I first heard of ibogaine from Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, even though he had previously written about it in Breaking Open the Head, which is still in my reading queue. He also talked about it in a 2003 Guardian article titled “Ten years of therapy in one night,” whose teaser reads: “Could a single trip on a piece of African rootbark help a junkie kick the habit? That was the claim in the 1960s, and now iboga is back in the spotlight. But is it a miracle cure? Daniel Pinchbeck decided to give it a go. And life, he says, will never be the same again.”
Now R.U. Sirius, the man who helped to break open my own head at the tender age of 18 when I started reading Reality Hackers, later to become Mondo 2000, later to morph, sort of, into Wired, has compared ibogaine to the wake-up pill offered by Morpheus to Neo:
Ibogaine is a hallucinogenic compound containing Iboga, a substance largely found in the African Tabernanthe Iboga root. It’s safe to say it’s the world’s least popular psychedelic substance. An Ibogaine trip lasts 36 hours and is understood to launch the deepest probe into personal psychological material available to humans on planet earth. A couple of hours into the experience, the Ibogaine tripper experiences an irresistible need to lie down and close her eyes. After than, (s)he will usually receive information — often experienced as though watching scenes on a giant screen — about all the accumulated traumatic events and the other types of awkward, uncomfortable, pathetic elements of personality and experience that the vulnerable human organism represses — partially or entirely — in order to “grow up” and maintain the socialized ego required by a complicated and competitive civilization.
What seems to emerge from these experiences is not a shipwrecked husk of a human being (as occasionally happened with LSD). It’s more like the tripper has undergone a very positive “extreme makeover” — but not one of a superficial sort. Indeed, many of those in the West who have had the opportunity (and need) to experience Ibogaine arrived at the experience as shipwrecked husks — they were drug addicts.
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My sense is that most people would rather “work on themselves” for 40 years than be dragged in front of stark actuality — a terrifying something that we have no control over. So … will you take the red pill? Or will you take the blue pill … “you wake up in bed and believe whatever you want to believe” … for a long, extended time?
Full story at Red Ice Creations.
A better candidate for a red pill is ayahuasca, and its primary active constituent, DMT. If the doors it opens are entries to real places (however you define “real”), that’s equivalent to discovering an underlying but mostly invisible matrix, per the film. Ibogaine seems to be more useful for personal/ancestral insight and analysis, which explains some of its efficacy in ending addictions.
I actually agree with you, Michael, despite my attempt to create a catchy post title by referring to ibogaine as the possible red pill. DMT is, for me, the most fascinating substance and subject in the psychedelic world right now, although psilocybin is making admirable strides in that direction thanks to, e.g., the recent Johns Hopkins research.
Ibogaine makes DMT look like Kool-Aid. DMT will safely take you someplace unfamiliar for a few minutes, or a few hours, depending how you take it. Yaeee, look at the pretty colors, weeeee. If you think anything like that is coming with Ibo, you are in for a dangerous shocker.
Ibogaine will make you confront some really emotional things in your history in which you have no control. It can make you see and feel the pain you caused others. If you have a demon, you are going to confront it. The feeling is like drinking a whole bottle of whiskey while huffing gasoline. Very unpleasant feeling. There is a lot of vomit, you cant move because you feel something like altitude sickness and vertigo. It is the most powerful, and the most miserable drug I have ever taken. I do not want to take it again.
I will say with absolute certainty that it is the cure to opiate addiction. Anyone who says otherwise does not understand Ibogaine, nor the word ‘cure’. I took it to get off the methadone, and it achieved that on both a physical and emotional level. Damn right it worked. For months after, for the first time in my life, I felt complete. I was absolutely sure that my life was about now and tomorrow, and the past did not decide my future. We can all repeat that a million times, and it means nothing. To actually feel it in my whole being completely changed who I am. It is amazing stuff.
Thank you sincerely for the first-person account. Sounds like your whole life was deeply changed.