Ibogaine: A Promising Psychedelic Therapy For Drug Addiction

Research suggests ibogaine therapy can eliminate withdrawal symptoms and cravings towards drugs in struggling addicts.

Followers of the Bwiti religion in the West Africa nation of Gabon have used ibogaine for centuries in healing and spiritual rituals. Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive chemical derived from the root bark of Iboga — Tabernathe iboga. While ibogaine is a mild stimulant in small doses, in larger doses it induces a psychedelic trip more intense and longer-lasting (up to 36 hours) than LSD or psilocybin mushrooms.

Although the drug can lead to some short-term effects like anxiety during or after the experienced hallucinations, it has been proposed as a potential treatment to devastating addiction problems to substances such as opioids, methamphetamine, and even cocaine, which are some of the most addictive substances.

For addiction, in particular, the need has never been greater. Aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, more Americans died from drug overdoses last year than ever before. According to research, weekly counts of drug overdoses were up to 45% higher in 2020 than in the same periods in 2019 while opioid addiction kills 128 Americans per day.

The current treatment for opioid addiction is Opioid Replacement Therapy (ORT). ORT is a therapy where you have one opioid, typically something highly euphoric like heroin or oxycodone, and you replace it with something that doesn’t give you that high, doesn’t make you euphoric, and is also longer-lasting. The two most common options for ORT are methadone or buprenorphine.

The problem is that this therapy is only effective when you keep you using the opioid replacement every single day for the rest of your life. Other problems are the high drop-out rates and relapse rates. For methadone, about a month and a half after dropping out of the program only 1 in 4 people are going to be abstinent from opioids. It’s even worse for buprenorphine, at only 4 weeks after dropping out of the program only 1 in 5 people are abstinent from opioids.

Fortunately, there is a treatment that exists that only involves short durations of treatment and doesn't involve taking a drug every day for the rest of your life and that is ibogaine treatment.

Scientists, who are exploring the potential of ibogaine in addiction treatment, do not believe that this psychoactive chemical completely ends addiction, instead, it interrupts the process of drug-seeking seen in addictive behaviors.

Based on anecdotal reports, ibogaine adjusts the brain chemistry of an individual, who otherwise might experience intense withdrawal symptoms, to the point that it can temporarily eliminate substance-related cravings and significantly reduce withdrawal from opiates.

Taking all these facts together, you can comprehend why researchers are becoming more interested in studying ibogaine as a potential treatment for addiction.

The discovery

In 1962, a 19-year-old American heroin addict named Howard Lotsof was looking for a psychedelic drug more intense than LSD or psilocybin mushrooms. He tried ibogaine. After tripping for 30 hours straight, he took a short nap, woke up, and realized that he didn’t experience any withdrawal or cravings towards heroin, even though he hadn’t had any heroin for 1,5 days.

Before he had seen heroin that gave him comfort, now he viewed heroin as something that mimicked death. The next thought in his head was “I prefer life over death”.

So Lotsof gave ibogaine to seven friends also addicted to heroin. 5 of them stopped using heroin. After just one use, they said that their desire for the drug had been eradicated, at least for 6 months.

Lotsof spent the rest of his life promoting ibogaine. His quest became harder and harder after the drug was designated a schedule 1 controlled substance by the Drug Enforcement Agency in 1967.

Although underground treatment centers popped up in the U.S., they closed down fast after bad incidents, sometimes including death. The missing piece was more research, trained professionals with scientific knowledge of the drug's properties, and the scientific community's support.

Deborah Mash, a neuroscientist researching addiction at the University of Miami, heard about Lotsof's story and said:

“I didn’t believe it. How could one molecule have an effect on alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, and opiates? [It] didn’t make sense. I saw people who were at the end of the rope … look like new human beings, no signs of withdrawal, and ready to change their life, and I thought what does this teach us about the brain? I need to know.”

She and her team administered the first legal dose of ibogaine to a U.S. patient at the University of Miami in 1993, with approval from the Food and Drug Administration and some private funding. However, her proposal for funding to continue the trials was rejected. So Mash took matters into her own hand.

Therefore, she opened a private clinical research center on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts in 1996. More than 300 patients were treated with ibogaine and she collected data for almost a decade. She is also the CEO and founder of DemeRx, a company developing ibogaine therapies to treat substance use disorders.

Mash said of its short-term detoxification rate:

“The thing we learned straight away was that the ibogaine detox was 98 percent effective for opiate withdrawals, I couldn’t believe it.”

No desire to get high, no cravings for drugs, and perhaps most incredibly, none of the usual painful withdrawals. A year after treatment, about half of her patients were still clean and sober.

Mash’s scientific research on the effects of ibogaine in humans gave more evidence confirming what many already suspected; ibogaine affects the human brain in a completely unheard-of way.

Addiction interrupter

Mash emphasizes that ibogaine is more an “addiction interrupter” than a cure for addiction.

“You take a person who’s been on drugs or alcohol for a decade, hitting it hard, and you try to get them to transition to sobriety. That’s hard to do, there are fundamental changes in the chemistry of the wiring in the brain.”

The above-mentioned chemical changes affect the pleasure center and the part of the brain involved in the unmanageable cycle of addiction. The addiction model of disease describes the condition as chronic due to long-term changes to the reward centers of the brain.

Getting clean is more than breaking a habit. The brain has to be completely rewired, and that’s where ibogaine comes in.

When a person takes ibogaine, it is converted into a molecule called noribogaine, which targets and rewires the areas of the brain affected by addictive and drug-seeking behaviors. Therefore, it allows the brain to restructure itself to a state similar to before addiction was triggered.

Although the mechanisms of action are still unclear, its effect on addicts is huge: no withdrawal or cravings towards drugs.

Mash told America Tonight:

“You know, it’s amazing as a neuroscientist for me to say this, but, when you look at the behavior, it’s like the reset button has been hit. We always told [the patients], don’t think that one dose of ibogaine is going to cure all the baggage and change your life from black to white, it’s not going to happen. You have to work a program.”

That reset is just the beginning of the recovery process.

Success rates

Although human clinical trials on the safety and efficacy of ibogaine are lacking, animal studies do support the efficacy of ibogaine. However, more and more human clinical trials are underway to study ibogaine as a potential treatment for addiction.

Medical professionals reported a 50–80% success rate after treating people with ibogaine recovering from methamphetamine addiction. However, relapse avoidance and long-term recovery depend largely on entering rehabilitation after taking ibogaine with a doctor’s supervision.

One of the doctors reported a 70–80% success rate with effective aftercare. However, he added that there was a relapse rate of 90% when people recovering from meth addiction returned to the same environment where they had originally abused meth.

Apparently, behavioral and visual cues associations are more salient for people struggling with methamphetamine addiction compared to those struggling with opioid addiction.

A review from Brazil showed higher rates of success. In Brazil ibogaine is unregulated and a combined approach of psychotherapy and ibogaine is being practiced to treat cannabis, crack, and alcohol addiction. One-time ibogaine treatment resulted in average abstinence of 5.5 months while multiple sessions of ibogaine treatment resulted in abstinence for 8.4 months on average. The authors of this paper reported:

“These results suggest that the use of ibogaine supervised by a physician and accompanied by psychotherapy can facilitate prolonged periods of abstinence, without the occurrence of fatalities or complications. These results suggest that ibogaine can be a safe and effective treatment for dependence on stimulant and other non-opiate drugs.”

Furthermore, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has funded two observational studies to examine the long-term effects of ibogaine treatment.

In one of the observational studies of the 30 individuals who sought treatment with ibogaine for detoxification from opioids, 50% and 33% of the subjects reported no opioid use at 1-month and 3-months posttreatment. And after ibogaine treatment, basically, every withdrawal symptom was disappeared. Moreover, subjective effects like long-term improvement in social and family status significantly improved.

One of the study participants commented:

“…you could safely say that iboga will give an opiate addict several months to a half a year of freedom from cravings and an expanded awareness. This gives the user a period of time in which to get his/her life together and learn to face things straightforwardly, directly and honestly. Iboga will not do the work for you. However, it will help you do your own work.”

By comparison, a large study reported an 8.6% rate of treatment success, defined as a self-report of ≤4 days of opioid use in the previous 30 days, at 8 weeks after tapering and discontinuing buprenorphine with no subsequent pharmacotherapy.

The other observational study examined long-term ibogaine treatment effects over a 12-month period. A significant reduction was found in the Addiction Severity Index, Subjective Opioid Withdrawal Scale, and symptoms of depression following single ibogaine treatment.

Furthermore, another study examined the therapeutic potential of ibogaine through the subjective experiences of 44 participants from the two above-mentioned observational studies. The authors reported:

“Ibogaine’s strong oneiric action promoted cyclic visions leading to confronting realizations involving remorse and regret for participants’ actions towards others, but also release from feelings of guilt and worthlessness. Many participants reported feeling a sense of spiritual transformation. We propose that the reported experiences support the meaningfulness of ibogaine’s oneiric effects as a discrete element in its capacity for healing, which is distinct from pharmacological actions associated with reduced withdrawal and craving.”

These subjective mystical reports contribute to the therapeutic effects of ibogaine. Psychedelic studies already showed that the greatest mystical experiences perpetually obtained the greatest symptom improvement. This suggests that the treatment response is better when patients report strong spiritual and insightful components of treatment. In other words, the importance of the psychedelic-induced mystical experience can’t be overlooked.

In 2017, Alan Davis a Johns Hopkins University adjunct assistant professor researching psychedelics published a study in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies. He surveyed 88 people — most of whom (72%) had been using opioids daily for at least four years — who had visited an ibogaine clinic in Mexico from 2012 to 2015. After ibogaine treatment, about 80% said it drastically reduced or eliminated their withdrawal symptoms; 50% said it reduces opioid cravings, and 30% said they NEVER used opioids again.

Addiction may only be the beginning. A research paper published in 2020 in the journal Chronic Stress, found that among 51 U.S. veterans who had taken ibogaine in Mexico from 2017 to 2019, there were “very large reductions” in symptoms related to every domain they measured, including PTSD, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, cognitive impairment, and depression. In addition, more than 80% of the vets surveyed said the psychedelic experience was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Alan Davis, one of the authors of this paper said:

“Their improvement [was] way above what we would see with typical currently approved treatments. We’re not actually healing problems with medications that we currently have; we’re just trying to treat the symptoms. Psychedelics like ibogaine, on the other hand, seem to be showing that we might actually be getting below just symptom reduction into a place where true healing can happen. ”

More human clinical trials for ibogaine and addiction are underway. Researchers of the University of São Paulo will give different doses of ibogaine to 12 alcoholic patients, once the pandemic is under control, while, in October, researchers in Spain began testing ibogaine in 20 people trying to wean themselves of methadone.

In conclusion, the growing evidence for the efficacy and safety of ibogaine treatment, not just for opiate addiction but alcohol, cocaine, crack, marijuana, and probably even gambling addiction comes as a blessing to those suffering from many forms of addiction.

These new studies add to the growing list of reasons to consider ibogaine treatment at a professional clinic if you or a loved one is struggling with addiction. However, it’s important to note to most of these had a form of continuing care after the ibogaine treatment.

Ibogaine is not a magic bullet by itself. For truly effective healing, a professional recovery coach is useful to help integrate the mystical experience it provides. After just one ibogaine treatment, people don’t experience any withdrawal or cravings towards drugs for a few months on average, giving the individual — and their brain — the time to ‘rewire’ and change their addictive behavior to its pre-addicted state.

Fortunately, Deborah Mash says she refuses to give up because she knows it works; she’s seen it hundreds of times. And she hopes that others will too.

“My role in this was simply to either show that it worked or to debunk it. And that was always my plan, I said either ibogaine works or it doesn’t, but we in the scientific community need to test, to study it. The epidemic of drug addiction in our society is too large to leave this stone unturned.”

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