Hi there,
Long before Western science discovered iboga (the world's most potent psychedelic), the Bwiti people of Gabon had a word for their tradition: emancipation.
Iboga has been at the heart of a living wisdom tradition for centuries, used in initiation ceremonies that mark the brutal but rewarding passage from one way of being into another. The Western world got its first glimpse of iboga's power in 1962, when a 19-year-old heroin addict named Howard Lotsof took it and woke up the next day without cravings or withdrawal. He gave it to six friends with the same addiction. Five of them stopped using heroin immediately.
To this day, iboga remains the only substance known to interrupt both the physical withdrawal and the psychological craving of opioid addiction - sometimes in a single session. No pharmaceutical comes close.
Now the wider world is catching up. Stanford Medicine researchers have found that ibogaine, produced significant improvements in depression, anxiety and functioning in veterans with traumatic brain injuries. Stanford Medicine Texas has committed $50 million to state-backed clinical trials.
As iboga moves into the mainstream, the question of how to honour its roots - not just extract its chemistry - matters enormously. The risks are real, the experiences can be overwhelming, and the relationship between Western medicine and the indigenous custodians of this plant demands careful thought.
These are exactly the kinds of questions we'll be sitting with at Meeting Iboga next week, when Aluba Fénix - initiated into the Bwiti tradition in Gabon in 2014 - joins us online where he'll share the essence of this medicine and what it means to bring it into the world with care.
If you want to follow more conversations on the latest trends in psychedelics, join us for the Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research (ICPR), Europe's premier psychedelic conference in the Netherlands in June.
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