Articles for Further Information

“It’s arduous. Ibogaine is not a drug you take to get high.”
– An ex-cocaine addict after ibogaine therapy.

Imagine a world in which most people feel so good about themselves they treat victims of self-abuse with compassion, a world in which empathy for the pain that precipitates self-destruction is widespread, and where opportunities for aiding, and softening, difficult healing processes are avidly explored. Compared to our culture, where the weak and psychically wounded are ostracized and kept down, it would have to be some kind of heaven.

The vision of a culture in which personal empowerment is a household feeling, each household a place from which the demons of negativity and fear have been swept- a golden drama in which humanity can finally express the positive yearnings of nature- seems utterly fantastic. Still, the vision calls out to us; and despite millennia of repressive conditions, people still respond to its call. But to change conditions, even to challenge them creatively, takes even more than telescopic inner sight, digital inner hearing, and telepathic sensitivity combined: it takes extraordinary commitment.

In the arena of all possibilities, where the future paradise stretches its rainbow tentacles backward in time to inspire the stonehearted present, two extraordinarily committed human beings have been working to alleviate the suffering of substance abuse caught in the double damnation of personal and social hells. Each has been touched by a West African psychoactive shrub, Tabernathe iboga, which has the unexplained ability to interrupt craving and addiction to everything from tobacco to methadone, in many cases permanently.

One of these dedicated fellows, Howard Lotsoff, an ex-heroin addict, took ibogaine to get high some thirty years ago, and went on an extended psychedelic journey that brought him back, after thirty-six hours, drug free. Without the dreaded sweats, shakes and cramps typical of cold turkey, his craving for heroin was gone, as if he’d just received a complete chemical transfusion.

Lotsoff immediately tested the drug on a half dozen other addicts, all but one of whom were able to kick their addictions. Determined to make ibogaine therapy available to the public, he began to establish himself in official channels. He co-started NDA International, which has patents pending for Endabuse, their name for ibogaine treatment of a variety of chemical dependencies. NDA soon hooked up with ICASH (the International Coalition for Addict Self Help) and, up until recently, were documenting ibogaine sessions in the Netherlands, with excellent results. Then two subjects died, and although the deaths are as likely to have been from narcotic, rather than ibogaine overdoses, the coordinators thought it wise to move the operations to Panama, where sessions are said to have once again resumed.

An ibogaine journey averages about thirty-six hours. In Africa, its religious use leads to mystical encounters with ancestors and spirit guides, which are sought by iboga cultists for healing, empowerment, and spiritual development. Western subjects commonly report vivid, previously buried memories that emerge as a series of intense, lucid dreams. A broadened understanding of self and others seems to blanket these regressive experiences, providing access to discovering the roots of destructive beliefs and behaviors.

Three basic stages of the ibogaine journey are most often described. The first is a visionary, symbolic first stage, which can last several hours, followed by a longer, reflective stage filled with insight into one’s life and patterns, and a final stage in which ordinary consciousness returns even while the spirit of the journey continues to supply personal insight and opportunities for psychological integration. At the very “least,” addicts who have taken ibogaine attest to its power to greatly diminish, if not completely dissolve, the suffering of withdrawal, leaving them with the optimism that often accompanies deep cleansing. An addicted couple who recently took ibogaine to get off methadone, experienced moderate withdrawal symptoms that kept them from being able to stay on their jobs. They finally decided to manage the symptoms with low doses of heroin until a second round of ibogaine therapy could be arranged.

But back to our story. In another subculture, a young fellow called Eric Taub had also been engineering extraordinary experiences in consciousness for himself, without the use of harmful substances. In addition to having some powerful experiences with psychotropic drugs, his search led him to set himself up in silent, out of the way places on long fasts, and into an initiation by a spiritual master from India. Several years ago, when Taub heard about ibogaine’s transformative power, he felt drawn to play a part in its popularization.

As time went by, Taub continued stalking sources of ibogaine in his desire to help addicts find the Agony Bypass on the Monkey-free Freeway. Striving to overcome legal and financial obstacles preventing its use, he traveled the globe, meeting with scientists and addicts, chemists and doctors, lawyers and business people, as well as concerned individuals interested in establishing ibogaine clinics in their respective countries.

Eventually, Taub began to experiment on himself. Believing the habit patterns and aimless meandering of his conditioned mind were nasty addictions in their own right, he took smaller “therapeutic” doses of ibogaine that he says deepened his self-knowledge in the course of mystical and regression episodes. Acquaintances who took the smaller dose have also written testimonials to the psychotherapeutic value of their ibogaine journeys, in addition to its interruption of some lesser substance dependencies, such as marijuana use.

The earliest reported explorations of ibogaine in the West were done by the French at the turn of the century, when it was recommended as a stimulant and was found to be effective in the treatment of neurasthenia. In 1956, researchers at the Swiss drug company, CIBA-Geigy, found out about ibogaine's analgesic affect on morphine withdrawal, but chose not to pursue its application. More recently, in the U.S., Dr. Stanley Glico, of Albany Medical College in New York, found that rats conditioned to inject themselves with morphine diminished self-administration after ibogaine doses. In 1988, doctors in the Netherlands published similar reports and cocaine addicted rats at CUNY Medical School in Manhattan showed an increase in dopamine levels after Dr. Patricia Broderick treated them with ibogaine.

Ibogaine was classified by the FDA as a Schedule 1 narcotic (like heroin and cocaine) in the early sixties (just like LSD). But unlike the stereotype of the spaced-out acid head, users come off their ibogaine trips more grounded than they go in. More then seventy-five percent of the addicts who have taken ibogaine claim to have gained valuable self-knowledge, in addition to losing their drug craving. Of the twenty-some percent who return to drug use, most have been able to break their dependencies after a second session.

How does ibogaine work to interrupt addiction? Some say it is so strong it simply overwhelms the attention while withdrawal is happening. Brain research with rats has indicated it affects the area of the cerebellum where motor coordination, memory, and dreams intersect. Researchers have theorized that ibogaine destroys enough of the cerebellum’s many branched Purkinje cells to affect learning and remembering, especially of standard behaviors and certain skills and conditioned responses.

Until scientists can say exactly how ibogaine works, however, its effectiveness continues to be viewed from a skeptical distance. One researcher at a Southern University, is one exception. “Given the magnitude of drug abuse in our society, we can’t leave any stone unturned.” she has insisted. After receiving the go ahead for human trials from the FDA, her experiments, which depend on interdependent financial support, finally began last year. However, as ibogaine advocates emphasize, the testing protocol calls for such minimal incremental dosages that they are not likely to yield results conclusive enough to serve addicts soon enough.

In the interim, Howard Lotsoff set up an ibogaine processing factory in Belgium, which is ready to distribute the drug in America, as soon as the FDA approves. “We have a highly effective treatment for chemical dependency,” he says, reviling the status quo attitude toward addicts.

Television reporter John Hockenberry, in a prime time special, noted that ibogaine seemed to take an addict “to a pre-addictive state” where “it resets the brain.” Ibogaine users he interviewed were ecstatic: “I got my innocence back” said an ex-cocaine junkie. Another stated that, “For the first time in my life, I felt free.” One recovered heroin addict repeatedly voiced his astonishment that “I stopped using- and I wasn’t sick!” Use of ibogaine in treating alcohol dependency is also showing promising results.

Among non-addicts, therapeutic sessions commonly stimulate spontaneous regressions to significant early childhood experiences. A therapist who had been adopted was able to go back to her second day of life and remember her natural mother, discovering that lone, not the rejection she had always assumed, was the basis of their connection. “This understanding filled me with a sense of belonging and safety that I had never known” she wrote. A fifty-four year old man who took ibogaine for therapeutic purposes was also positive about his experience. “I don’t know if I would have reached this point in my life process if I hadn’t done the ibogaine” he concluded, “but my life process has opened in a way it hadn’t been able to open before, even though I had been doing a lot of deep internal searching.”

Notes from ibogaine sessions in the West and reports from African iboga cultists corroborate this sense of spaciousness and renewed flexibility. One American addict confessed that her life was “in turmoil. I could not stop using drugs for some reason. I was uncomfortable just being myself. I’ve been to many rehabs, detoxes, N.A. and A.A. meetings” she wrote. “I believed this was my last hope to get to the root of my problems.” On ibogaine, she saw herself being born, then had memories of “a lot of fighting through my childhood, being a frightened child. I was violated when I was about four or five years old. It makes a lot of sense now, why I always felt this fear inside of me.”

Coming out of her session, she was aware of her anger “because of what happened to me, and yet there was such a sigh of relief, a peace of mind. There’s more energy in me now that I don’t feel depressed. There’s a spiritual side in me that is beautiful.”

Another young man couldn’t stay away from beer. “Once I got started it was hard to stop. I did stop, sometimes for weeks at a time, when the hangovers got too unpleasant. But I would go back to drinking after a stressful experience, like getting angry, or sometimes as a kind of self-sabotage when I was feeling exceptionally good. Since ibogaine, I have had no desire whatsoever to take one drink. The impulse of self-sabotage is gone. I’m more hopeful about what I can do and how things will turn out. If something upsets me, I no longer feel like everything is hopeless. I’m more content and at ease with life.”

Another woman took ibogaine four years ago in the Netherlands, after becoming addicted to heroin and cocaine during her junior year in college. She was already experiencing severe withdrawal when the dose was administered, but within two hours, “all my symptoms had completely disappeared and I was entering a very deep state of self-awareness, seeing my entire life in reverse.”

She heard a voice telling her to make a choice. “To choose a new beginning or choose to die struggling and suffering alone.” After her session she felt an “overwhelming sense of safety” that allowed her to reconnect with her family and then to return to school, drug free.

An executive with a large Manhattan firm used cocaine consistently for over six years. After an ibogaine session, he recollected, “I was doing about an eighth of an ounce of coke a day. I could do a gram before noon.” His ibogaine journey was “…well, arduous. It’s not a drug you take because you want to get high. Your subconscious comes forth, and you’re able to view it in a totally impartial manner.” Like many African users, he said he was able to gain access to the information in his “individual hereditary archive.” Declared ibogaine “a wonder drug,” he is convinced that "it clears and resets all the neurotransmitters to maximum efficiency, so that everything becomes crystal clear.”

A thirty-year-old Gabonese native wrote, “I ate the iboga for other black men. I am sorry for their suffering. I also ate to be able to play the ngombi (native harp) well. I also searched in it to have many children.” He had visions of his father and ancestors. “I began playing the ngombi under the rainbow, and I heard the applause of men. The people thought I had gone too far and was dead. Then I returned. Since then I have seen nothing in iboga, but each time I take it I hear the spirits who give the power to play the ngombi. I play what I hear from them. Only if I come into the chapel in a bad heat does iboga fail me.”

Further research into the religious use of ibogaine in West Africa has inspired Taub to experiment with its initiatory powers, increasing the ratio of ibogaine to body weight he will take in the hopes of communing with the spirit of iboga.

The possibility of the legalization of ibogaine in the U.S. has also stirred up forces that poose its use for economic reasons. In Mexico, several doctors that Taub interviewed backed away from an initial interest in an ibogaine clinic connected to their medical school when they learned of its seventy-five percent effectiveness. “They said it was both futile and dangerous to support a treatment that would threaten the strongholds of drug lords and of the AMA and the DEA.”

Nonetheless, the climate of resistance to ibogaine appears to be changing. With ever-increasing public pressure to come to terms with drug addiction, the FDA has had to authorize the exploration of ibogaine’s potential. Should Ibogaine become decriminalized for addiction therapy, it will herald a subtle but substantial shift in the mindset of late twentieth century America, and perhaps hold a promise for a new kind of freedom of consciousness in the twenty –first. Since affording addicts a way out of the torment of withdrawal and craving means dropping the rationale that their suffering is an appropriate punishment for their “sins,” this indeed would be a move towards enlightenment.

And when a collective conditioned by Puritanism is granted permission to consider that a psychedelic experience can be spiritually beneficial, it could indeed herald the crumbling of the Iron Vice that has psychically immobilized for generations- an event with more liberating promise than even the crumbling of the Iron Vice that has psychically immobilized for generations- an event with more liberating promise than even the crumbling of the Iron Curtain.

Other Articles and Links