Ibogaine
and Addiction Interruption

Welcome to this page of resources, created around 2002. It is here, of course, to help people who are struggling with addiction to find freedom, both for their benefit and for the benefit of society. Over the years since I created this website, as I continue to develop and refine the chemistry for ibogaine production, my attitude toward those struggling with addiction has evolved and improved. For example, there is a study called Rat Park that found that rats kept isolated in uncomfortable cages would compulsively overdose on water containing heroin or cocaine, while rats offered the same water in a park that simulated a healthy environment and interaction with other rats would only consume the drug-laced water intermittently and never overdose. The implication is that addiction is a problem with society itself as much as a problem with those struggling with addiction. William Burroughs wrote "Perhaps all pleasure in only relief", and also described his first experience with heroin as a tremendous relief. A relief from what? I see two sides to the pain that would drive each of us to drink and worse if not for the stamina we develop through healthy relationships and personal outlook. The first is the strain from unhealthy relationships or lack of social contact, and the other is the baggage and trauma that we each carry.

MAPS has been rigorously studying the ability of MDMA to relieve the symptoms of severe PTSD, to the point of nearly completing clinical trials and obtaining US FDA approval for its use. The mechanism for this healing seems to be that MDMA provides temporary relief from fear, and when taken in the presence of a skilled therapist who directs the patient's attention to the trauma underlying the PTSD, the events surrounding the trauma can be processed and put to rest. Stanislov Grof proposed that a lot of issues we all experience are due to trauma experienced during birth. It now seems strange to me that we don't all think about how traumatic and profound the experience of being born must have been. If a woman goes through such life-threatening agony to give birth due to the trauma to part of her body, must not the baby experience even more pain experiencing the same force on his or her entire body? But the pain is only part of the trauma - there is also not knowing if it will end, and the shock of finding oneself in another world while being faced with a new host of intense sensations. When babies cry upon being born, I don't think it is only because they need to breathe. PTSD results from traumatic experiences that we don't have the maturity, mental health or the time to process. What if what we call PTSD is only the most overt cases of what we all are experiencing to some degree? Couldn't unprocessed trauma explain what drives some people who struggle with addiction? What if we are all menatlly ill to a significant degree, and those we regard as mentally ill are only a little worse off?

I believe that the two mechanisms presented above, unhealthy social and physical environment, and unresolved trauma, may also explain why the prison population in the United States is the highest per capita in the world, but that is a topic for a separate section of this website.

  Resources:

      The Ibogaine Journal at McGill University

      The Ibogaine Story

      The best of the ibogaine mailing list

      The Ibogaine Dossier - The main ibogaine web site

      Tripping on iboga - Article about visiting Bwiti in Gabon

      Information about Ibogaine - A site that has been around a good while

      Providers - the quality of these services has not been verified and is up to the reader to investigate.

      Conference Recording - The California Society for Addiction Medicine (10/9/03 and 10/10/03)

      Ibogaine Conference in New York, February 2010 - Please use external links if possible.

      Ibogaine Conference in Barcelona, October 2010 - My slide show

      Ibogaine Conference in Vancouver, October 2012 - Please use external links for video downloads if possible.

      Ibogaine Conference in Durban, May 2014 - Only this external archive is available, EXCEPT FOR my slide show (6.9 MB).

      Global Ibogaine Conference in Tepoztlan, Mexico, March 14-16, 2016 - External link, except for my slide show (6.2 MB).

      European Ibogaine Forum 2017 in Vienna, Austria, September 8-10, 2017. My video on YouTube and other presentations.

      European Ibogaine Forum 2018 in Porto, Portugal, December 5-9, 2018. I didn't present this time but here are the YouTube and slide presentations.

      Interview with Dimitri Mugianis on VICE on HBO, segment 2 of episode 7, 13 minutes, broadcast 5/17/13: Streaming or Download (203 MB) - Please use external links for video downloads if possible.

      Ibogaine Bibliography - With a growing archive of the papers themselves in PDF format (mostly pre-1998). You can also download all of them at once.

      The Global Ibogaine Therapist Alliance (GITA) - Canadian non-profit that provides ibogaine treatment standards and grievance mediation and promotes iboga sustainability.

      Clinical Guidelines for Ibogaine-Assisted Detoxification Current Version: 1.0 (September 2015)

      The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research & Service (ICEERS) - A charity in Barcelona dedicated to the integration of ayahuasca, iboga and other traditional plants as therapeutic tools in modern society and the preservation of the indigenous cultures that have been using them.

      IBO-Radio - An archive of audio or video interviews related to ibogaine.

      Miscellaneous Files and Links - related to ibogaine.

      Notes.

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