Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 08:24:43 EST
From: "Carl Nyblom-Waltenburg" <ibogalab@hotmail.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <ibogaine@ibogaine.org>
Subject: Re: indra ibo(beginning)
From: HSL123@aol.com
Reply-To: ibogaine@ibogaine.org
To: Multiple recipients of list <ibogaine@ibogaine.org>
Subject: indra ibo(beginning)
Date: Sat, 11 Dec 1999 08:42:19 EST
In a message dated 12/11/99 10:48:50 AM, ibogalab@hotmail.com (Carl) wrote:
> I have been working with the Iboga alkaloids over the last sixteen years
Carl,
What precipitated your work with ibogaine? How did you come to it? Please
be only as open as you feel comfortable in being.
Thanks.
Howard
Well,Howard it is a very long story,I guess it started with being born into a family where visionary plants and drugs was part of the cultural heritage,and literature in that field was abundant.Huxley's"Island",Baudelaire's"the artificial paradises"de Ropp's "drugs and the mind" etc. was my childhood literature,my father was a book publisher and translator and a journalist with a strong revolutionary impact on contemporary society throughout the 1960's and my school years in the late sixties were heavily laced with psychedelic drugs and social protest,the Vietnam war being what it was and youth culture being what it was...
I first came across the Iboga plant when I returned from a soujourn with the medicine men of Tanzania ,Kenya and Uganda in the Kilimanjaro area (doing some highly classified magic that was part of overthrowing the Idi Amin dictatorship),finding dr Hofmann's and dr Schultes' elegant volume "Plants of the Gods".Then,as I stated earlier,I was working with numerous medicinal plants in a pharmaceutical house,and the Iboga plant was one of them.At that time,we considered it to be a rather wild and rough trip with a lot of undesirable side effects,so I set out to "tame" this wild spirit into something more manageable,as I intuitively felt that here was something with a tremendous healing potential.In the same time period Christiania Freetown had a severe problem with hard drug abuse,criminal biker gangs fighting over street level drug market control,heavily armed maniacs, and a lot of police brutality.The scene was disgusting,so the Psychedelic Movement decided to make the entire arsenal of visionary plants and drugs readily available at street level,on the principle that on a truly free market good drugs will drive out the bad,and the Iboga extract was one of the materials employed in this endeavour.It was a successful operation,and Chritiania Freetown has remained a zone entirely free from hard drugs like opiates,cocaine, speed etc.to this day, and violence is rare,although there are some problems with alcohol and tourism...
To acheive consensus on "no hard drugs" in a community is no easy thing and our model may not be universally applicable,but the principles involved could indeed be applied worldwide in a more enlightened future.To some extent there are hopeful signs that visionary plants and drugs are becoming an accepted part of everyday reality in the western "civilization",and that long-lost profession of being a psychedelic guide will be back in business, as was the case in the 1950's and early60's,with a new role to play in using the Iboga alkaloids in therapy and counseling.In this spirit,I will do what I can,as much as I can, as fast as I can...
Cordially,Carl
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