Rolling Stone

Good news! Apparently he's past his addiction, and one of his most recent treatments was ibogaine.

Taking Ibogaine is no cure or guarantee of ending a drug problem, especially a severe multi-decade usage of cocaine, crack and crystal meth like Hunter has been through. It is not a cure all. People who have used Ibogaine have relapsed and gone right back to abusing the same drugs they abused before Ibogaine. Isn't Ibogaine and Ibogaine therapy illegal in the USA? That begs the question, where did Hunter have his therapy session(s)? Mexico perhaps? I wish Hunter well and hope the monkey of addiction is off his back. Cocaine, crack and meth are all horrible drugs. Quite the opposite of most entheogens.

Yeah, ibogaine only cures in the sense that it facilitates detox. Addiction never goes away once it sets in. That’s a lifelong battle, vigilance is always necessary.

Nobody said it was a cure-all. In fact, if you take ibogaine/iboga, and stay off the drugs, it speaks just as much to your character and perseverance as it does to the medicine ibogaine.

OneIsEros, that's true, vigilance is always necessary. That goes with any monkey on anyone's back. I think that's something that the medicine teaches, too. Health and wellness is a daily task, not something that can be achieved and then tucked away, crossed off the To-Do list never to be visited again.

Thanks for your input.

That right there. From talking to people who have both sucessfully and unsecussefully engaged with ibogaine in search of recovery, those who do not suceed are those who see it as a cure in and of itself. I remeber a dude a few years ago who had nothing good to say about it, saying that the treatment completely failed him. He went on to say that after he came back to the States from Mexico, he returned to his old hunting grounds and drug compaions, and stayed clean for an entire six months doing so. He thought that since he'd done ibogaine that that was somethinh he could do, inexplicably. It wasn't ibogaine that failed him, it was himself and his unrealistic expectations.

As for the facts of the story, I wonder that if this escapes into the wider narrative, whether or not that would shed some positive light on ibogaine and open the discussion about it being a legit therapy available legally in U.S. policy-making circles.

What does the future hold, if this year has taught us anything, it's to be prepared for anything.

I thought it was being tested by western medicine and abandoned because of its effects on the heart.

Maybe if it was modified to remove the heart effects yet still stop withdrawal, etc, it could be developed into a western medicine product.

Those heart studies were done using the isolated chemical ibogaine, not the whole, unextracted root bark. I'm sure the natural form of the plant would be safer on the heart, in the same way that herbs tend to have far fewer reported side effects than pharmaceutical medications.

A lot about its ingestion can be modified (the set and setting, the preparation, and using the whole root bark rather than an extraction) to make it safe without having to isolate the chemical and modify it.

I'm of the camp that nature made it perfect first. Not many would agree with me, but that is where I happily stand.

Nope, the natives in Gabon are very aware that the flood dose they take in their initiation ceremony has lethal potential. I saw an interview with a local there who talked about how his mother was very nervous when his grandfather initiated him for that exact reason.

That being said, under medical supervision I am willing to bet it would be fairly safe. People at supervised injection sites overdose on crack and meth all the time and are almost always revived - I think the one in Vancouver has never had a death.

FYI - ibogaine has its detox effect via kappa opioid agonism. Noribogaine also has detox effects - a professor I spoke to told me there were even indications it may be more powerful than ibogaine itself - without the psychedelic effects. I don’t know about noribogaine’s effect on the heart though.

And salvia diviniorum also has kappa-opioid agonist effects, which seem capable of breaking dependence on things like cocaine, although it is not strong enough to break opiate dependence. With salvia oral use (kept under the tongue, it’s not active when swallowed) would probably be the best way to achieve detox effects. And unlike ibogaine, salvia is one of the psychedelics not known to cause overdose death, alongside cannabis DMT psilocybin mescaline and LSD.

I think noribogaine does have psychedelic effects. Or at least from my personal experience i can tell that an iboga trip usually has a couple of very distinct stages. Maybe there is another explanation, but the gradual conversion of ibogaine to noribogaine seems the most logical one. It could also be ofcourse, that noribogaine has no psychedelic effects by itself, but alters the effects of ibogaine. Maybe that makes even more sense.

I would guess the main reason why salvia is not as powerfull against addiction as noribogaine, is because noribogaine stays in the blood for much longer. Maybe microdosing salvia throughout the day for a period of several months would be just as effective.

The NMDA antagonism of iboga is also pretty powerfull though. It is a much more dominant effect than the kappa agonism, wich you only start to notice beyond a certain dose. But the NMDA antagonism is the first thing you'll notice when you take iboga, and it can be felt at pretty low doses already. It is very peculiar. Something in between the effects of ketamine and N2O.

Iboga is a lot like Iboga.

Nothing else really compares to it. Not salvia or ayahuasca or anything else. It stands alone.

Eat it and find out.

A visionary dose on the level of ayahuasca etc is around 4-5g rootbark. People familiar with it know this, and this is why it is usually available in that amount in countries where the herb is still legal.

A traditional flood dose is on the level of 20-30+ grams. The comparison to other psychedelics is futile and does a disservice to what iboga is actually doing for people. I like saliva too, but it just is not iboga.

Iboga is unique and unmatched, in my experience with the stuff.

Lol, you didn’t understand me.

Qualitatively the experiences are vastly different. I’m just saying k-opioid agonism reduces physical craving for drugs. Obviously they are vastly different. Salvia does nothing with the serotonin system.

NBOME research chemicals also have mild k-opioid agonist properties. I have witnessed people spontaneously stop smoking and using cocaine after NBOME trips, as well as read reports online - without anyone knowing about it. I discovered the fact while browsing receptors the NBOMES activate and it pieced what I had witnessed and read together.

NBOMES iboga and salvia are all vastly different from one another. But their k-opioid agonist properties facilitate detox from physical drug cravings. It is a mechanical process unrelated to the psychedelic effects themselves (noribogaine can achieve detox effects via k-opioid agonism even though it is not psychedelic in its own right, though it does modulate the effects of ibogaine, similarly to how CBD modulates the psychedelic effects of THC), though the psychological impact of the psychedelic effects can (and usually do) contribute healing psychological content to the mechanical efficacy of the k-opioid agonist detox treatment.

Iboga is by far the strongest k-opioid agonist. Neither salvia nor NBOME can make much of a dent in physiological opioid dependence. Salvia is stronger than NBOME. In rodent studies it has effectively broken physiological cocaine dependence. NBOME there are no studies. I just noticed it was a k-opioid agonist, after I had both personally witnessed and read online anecdotes of it spontaenously relieving people of physiological cravings for cocaine and tobacco (without it being a contemplative aspect of their trips).

I kicked my habit the old fasioned way.

Went and signed on for methadone maintenance, about six years ago. Kicked my monkey right in the ass. Almost 0% heroin use after beginning treatment (had one insane relapse where I used some of everything), no looking back, and I don't miss it.

Props, friend.