, but it also helps you to understand the initiate, and it keeps the healer stay awake the whole night. It’s a very little dose, maybe about 1/100th of the initiate’s.

Do the Mitsogho take iboga regularly, or in any context outside of initiation?

SÜSTER: They don’t take it regularly.

UWE: Well, they take very small amounts in ceremonies.

SÜSTER: As far as I remember, only the people who were dancing took iboga. I think in the women’s ceremony it’s the women who are really dancing, and the men are sitting around and they are not taking iboga.

UWE: Sometimes they are taking it as well.

SÜSTER: Maybe they take it because they just want to, yes. But we have never seen the traditionalists ever taking iboga outside the ceremony.

UWE: We know one man who did it. 

SÜSTER: He was criticized a lot.

UWE: Yes, because he took it every day and they said he was addicted.

Well, they told us that it’s possible to take a second flood dose, what they would call second initiation, if there’s a profound change in your life. They were giving me the example of a fatal car accident in your [immediate] family. That would be a reason to do another initiation. 

SÜSTER: Or if you want to enter another cult. If you’re a man and you want to enter into the women’s cult because you want to take part in ceremonies or you want to play the instrument there, then you can.

Have you found that the cultural landscape has changed much since you first started going to Gabon? 

UWE: Oh, yes.

SÜSTER: Many people who were living in the villages have left. Now it’s mostly older people, some young women who haven’t found work, and children. Many men are working outside [the villages]. 

UWE: When we arrived in Gabon they were doing at least 1 ritual per month, even in the low season. Nowadays they have no more rituals in that particular village.

I’ve heard a lot of people say that as Gabon has become increasingly more Christian, iboga has been stigmatized and associated with witchcraft. Have you noticed this at all?

SÜSTER: Not really.

UWE: But when? During European colonialism it’s clear that iboga was demonized.

SÜSTER: But it’s not the government persecuting, nowadays. If you don’t want to go to a church and if you want to join an iboga cult, it’s open. You can see them from the road. They don’t hide before the government. But the churches, they are always making politics against traditional healing. 

UWE: I would say it’s the opposite. Wherever you go in Gabon, even in a church, if you tell them you’re initiated then you’re really seen as someone.

SÜSTER: I think there might be individual people who are really being influenced by the church, and they’re not going to iboga ceremonies anymore. Personally we know some women who don’t like to go to iboga ceremonies because it costs them a lot of money, so they often choose to go to the Catholic church.

Have you noticed any impact on the supply or availability of iboga?

SÜSTER: No, absolutely not. The healers we know are growing iboga behind their house. They have their own trees. Sometimes they go into the bush and bring back some root. Iboga supply is no problem. It’s not really calculated in the price of an initiation ceremony because it’s just something you get out of the bush.

To wrap up, how has iboga had an impact on your own life?

SÜSTER: For me it’s very special because I had no [previous] experience with psychedelics. I had no experience with spiritual literature at all. I was more of a materialistic thinking person. I wasn’t going to church. This changed dramatically afterwards. I went to church for a while, although I don’t anymore. I’m believing in a life after death, and I’d consider myself a spiritual person, which was not the case before.

And there are other changes. I’m hearing music very differently. I’m generally enjoying music more. It’s so very important for me. So for me it was a very phenomenal change. 

But I also had some problems. I lost my job. I thought it was because I had changed on some level I didn’t really recognize, but others saw it. My relationship is better, well it’s continued. We have a very strong relationship.

UWE: Everything they told me before turned out to be right. Being an active musician for most of my life, I couldn’t imagine that the way I see music could profoundly change, but it did. Sound, as opposed to melodies, mean so much more to me now. I developed a strong emotional relationship to certain colors, such as a bright blue or a warm orange. My relationship with nature, namely specific plants, animals and rocks, became much more profound.

In relation to people, I completely lost the fear that they could misunderstand me. It’s difficult to explain. It’s my deep belief that they themselves can read my mind. The other way round, I care much less about what they may think about me. And there is a belief in the spiritual world that I already had before, but turned out to be much stronger afterwards.

Interestingly, quite similar changes have been noticed in many people who’ve had what I would call a “natural” near-death-experience, following a heart attack or difficulties during surgery. There must be somatic processes in these situations that have the capacity to connect us not only to the beyond, but also to essential aspects of the world we’re living in. I personally think that maybe the most important therapeutic value of iboga is to bring us nearer to that feeling of “unity” which is often provoked by near-death-experiences, and which is the aim of so many spiritual practices.

This is exactly what I experienced. I got more close to it all.

Read Part 3: How has Western influence changed the traditional use of iboga in Gabon? We talked to a French guy living there.

My addiction started when I was 13, with prescription medications. I knew it was over the very first time I took an opiate. It was set, that this was going to be my addiction for a long time.”

There’s a brief silence as the woman sitting across from me takes a moment to swallow the lump in her throat. Her name is Amy. She’s a nurse from Canada, and she’s spent the majority of her life addicted to opioids.

“It developed into a more serious addiction over time, to the point where I was using them intravenously, when I became a nurse and had access to injectable medications. So my use got really, really out of control.”

We’re sitting amidst a hustle and bustle of people as they come and go through the hotel lobby. The sound of excited chatter dominates the space, and despite the heavy undertones of our conversation, you can feel the electricity in the room.

This is the setting for the European Ibogaine Forum, a small conference that took place in Vienna, Austria this past September. The event attracted an unlikely crowd of people from all walks of life. Doctors, researchers, drug users, and hippies from around the world came together for their shared interest in an obscure hallucinogenic alkaloid – ibogaine.

Sourced from the African shrub Tabernanthe iboga, or simply iboga, ibogaine is reputed to have the profound ability to eliminate opioid cravings and withdrawals. And unlike other psychedelics, ibogaine can be fatal. As such, it presents unique challenges in how we approach drug policy and addiction.

Iboga has a long history of use in west-central Africa. Consumption of the root bark, specifically, is intimately tied to the ancient spiritual discipline known as Bwiti, which is believed to have originated with the Babongo people in the Southern forests of Gabon. It’s said that the Babongo shared their knowledge of iboga with a migrant Bantu tribe that settled nearby, the Mitsogho.

Bwiti continued to evolve as the Mitsogho people came into contact with other tribes, such as the Fang, and now exists in the form of many diverse and interconnected syncretic belief systems that use iboga as part of their practice. In these contexts, iboga is typically ingested during initiatory rites of passage, for healing, and to make contact with ancestors.

Iboga and its constituents remained relatively unknown in the West until recent years. Ibogaine was first isolated in 1901, and in 1939 it was marketed in France under the brand name Lambarène for the treatment of depression and fatigue. It wasn’t until 1962, on the streets of the Lower East Side in New York City, that the drug would attract any serious international attention.

Howard Lotsof was only 19 years old when he first tried ibogaine. He was addicted to heroin and willfully experimenting with any substance he could get his hands on. The story goes that he was given ibogaine by a friend of his, who happened to be a chemist. Howard had never heard anything about the strange compound, and he chose to ingest it for no reason other than curiosity. Yet curiously enough, by the time the experience was over, he realized he no longer had any cravings for heroin whatsoever.

He went on to share the drug with his friends, who were also addicted to heroin, and it seemed to have the same miraculous effect on them. From that point on, Howard became a kind of evangelist for the addiction-interrupting potential of ibogaine. Between 1985 and 1992 he was awarded numerous patents for utilizing ibogaine as a rapid method for the interruption of various addictions, and he provided pilot data for a research program that eventually resulted in an FDA-approved Phase I clinical trial for ibogaine in the treatment of addiction.

At the same time, Lotsof also offered underground treatments and provided ibogaine for the Junkie Bond, an advocacy group for drug users. This work served as the foundation for the users-helping-users movement, a treatment modality rooted in harm reduction and self-care.

Howard died in 2010. Ultimately, his crusade involved a small army of devoted individuals, some of whom are featured in this series. Howard’s journey laid the groundwork for a movement that’s been steadily growing since his fateful experiment in 1962. Since his death there has been a tremendous resurgence of interest in psychedelics, and drug-related overdoses have continued to rise at exponential rates around the world. In fact, overdose is now the number 1 leading cause of death in Americans under 50. Given these circumstances, perhaps it’s inevitable that the ibogaine movement has grown so significantly since Lotsof’s passing.

Though still relatively obscure, the premise that ibogaine can be used for the treatment of addiction is becoming more accepted. Since 2010 there have been over 200 scientific papers about ibogaine published in academic journals, and legislation to legalize it for medical use has been introduced in states like Vermont. With all of this attention, one might wonder why it’s still so unheard of.

Ibogaine is unlike other psychedelics in that it is potentially cardiotoxic and physically dangerous. The National Institute on Drug Abuse abandoned clinical trials with the drug due to safety concerns spurred by neurotoxicity observed in rat trials (however, the doses were substantially larger than equivalent doses that would be given to humans). Ibogaine is also classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic in the United States, and thus individuals seeking to use it must either find it through the black market or travel to foreign clinics in countries where it is not strictly prohibited.

“Because of the unregulated nature of ibogaine treatments, people are playing a lottery as to what kinds of results they will get,” says Hattie Wells of the Beckley Foundation. “Ibogaine clinics range from very good to pretty dangerous, and I wouldn’t recommend people take it without experienced medical supervision and a proper post-treatment program of support in place.”

That it elicits powerful visionary experiences lasting for up to 3 days is yet another factor contributing to the lack of acceptance for ibogaine as a legitimate treatment in the medical world.

“There are examples of licensed medications that carry cardiac risks, but none which also exert long lasting ataxia and a psychedelic trip. It’s not what conventional medicine would call very useable,” Hattie explains.

Ibogaine sits at the intersections of numerous social issues, tossed between movements for drug users advocacy, drug policy reform, and psychedelic research like a political hot-potato. Nobody seems to want to touch it, and yet there seems to be no better option in sight.

Amy was one of several people I spoke with at the Ibogaine Forum who had tried conventional treatments, such as methadone maintenance and 12-step programs, with limited or no success. Desperate, she ultimately turned to ibogaine as a last resort.

This conversational series is an exploration of these stories, a comprehensive look at the use of ibogaine as a medical intervention, a religious sacrament, and a source of misinformation and controversy. Opinions about ibogaine seem to vary from one extreme to the other in virtually every context– its efficacy as a treatment for addiction, its safety, and even whether or not it should be regulated at all are contested by advocates and opposition alike.

I found Amy’s story particularly important to include because of how effectively it highlights the nuances of the ibogaine world. For example, it didn’t really work all that well for her, initially.

“I did a lot of research before going to the clinic in Mexico, but it actually was not a very positive experience,” she told me. “I left the clinic in a wheelchair. I couldn’t even walk. I was still having serious withdrawal that lasted for weeks after the ibogaine experience.”

When I first heard about ibogaine, I was given the impression that it’s a straightforward cure for drug addiction, a kind of magic pill that you take once to solve all your problems forever. Most of the information I could find online seemed to follow this same narrative. Yet quite frankly, there’s nothing straightforward about ibogaine at all.

Many advocates are cautious of how ibogaine may be integrated into a medicalized pharmaceutical framework, with access to it overseen by regulatory agencies with little accountability. Some voices have expressed concerns about the long-term sustainability of international demand for ibogaine, claiming that iboga is becoming scarce due to unsustainable overharvesting. Others believe these claims are politically and economically motivated.

Over the next month, Psymposia will be releasing a series of interviews and conversations featuring key figures in the ibogaine movement. Our goal is to explore diverse, and often conflicting, perspectives on the relevant issues. We spoke with clinical researchers and facilitators, underground providers, activists, policy workers, and of course, individuals who have taken ibogaine for medical, spiritual, and recreational purposes.

Amy did eventually get through withdrawal and her cravings disappeared, temporarily. Her exposure to ibogaine provided a valuable window of opportunity for her to begin making the changes necessary for her recovery.

“I had some serious trauma in my life prior to taking that ibogaine dose, and the experience helped me resolve that trauma in a way I hadn’t been able to with years of counseling. I walked out thinking, once my withdrawal was completely over with and I realized my cravings were gone, ‘This is pretty amazing.’”

The political stigma attached to ibogaine is so strong that I had to agree not to use Amy’s real name in anything published by Psymposia. Amy could lose her job and see the end of her career as a nurse if her employers were to learn that she had ever used ibogaine, despite the fact that it’s a legally prescribed medication in her country.

Like ibogaine itself, there’s much more to Amy’s story than what’s presented here. As we dive into the complexities of the ibogaine world, we’ll revisit Amy on her path to recovery. For now, we’ll start by taking a look at the cultures that have used iboga the longest. Our exploration begins in the heart of the equatorial rainforests of west-central Africa, specifically, in Gabon.

As the series evolves, Psymposia hopes to pose challenging questions that encourage us to evaluate the dominant models of addiction treatment in the United States and abroad, our engagement with plant medicines as Westerners, and the very foundations of the regulatory model that determines what is ‘medicine’ and what is not.

Read Part 2: Taking Iboga with the People of Gabon

LLegalization of ‘Magic Mushrooms’ Might be Just Around the Corner” was one of several headlines that recently created waves on social media. And although it’s not entirely true that psychedelic mushrooms are likely to be legalized and regulated like cannabis or alcohol any time soon, consuming them may actually be legal, in certain contexts, in the near future.

Sheri and Tom Eckert of the Oregon Psilocybin Society have been drafting a ballot initiative in Oregon that would allow individuals to take psilocybin in supervised settings. If the public votes in favor of the ballot this could lay a groundwork for an emerging mental health paradigm that recognizes the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs. And that’s a big deal.

Sheri and Tom were generous enough to take some time to talk with us about the ballot initiative. We had a lot of questions about the content of the proposal, the process of drafting it, and a number of other things that you may be wondering yourself.

So to start off, can you describe your background a bit?

TOM: Sheri and I own and operate a private counseling practice called Innerwork, which we’ve been running here in Portland for about 4 years. We also run a domestic violence program, where we work with male offenders. That’s tough work, but we enjoy it because we have those guys for a good stretch of time and we see a lot of change.

What is the Oregon Psilocybin Society?

TOM: The Oregon Psilocybin Society, OPS as we like to call it, is an evolving coalition of individuals and existing networks of folks who are interested in supporting and promoting the idea of psilocybin services… and we’ll talk about what that means. Basically OPS is about promoting the science, the safety, and the benefits—as well as the risks—of supervised psilocybin use. The second part of the OPS mission is to advance the Psilocybin Service Initiative of Oregon, a ballot initiative measure which we aim to put on the Oregon ballot in 2020.

So, when we talk about psilocybin services, we’re basically talking about a service framework that takes its cues from the research and attempts to follow best practice standards. These standards include preparation and assessment beforehand, proper psychedelic facilitation, and then integration afterwards. It’s this sequence as a whole that we refer to as psilocybin services. So when we talk about the kind of services we’re looking to promote and eventually legalize in Oregon, we’re talking about a full sequence of supervised sessions.

SHERI: Which, by the way, is not something that OPS does right now. We don’t facilitate sessions or anything of that nature. We get a lot of interest and inquiries in that regard, but at the current stage we are simply a coalition of people looking to legalize this type of therapy.

Going into a bit of detail about the process, what would it look like for someone who wants to be a facilitator or a cultivator?

TOM: As far as how we wrote the measure, there would be training and certifications for all aspects of the new “industry” that would come out of this. We’ve written the language of the measure and we’re waiting on a final draft from the Legislative Counsel in Salem, which they’ve promised by November 22nd.

It basically breaks down into 3 parts, all regulated by a “Psilocybin Service Program” [that would be] created within the Oregon government. One part defines and regulates service centers, where you would access psilocybin services. Another part defines and regulates training centers, which is where you’d be trained and certified to become a facilitator. And then production centers, where psilocybin products would be developed and whatnot.

The Program—the regulatory body—along with service centers and product centers, would all access an online platform to track the movement of psilocybin between facilities, track inventory, the rendering of services, and things of that nature. The psilocybin itself would always be tied to a licensed facility. In other words, if you were a facilitator you wouldn’t have psilocybin at home that you would take from place to place.

With regard to becoming a facilitator of psilocybin services, you’d need to complete an approved training program and get certified. The Advisory Board would compile approved practice standards, so training programs would be required to base their curriculums on agreed-upon standards.

SHERI: To sum it up, as he’s saying, you apply to become a facilitator, or you apply to become a service center, or you apply to become a product center—and all of this would be regulated, tracked, and monitored under a particular department within the state of Oregon.

TOM: Yes, and…back to becoming a facilitator…we want to open up certification channels to anyone with the heart, disposition, and discipline to do this kind of work. We’re trying not to medicalize it and make it a clinical-only type thing.

SHERI: The initiative isn’t just for people who are struggling with depression and anxiety, and things like that. If you’re over 21 and you’re medically cleared, and simply want to explore your own mind and your own consciousness through these kinds of services, you can do it under this measure.

You mentioned that you’re waiting on a final draft from the Legislative Counsel and I’m curious. What has it been like being involved in that legal process? Have there been any challenges specific to working with the Counsel? What’s the reception been from people who are involved with the legal system?

TOM: It’s been pretty smooth working with the Legislative Counsel. We didn’t know exactly what to expect. The Counsel is a nonpartisan group of lawyers that draft bills for Congress, and they’re also charged to work with ballot initiatives when they’re presented with signatures and whatnot. We had to do a few things to get in the door, but now that we are, we have a good working relationship with them. We’re assigned 2 lawyers—they’re enthusiastic and intelligent and we have good meetings, so we feel confident that we’ll get the language where we want it.

SHERI: They’ve clarified some things that we need to focus on. They’ve been very helpful; I can’t say anything negative at all.

That’s awesome.

TOM: Once we get that full draft we’ll probably take it to a few other groups and lawyers and things like that just to get more feedback, but that’s where we’re at right now.

One thing I remember reading is that the ballot itself wouldn’t actually be voted on until 2020—so you can’t start collecting signatures until a year before then, correct?

SHERI: Actually, we’ve since learned that, if we have all our ducks in a row, we can start collecting signatures in July of 2018… next year! So that’s pretty exciting and motivating.

Does that affect when the ballot will be voted on?

SHERI: Nope, voting will still take place in 2020—it just gives us more time to collect signatures.

So what else are you currently working on to prepare for that moment?

TOM: The first part of the mission is to raise awareness in Oregon. To that end we’re doing more events, we’re talking around town, we’re going to festivals, we’re going to conferences here in Oregon, and we’ve got more planned. So that’s been an enjoyable part for us, getting out there and talking to people about this.

SHERI: It takes a lot of energy and effort, because we really want to educate the Oregon citizenry so that they understand the plan behind the measure, so that we can reduce that stigma that’s attached to it.

TOM: Part of that is going to different cities, doing events, and developing groups. That’s something we’re really getting into now. We get a lot of feedback and emails from people around the state. Motivated people. People that are really excited about it. So now we’re trying to shape that energy, give it form, give it a strong, unified voice.

SHERI: The idea is not only to educate people around the state, but to prepare them for when it comes time to canvass… preparing people with real talking points so that they’re equipped to handle any conversation that might come up with someone who’s not quite sure what the ballot measure is all about.

Has it been mostly just the two of you who’ve been laying the groundwork for this?

TOM: It’s been the two of us at the core. Obviously we’ve had to get all this rolling so we’ve done a lot of work together. But we’ve developed a great inner circle, and lots of new volunteers are coming on board. We’re going to need everybody.

SHERI: We’re working towards establishing a board that would collaborate with us and work towards the overall objective.

TOM: It’s all going to get more formal as we move into fundraising, I would say.

SHERI: I think so.

TOM: We need momentum, and that means fundraising. And we’re just starting down that path.

What would fundraising look like? Would you be able to get a grant or would it mostly be crowd sourcing from groups or individual donors?

SHERI: I think all of the above.

TOM: Yeah. One thing that’s on our radar is doing fundraising dinners that engage individual donors, as well as leaders and groups, that might be interested. And just have them come and have a nice dinner, and help them get a better understanding of what we’re doing.

SHERI: There’s a lot of challenges to fundraising. But one of the beautiful things about raising funds for this particular agenda is that we don’t have to seek out only people in Oregon. We can reach out to the global community, which has a really great interest in psilocybin.

Why psilocybin specifically, as opposed to other psychedelics? Has it had a significant impact on your own lives?

TOM: I think, like a lot of people, we’ve had some formative or interesting experiences with psilocybin in the past. However, why psilocybin specifically? I think all the psychedelics are fascinating and there’s a lot of potential in all of them. Psilocybin has some particularly useful attributes. It’s manageable, it’s a shorter experience than, say, LSD. Its…

SHERI: Natural.

TOM: It’s easier on the body than, say, ayahuasca.

SHERI: Its definitely much more researched at this point than some of the other psychedelics. In terms of the clinical studies and the other work that’s being done to show the efficacy of psilocybin in individuals with particular dispositions, there’s a lot of good research.

TOM: So that lends credence to the movement.

SHERI: And of course it’s not addictive. It’s also…

TOM: Identified as the safest.

SHERI: One of the safest recreational drugs that you can utilize. When you take all of that into consideration, I think for us the big draw to psilocybin wasn’t just personal experience, but it was that it has a successful track record.

TOM: You might run into a little anxiety, like you might develop with all of the psychedelics while you’re on the trip, but that’s very manageable and a time limited thing. Psychedelics are fascinating, psilocybin is fascinating—but of course it’s the research, really, that makes it clear that this is something to get behind and take action on.

Have you thought about an ideal recommended dosage? Is there a cap—no pun intended—on how much someone could take?

TOM: I don’t think so, but when you write an initiative you don’t have to answer every detailed question like that. What you need to do is create a board that’s going to figure out what makes good sense in terms of training facilitators and whatnot.

SHERI: Best practices, and all of these details, will be defined by the Board. The Board will consist of experts who really understand psilocybin, people, the human psyche, and how all of this fits together.

I know you already touched on some of the risks, but what would you say to someone who might respond to this ballot with skepticism?

TOM: Well the main point is to really look at what this initiative is about. It’s about supervised services in which all those kind of issues, many of which are overblown, all of those risks potentially disappear when you do this in a supportive, supervised setting with trained and certified facilitators in a contained environment.

SHERI: We don’t have to lean on just our own personal opinions. We have the science and the facts to support the measure. And I think that’s really the comeback to someone who comes at you with a fear-based idea. If you can help them to see that science proves the safety, the science proves the efficacy, then it’s not just a message from us.

TOM: It’s Johns Hopkins, its UCLA, its NYU, y’know? That is where we’d go with it for sure.

SHERI: And I think it’s also important to really emphasize the fact that we’re not looking to legalize psilocybin so that anybody can just grow it, possess it, things of that nature. That’s not the intent of this measure. The intention is that it will be regulated; there will be supervision around it. Its not like marijuana or alcohol.

TOM: I think these services are so important because if you look at the epidemics in our society, epidemics that have a human toll and also drag on the economy—things like depression, alcoholism, nicotine addiction, and all the health issues tied to that—psilocybin services address these issues in a novel and effective way. And it’s unprecedented how effective, at least in the early research stages. So this is a big deal.

SHERI: It will have an impact, we’re hoping, not only on the human experience, but an economic impact on the state because, as Tom shared, mental health issues are an epidemic in our country. Oregon is actually ranked pretty high in regard to the number of people who are struggling with depression and anxiety.

TOM: From that angle there’s tremendous opportunity to make a real impact. It’s transformative. The experience is transformative and the potential for policy reform is transformative, and just what it represents I think is potentially transformative.

At this point do you know if this is something that would only be available for residents of Oregon, or could people come from anywhere?

TOM: We would like it to be the latter.

SHERI: There would be a process to access these services, which would happen here in Oregon. I don’t see why it would matter if you’re a resident. It matters mostly that you’re physically and mentally healthy to the degree that you need to be to enter the experience safely.

So is the current draft of the ballot accessible for the public to view online?

TOM: Not yet. We have a short summary on our website which gives the basic overview. When we get the final draft we will release it.

Lastly, what would you recommend to someone who wants to get involved?

SHERI: Well there’s the opportunity to donate to us, and that’s on our website. There’s the opportunity to make contact with us; we’d be glad to speak with anyone who wants to know how they can participate. If you live in Oregon, we’ll be posting volunteer luncheons and meetings. We have need for creative content, fundraising and canvassing expertise, people who might be interested in starting or participating in pod groups around the state, or folks that just want to help in any way they can.

TOM: It helps when people tell us what they like to do and what they can do, as opposed to asking, “What can I do?”

SHERI: It’s going to take an army. I have confidence in the people of Oregon to be that army.

Once buried in obscurity, the Amazonian concoction known as ayahuasca has captured the hearts and minds of people around the world, earning for itself a near-mythical reputation among the psychedelic community and exploding in international popularity over the past decade.

[Read the reaction piece: Globalhuasca: Reciprocity and Integration of Indigenous and Scientific Worldviews]

It’s really no surprise that the brew is turning so many heads—as anyone who has had the privilege of experiencing full immersion into the realms that it gives us access to knows that within those strange and ineffable spaces is the capacity for profound growth and discovery, wonder, and healing.

It may seem natural then that something so seemingly magical would attract the attention of people all over the world.

There is certainly no shortage of media exposure—ayahuasca is now frequently featured in movies, TV shows, major magazine articles, and has even been endorsed by celebrities using it for diet and detox programs on reality television.

Those who hear rumors of its miraculous healing abilities, or tales of the mind-bending and ego-shattering journeys that push even the most seasoned of psychedelic explorers to their limits, understandably want to investigate and experience for themselves the enigma that is ayahuasca.

However, many people have raised concerns about the global ayahuasca craze and the consequences that it has for the indigenous cultures that have been using it longest.

They argue that the rise of ayahuasca’s popularity can be attributed to globalization, a process through which interconnection between cultures is accelerated through economic policies that maintain an unequal distribution of power and wealth, thereby introducing ayahuasca (and the cultures that use it) as commodities to be consumed in a global capitalist market.

I am no stranger to the promise that ayahuasca has to offer people from all walks of life. I’ve seen first-hand how this remarkable drink can bring desperately needed healing to those facing loss, trauma, and addiction. It has personally offered me insights that have altered the course of my life in profoundly transformative and indisputably positive ways.

My concerns certainly don’t take away from the meaning that I’ve placed in my encounters. However, if they have truly shown me anything of value at all, it’s that I cannot ignore the hard and unfortunate truth that—regardless of my intentions—my overwhelmingly positive experiences with ayahuasca have been made possible solely because of the social, economic, and ecological exploitation of the Amazon and its people.

The history of ayahuasca use in the Amazon reveals a nuanced and rich history of intercultural exchange that precedes European expansion. Yet, it also tells of the horrific and violent legacy of colonialism that characterizes the region’s interaction with the Western world, and therefore must inform my engagement as a Westerner.

European invasion of the South American continent brought about a number of new social orders, notably the Spanish sistema de castas, a racialized hierarchy that determined class and social worth. This hierarchy colored the violence of European expansion and framed the justification for an era of genocide that claimed an estimated eight million native lives, leaving a lasting impact that shaped the social structure and political landscape of the continent for generations to come.

Many indigenous groups of the Northwest Amazon resisted the extreme violence and exploitation at the hands of colonial settlers by mobilizing their people in large demonstrations of resistance that often took the form of dance festivals, religious rituals, and other acts of cultural preservation (Gearin, 2015). For many of those at the head of these movements, such as the renowned Venancio Kamiko, ayahuasca rituals played a critical role in relaying the importance of an anti-colonial practice that actively resisted exploitation and preserved cultural unity.

The interaction between mestizos, African slaves, and indigenous peoples made necessary by colonization fostered intercultural exchange that gave rise to a number of new languages, belief systems, and traditions.

The use of ayahuasca was among one of many native customs that was adopted by mestizos, giving rise to vegetalismo, a mestizo approach to ayahuasca healing that combines traditional indigenous practices and beliefs with Catholic influences. Vegetalismo is sometimes considered the face of modern ayahuasca traditions in South America, and is one of the models followed by retreats in urban centers such as Iquitos, a unique city in Peru that is often regarded as the epicenter of ayahuasca tourism. The Santo Daime, founded by a black rubber tapper in the 1930s, and the União do Vegetal (UDV), founded in 1961, are well-known examples of modern ayahuasca traditions that grew out of this intercultural exchange.

Ayahuasca has since been spread far beyond its roots in South America and now holds a powerful global presence. By 1953 ethnobotanist Richard Evans Shultes had tracked down ayahuasca in Colombia and shared it with the infamous Beat poets William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, who went on to introduce the tea to Western consumers in their published Yage Letters. Academic interest continued to grow steadily over the following decades, finally exploding with the introduction of the internet which gave the public the means to access and exchange information on an unprecedented scale.

In recent decades, tourism has been sold by development agencies as a way for poor countries to generate income. Unfortunately, the high start-up costs of the industry largely bar local businesses from participating, forcing them to rely on external investments. As a result, power is concentrated in the hands of foreign stakeholders, creating cycles of economic dependency dictated by the demand of outside interests.

The same can be said for the growing number of ayahuasca retreat centers, which attract thousands of tourists each year. These retreats are predominately owned by foreigners who have enough money to invest, often with little or no ties to the community in which they operate (May, 2015). In most cases, positions made available to locals are low-paying, such as cooking and cleaning. Typically, foreigners are hired for the higher paying jobs, such as translators and facilitators (Labate & Cavnar, 2014).

These sort of inequalities, inherent to an industry that prioritizes the comfort of foreign tourists, have far-reaching economic and social impacts that extend well beyond the retreat centers into the very communities in which they occupy.

Many indigenous groups are struggling to preserve their traditions as global interest in ayahuasca grows. Younger generations increasingly adapt modern Western paradigms in order to avoid discrimination, and many communities are seeing a decline in the number of people practicing traditional medicine.

The situation has left many of the remaining healers with no choice but to leave their communities to find work at foreign-owned retreats, creating a cycle of dependency. For some groups, such as the Siona, ayahuasca has become the principal means of engaging with outsiders for resources while continuing to express their cultural identity (Langdon, 2016).

One anthropologist demonstrates that the evolution of their use of ayahuasca can be framed as a strategy for survival, a cultural transfiguration “that has allowed the Siona to survive as a collective group in the face of the violence and the growing economic importance of the region during the last 30 years.” This is made clear by the modification of their traditional ceremonial dress and beadwork, which now reflect patterns and styles popularly recognized as indigenous in the Americas and Europe (Langdon, 2016).

The case of the Siona is but one example of how native communities are often pressured to re-brand their cultural practices for Western consumption, yet many others exist.

One well-known instance is that of the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council (ESC), an American NGO born out of a 2013 Colorado conference surrounding drug policy reform. ESC founder Joshua Wickerham expressed concern over the rapid growth of the ayahuasca tourism industry, which is largely unregulated. Citing “new types of ayahuasca activity, changes in international drug policy, and reports of charlatanism, sexual assault, or even death,” the ESC proposed that the organization would respond by raising awareness and bringing together stakeholders to “develop mechanisms for recognizing ayahuasca retreat centers that adhere to best practices” (ESC 2014).

The organization quickly came under heavy fire from the international ayahuasca community, and in 2014 over 60 expert researchers, NGOs, and activists signed a public statement rejecting the platform of the ESC. Their critique drew attention to the ESC’s alarmist fundraising campaign in which the organization overstated the level of danger inherent to Amazonian ayahuasca ceremonies. The lack of meaningful indigenous representation and the troubling undertones of commercial motive were also key points of the statement. Other critics argued that the policies proposed by the ESC aimed to replace local community control in the Amazon by a form of market regulation linked to the tourist industry.

The incident demonstrates how efforts framed by a global capitalist market and driven by consumer demand can have unforeseen consequences, even despite the best of intentions.

The issue of commodification and misrepresentation is a hot topic in the psychedelic scene, evidenced by the growing trend of for-profit “churches,” retreats, and other questionable capitalistic endeavors taken on by spiritual charlatans around the world. In fact, so many people are trying to capitalize on these practices that entire databases have been created to document their activity.

The problem is so rampant that in 1999 a coalition of Colombian healers known as the Union de Medicos Indigenas Yageceros de la Amazonia Colombiana (UMIYAC) came together for an eight-day gathering to address concerns over the increase of foreign interest in their medicines. The event was attended by representatives from eight tribes. Together they issued the historic Yurayaco Declaration, a public statement that raises a number of issues critical to the globalization of native culture.

Non-indigenous people are finally acknowledging the importance of our wisdom and the value of our medicinal and sacred plants. Many of them profane our culture and our territories by commercializing yagé and other plants; dressing like Indians and acting like charlatans. We see with concern that a new type of tourism is being promoted which deceives the foreigners with so-called “services of Taitas or shamans” in a number of villages of the foothills. Indeed, even some of our own indigenous brothers do not respect the value of our medicine and go around misleading people, selling our symbols in towns and cities.

The declaration goes on:

We denounce those who take our seeds to patent them, to own them…those anthropologists, botanists, business people, doctors and other scientists who are experimenting with yagé and other medicinal and sacred plants without taking into account our ancestral wisdom and our collective intellectual property rights…We declare that yagé and other medicinal plants we use are the patrimony and collective property of the indigenous people. Its use in the name of mankind must be carried out with our participation and we should enjoy any other benefits that derive from its exploitation.

Here the statement is referring to an instance in 1986, when an American bio-prospector named Loren Miller traded two packs of cigarettes for a bottle of ayahuasca, that he then patented with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO). The incident caused outrage, and the patent was eventually revoked in 1999 after a formal request by the Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indigenas de la Cuenca Amazona (COICA), which represents over 400 indigenous groups throughout South America.

Unfortunately, Miller appealed the PTO’s decision to revoke the patent, and, in complete disregard of the wishes of native peoples, it was re-instated in 2001. The patent expired in 2003 and is currently un-renewable due to international law, but the incident is regarded as a heavy symbolic loss, representative of a continued legacy of colonial domination and blatant disregard for indigenous autonomy.

The Yurayaco Declaration laid out a series of concrete demands including legal recognition of indigenous intellectual property rights, repossession of native territories and sacred sites, and active support from non-native peoples who benefit from indigenous knowledge. The document was clear in stating that all people, regardless of race, can benefit from ayahuasca. This last point lends some hopeful possibility to the discussion.

When we consider the countless individuals whose lives have been positively impacted by ayahuasca, and the abundance of biomedical research supporting its success in the treatment of mental health disorders and addiction, it is hard to argue that it has no place in Western society.

How then might we approach our engagement in a way that accounts for the unequal relationships that have provided us access to these experiences, that addresses the complex ways in which cultural identities are impacted by growing interest in ayahuasca?

Many people seek out ayahuasca to find value and meaning in their life. Many of us, myself included, are confronted with a kind of cultural dysmorphia; we feel removed and dissociated from a toxic culture of modernity, and ayahuasca offers hope and authenticity in a society that feels more plastic by the day.

However, after taking a closer look at the mechanisms that make it accessible to us, I am led to believe that our collective engagement with ayahuasca is in fact not authentic at all, but steeped in the same consumerist paradigms that so many of us seek refuge from. With this said, I feel that if it is authenticity we’re looking for, we might have more luck in our own backyards.

The plants used in traditional ayahuasca brews are found in the Amazon, but DMT and harmaline-containing plants happen to grow almost everywhere. In my opinion, ayahuasca analogs provide an ethical and sustainable way to experience an oral DMT trip, offering a hopeful alternative to the current consumerist market model.

For example, the Acacia genus of trees and shrubs are native to many climates and are easy to cultivate, and over eighty different Acacia species are known or suspected to contain DMT. Both the Phalaris genus of grasses and Desmanthus illinoensis are incredibly common sources of DMT, beta-carbolines, and other psychoactive alkaloids—although results are experimental at this stage. The well-known ethnobotanists Jonathan Ott and Keeper Trout have both compiled volumes of literature on the subject of ayahuasca analogs, and an entire community exists of underground researchers who have made it their mission to identify plants that can be used for this purpose most effectively. Many of these species are so widespread that they’re considered weeds in their native habitats, and seeds or live plants can be purchased from online vendors and nurseries at incredibly low cost.

The advent of the internet has provided many new outlets for the sustainable exploration of psychedelic plant medicines. For those whom foraging for wild plants is not an option, online communities such as Share the Seeds (STS) provide a peer-to-peer platform for enthusiasts to freely trade live plants and seeds. Plants traditionally exported for Western ayahuasca drinkers are typically wild-harvested in grossly unsustainable ways, often leaving large swathes of land clear-cut and littered with the remains of uprooted species—killed in order to harvest their inner root bark, which contains the densest concentration of profitable alkaloids. These plant species take decades to grow and are critical not only to the ecosystems in which they are a part, but to the surrounding communities who depend on them for survival. The model provided by STS avoids dependence on these unsustainable markets and the exploitation of indigenous labor, all while creating an opportunity for individuals to directly participate in the preservation of endangered plant species.

Anyone who engages with ayahuasca should be aware of these alternatives. After all, what could be more authentic than cultivating a genuine relationship with the plants we intend to consume by identifying them in our local ecosystems or growing them in our homes?

As the community moves forward in bringing visibility to psychedelic medicine, we must do so in a way that gives back to those from which we’ve taken so much. Outside of seeking sustainable alternatives, ordinary people who have a stake in ayahuasca’s globalization can be proactive by engaging with their community to ensure that its use is protected under the law.

Bringing to mind the devastating impact that black-market demand for cocaine has had on the communities of coca farmers, and as court cases and legal disputes surrounding ayahuasca grow in number, it’s critical that we recognize how the nature of ayahuasca’s assimilation into Western culture has far-reaching implications for its home in the Amazon. Organizing to ensure that the use of ayahuasca is legally protected is a concrete and tangible way for anyone to engage in real world harm reduction that actually makes a difference in our communities.

Where does this leave us?

Right now, water protectors at Standing Rock are being forcibly removed from their land through militarized police raids. Right now, the Navajo continue to drink radioactive water contaminated by mining companies, and right now nearly 30% of indigenous people in this country are living in poverty.

For those of us who have benefited from ayahuasca, at what point will we call on our transformative experiences to cultivate meaningful change in our society? How can we claim that we have learned anything of value from these experiences if they don’t compel us to engage with the world we live in and those who we share it with? Beyond the world of think-pieces, social media, and NGOs, we need to ask ourselves what our engagement actually looks like and think critically about what it means when we fail to act.

Psychedelics have shown me some hard truths. I believe, fiercely, that they are some of the most powerful tools available to us for deconstructing the harmful patterns of behavior that make exploitation possible. I’m left feeling discouraged that the psychedelic movement has largely failed in confronting the difficult truths that characterize our position of privilege as a movement. Many of us are well-meaning in our engagement with plant medicines, but we cannot disregard the real-world impact that our actions inevitably have, regardless of intent.

Dennis McKenna once suggested that ayahuasca can be thought of as a “gentle emissary,” that it has been consciously making itself known throughout the world in order to spark the radical shift in global consciousness so desperately needed in our collapsing society. While I don’t necessarily disagree with the sentiment, my hope in writing this article is to challenge this narrative.

By examining the means through which ayahuasca has become a global commodity, it is clear to me that its rise to popularity can be seen as a phenomenon that has had undoubtedly negative, although unintended, consequences.

Drinking ayahuasca might make us more aware of the interconnections that make up our world, but unless we act on our compassion and use these states of mind to actively analyze our own engagement through a critical lens, the trend only furthers the colonialist legacies that many of us so desperately want to transform.