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Ibogainesville: An Emerging Therapeutic Community About No-thing

If you were to think of Gainesville, Florida, if you knew about it at all, you'd conjure up a sleepy north central Florida town-the sprawling, scenic home for tens of thousands of University of Florida students, full of lakes, churches and warm, easy living.

If you were to look more closely at what's going on underneath the surface, though, you'd find a small, underground community of a few dozen students and professionals who are utilizing a variety of Eastern and Western modalities to conquer abusive personal and pharmacological relationships. This is their first step on a path towards personal growth, and, ideally, transcendence of the suffering found in the concept of self and ego.

The root, both figuratively and literally, of this small miracle down South is ibogaine, a controversial drug derivative of an African rain forest shrub. Despite a lack of support from both the federal drug bureaucracies of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the mainstream of the drug policy reform movement, ibogaine has earned a reputation as a safe and effective method of interrupting drug addiction. Unfortunately, its status as a Schedule I drug ensures that the research to prove this to the satisfaction of the medical establishment and allow its legal use in the U.S. remains a dream to its advocates.

Eric Taub, a Gainesville resident, has been administering ibogaine therapy offshore since 1991. He's probably the most experienced ibogaine therapist in practice, having over 450 sessions with people seeking answers to the source of their addictions, as well as those in search of spiritual and psychological growth.

Ibogaine is well known for its pharmacological effects; it acts on multiple neurotransmitter sites and systems. But as Sue Berger, a transpersonal psychologist in Gainesville who works closely with Taub explained, the magic isn't in the neurochemical processes sparked by ibogaine. Nor is it in the often traumatic, searingly personal memories unearthed in the 24 to 36 hour experience.

Instead, the opening ibogaine offers is a breakdown of the ego structures that have entwined themselves with addictive and abusive relationships, and a window of opportunity to the change the behavioral patterns the ego has constructed to defend itself.

This has been one of the central problems in maximizing ibogaine's potential. Aftercare is all too often an afterthought, with the opportunity to change self-defeating life patterns lost once ibogaine's metabolites clear the system.

The psychodynamic duo of Taub and Berger have resolved this by having 15 people relocate to Gainesville since 1998. There's no opiate scene in Gainesville-a highly unusual situation, especially for a huge campus like University of Florida's.

This lack of opportunity to relapse is teamed with Berger's eclectic approach to individual and group therapy. Both Taub and Berger have meditated in India, and they draw on sources ranging from Buddhist teachings on self-transcendence, to the Enneagram system of character fixation, to the work of Eckhart Tolle on stillness, presence and acceptance of the now. Bodywork also enters the toolkit, via referrals to an experienced golfer.

The cumulative effect of the multimodal program evolving in Gainesville has been especially beneficial for female patients, who have developed a comfort level with a same sex therapist that they can't find elsewhere. These women are often coping with abandonment issues, which Berger cuts through with her astonishing combination of silence, awareness, empathy and brutal honesty.

Can these methods be systematized and applied more widely? The odds are against it. The most obvious obstacle is ibogaine's illegality in the U.S. Beyond that, holistic, aware teachers of mental and spiritual growth are few and far between, especially on the East Coast.

Under papal pressure, Galileo renounced his support for the Copernican theory of heliocentrism. Reputedly, as he rose from his knees, he muttered, "Eppur si muove (But still, it moves)."

The Gainesville experience runs totally counter to traditional models of both maintenance drug therapy and psychotherapy that reinforce chemical and ego dependencies.

But still, it works.

© 2003 Douglas Greene. All rights reserved.