Journalist. Reads, edits and answers for what this site publishes.
Articles
Iboga Compared
Ibogaine set beside the treatments people actually weigh it against, and the evidence each one has. The asymmetry is the finding.
Iboga Experiences: Reading the Accounts
Most first-hand accounts of iboga sit on Reddit and Erowid. How to read them, what the clinical record adds, and where both go quiet.
Is Ibogaine Legal? Status by Country
Ibogaine's legal status runs from prohibited to prescribable. Twenty-six jurisdictions, each with the instrument behind it and whether we read it.
Ibogaine News and Policy
Who is moving ibogaine through American politics, what they have actually achieved, and what remains a proposal. Dated, and revisited.
The Iboga Plant
A four-metre forest shrub from Central Africa, uprooted whole to reach its root bark. What botany establishes, and what nobody has measured.
Is Iboga Safe? Ibogaine Risks and Screening
No. Ibogaine can cause a fatal heart arrhythmia. Nineteen deaths are documented to 2008; in most, existing illness contributed.
Bwiti: The Tradition Iboga Comes From
Iboga is a sacrament in an initiatory religion before it is anything else. What the published record establishes, and what is not ours to publish.
Ibogaine Science and Research
What the peer-reviewed literature establishes about ibogaine, what it only suggests, and what has never been measured in a human at all.
Ibogaine Treatment: How to Judge a Clinic
This page lists no clinics and takes no referral fee. What the term hides, what separates one provider from another, and what the questions are.
Iboga vs Ibogaine: The Difference
Iboga is the plant, ibogaine one of its alkaloids. Why the distinction matters for dose, for legality, and for what people are actually taking.
Ibogaine vs Ayahuasca
One contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor and one blocks a cardiac channel. That single difference decides almost everything else about them.
Ibogaine vs Bufo
Fifteen minutes against nineteen hours. And the only comparison on this site where the other substance has a published randomised trial and ibogaine does not.
Is Ibogaine Like DMT?
A 2026 meta-analysis on DMT for substance misuse contains no study of DMT. Seven of eight are ayahuasca; the eighth is a different molecule with ibogaine.
Ibogaine vs Kambo
Kambo is not a psychedelic. It has been measured with psychedelic instruments and it does not register. What it is instead is a frog peptide on a burn.
Ibogaine vs Ketamine
Two very different drugs, both sold for addiction, neither approved for it. What each has actually been shown to do, and what each costs you.
Ibogaine vs Methadone
One has an established effect on death rates. The other has none. And a third of people on methadone already carry the change that makes ibogaine dangerous.
Ibogaine vs Psilocybin
Psilocybin has phase 3 trials and no approval. Ibogaine has neither. What each has been shown to do for addiction, and how differently they fail.
Ibogaine vs Rapid Detox
A procedure promising to remove withdrawal, sold ahead of its evidence, that killed people and was abandoned. Ibogaine's precedent, not its rival.
Iboga Documentaries and Resources
One of these films shows a client on life support and the provider jailed. Most of the others were made by people with a stake in the answer.
Reading the Erowid Archive
How reports get into the Erowid vaults, what its own analysts say the collection is not, and how much weight one ibogaine report can carry.
Joe Rogan on Iboga: What Was Actually Said
A text message reached a president and a drug reached an executive order. The record is checkable, and most of what circulates about it is not.
Microdosing Iboga: What We Know
No placebo-controlled study of iboga microdosing has ever been run. And a half-life of a day or two means a small dose repeated is not a small exposure.
Reading the Reddit Communities
What the ibogaine subreddits are, what their moderators forbid, and what the peer-reviewed work on these communities does and does not establish.
Reading Clinic Reviews Critically
A study of 1,798 testimonials on dental practice websites found every single one positive. Here is what reviews of any clinic can and cannot tell you.
Iboga Visuals: What People Actually See
Not a light show. In rats, ibogaine produces waking brain activity that matches REM sleep, which is why every account reaches for the word dream.
What Ibogaine Feels Like
The only large measurement of the subjective experience, what the phase timings everyone quotes actually rest on, and why two people differ so much.
When Ibogaine Does Not Work
What the follow-up studies found about relapse and the months after treatment: two small cohorts, one survey of survivors, and no trial reporting drug use.
Ibogaine in Arizona
Arizona put $5 million into an ibogaine trial in traumatic brain injury through its 2025 budget. What the grant requires, and what it does not.
Ibogaine in Australia
Ibogaine is a Schedule 4 prescription-only medicine in Australia. Widely reported as legal, which is not what Schedule 4 means.
Ibogaine in Brazil
Brazil's regulator says ibogaine treatments are unregulated. A São Paulo council said hospitals only. The federal government says no.
Is Ibogaine Legal in Canada?
Health Canada made ibogaine a prescription drug in 2017. What that regime allows, and why it is not the same as approval.
Ibogaine in Colorado
Colorado decriminalised personal possession of ibogaine in 2022 and has authorised a research pilot it has not yet funded.
Ibogaine in Costa Rica
Ibogaine appears unscheduled in Costa Rica, but addiction programmes need IAFA approval and no ibogaine facility has ever held it.
Is Ibogaine Legal in France?
France classes the plant itself as a narcotic, under two botanical names. It sold an iboga extract over the counter for about thirty years first.
Is Iboga Legal in Gabon?
Iboga has never been prohibited in Gabon. But export has been suspended since 2019, and since May 2026 the whole chain needs ministerial authorisation.
Ibogaine in Germany
Ibogaine is outside German narcotics law but inside medicines law. Possession is not an offence; supplying it is a crime, and importing it is penalised.
Ibogaine in Kentucky
Kentucky enacted an ibogaine research framework over a governor's veto. The $42 million it started with was stripped before it passed.
Is Ibogaine Legal in Mexico?
Ibogaine is not named in Mexican drug law, which is why the clinics are there. What that absence does and does not guarantee a patient.
Ibogaine in Mississippi
Mississippi created an ibogaine trial framework in 2026 and attached no money to it. What the law does, and what the $5 million figure actually refers to.
Ibogaine in the Netherlands
Ibogaine is not on the Opium Act lists, and the Dutch public health institute has formally advised against using it. Both are true at once.
Ibogaine in New Zealand
New Zealand gazetted ibogaine as a prescription medicine in 2010, and published what happened when a clinic got it wrong.
Ibogaine in Oklahoma
Oklahoma's Breakthrough Therapy Act ties ibogaine trial contracts to access conditions after approval. Kentucky did the same a month earlier.
Ibogaine in South Africa
South Africa places ibogaine in Schedule 6, with morphine and fentanyl. A practitioner may administer it, but no product is registered.
Ibogaine in Texas
Texas funded a clinical trial of ibogaine, yet the substance stays Schedule I under federal law. What the 2025 legislation does, and what it leaves unchanged.
Is Ibogaine Legal in the UK?
Supplying ibogaine in the UK carries seven years, simple possession is no offence, and one narrow lawful route exists that nobody appears to have used.
Is Ibogaine Legal in the United States?
Ibogaine is a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law. What that means, and how recent state-level activity does and does not change it.
Why Is Ibogaine Illegal? The 1970 Schedule I Decision
Congress wrote ibogaine into the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, before its claims were tested and decades before its risks were understood.
Bryan Hubbard and the Kentucky Attempt
He tried to spend opioid settlement money on ibogaine research in Kentucky. It failed. What happened, and what he does now.
Ibogaine and Federal Policy: What the Order Actually Does
Executive Order 14401 names ibogaine twice and reschedules nothing. What it directs, what it cannot reach, and the wrong number in circulation.
The GRATK Treaty and Why It Cannot Reach the Iboga Patents
Adopted in 2024 to make patent applicants disclose origin. It is not in force, not retroactive, cannot invalidate a patent, and Gabon has not signed it.
Iboga Patents: What the Register Actually Contains
Counts of iboga patents circulate without the query that produced them. Here are the queries, the counts, and what the register does not contain.
Rick Perry and Ibogaine
The former Texas governor chairs the main ibogaine advocacy group. What he has said, what Texas funded, and what it has produced so far.
Who Is Developing Ibogaine, and What They Have Delivered
One company valued its own ibogaine programme at a 4 per cent chance. Another deleted the word from its filings. Nobody has published a human result.
The Stanford Ibogaine Study, and How It Was Reported
Thirty men, treated once, in Mexico, before the researchers were involved. Two years of announcements have made it look like more.
The Other Alkaloids of Iboga
Iboga is a mixture, not a molecule. Ibogamine, ibogaline, tabernanthine and voacangine are in the bark, in the extract, and in the pure powder too.
Growing Iboga from Seed
Germination is slow, irregular, and fails once the seed coat dries. What the botanical record says, and where iboga is already farmed.
Forms of Iboga: Root Bark, TA, PTA and HCl
Four different products sold under one subject. Material sold as pure ibogaine hydrochloride has measured between 61.5 and 73.4 per cent ibogaine.
Iboga: Names, Slang and Etymology
The American drug agency catalogues street names for peyote, mescaline and mushrooms. For ibogaine it lists none, and that is the honest answer.
Where Ibogaine Actually Comes From
Ibogaine has three possible origins, and one is a different tree. Whose psychedelic reputation was invented on Wikipedia in 2007.
Iboga Root Bark
Published analyses of root bark give ibogaine contents from under two per cent to over seven. That spread is the safety problem, not a botanical footnote.
Tabernanthe iboga: Botanical Profile
Naming, structure, range and chemistry, from the floras rather than from the literature about the drug. Including where the sources disagree.
What Is Iboga?
A shrub from the forest floor of Central Africa, about four metres tall, whose root bark carries around thirty alkaloids. The short answer, and the record.
Ibogaine and Coming Off Antidepressants
Nobody has tested ibogaine as a way to stop an SSRI. The documented risk runs the other way, and the washout is the most exposed part.
Ibogaine and Bipolar Disorder
Every published protocol excludes it. Only one names a reason. The strongest argument against is not about ibogaine at all.
Iboga for Sale Online: Why It Is Dangerous
Iboga is sold openly online. What arrives is of unknown strength, the purchase may be a criminal offence, and nobody has looked at your heart first.
Ibogaine and the Heart: QT Prolongation
Ibogaine blocks a potassium channel that resets the heartbeat. What that does to the QT interval, who it has killed, and what screening can and cannot catch.
Who Should Never Take Ibogaine
Every exclusion list in circulation descends from one 1993 protocol. The mechanism that has killed most people was not on it until 2016.
Ibogaine Deaths: What the Published Record Shows
The figure people quote counts deaths up to 2008. A later review counted 33, on a different basis, and nobody has counted since.
"Ibogaine Detox": What the Term Hides
An ibogaine detox means getting through withdrawal, not recovering. The word imports a promise the published data does not keep.
Ibogaine Dosage: Why There Is No Standard Dose
No ibogaine dosage has been established. The trial built to find the maximum tolerated dose finished in 2024 and never reported its result.
Ibogaine Drug Interactions
Two separate mechanisms, and most lists conflate them. One raises how much drug reaches you. The other lengthens the interval that kills.
What Emergency Preparedness Should Look Like
In the published cases, drugs largely failed and electricity worked. Which decides what a facility needs, and how far it can be from a hospital.
The Powder Labelled Iboga That Contained No Iboga
A woman died after taking a powder bought online as Iboga du Gabon. Analysis found no ibogaine at all, and alkaloids of an entirely different plant.
Pre-Treatment Screening: The Tests That Matter
A resting ECG missed forty per cent of male carriers of the gene it exists to detect. Here is what screening can do, and what it cannot.
Ibogaine Side Effects: What Is Documented
Ataxia, nausea and days of insomnia are expected. QT prolongation is the one implicated in the deaths. What the record separates, and what it cannot settle.
Ibogaine Analogues: What Exists, and What Reached People
Three analogue families, none ever given to a human. And a recurring pattern where the spinout puts a different molecule into trials.
18-MC: The Analogue Built to Drop the Cardiac Risk
A synthetic iboga alkaloid designed to keep the anti-addictive effect and lose the heart risk and the visions. What it has and has not shown.
Where Iboga Alkaloids Act in the Brain
Three regions carry three different stories, and one of them is damage. Most of the anatomy comes from rats, and much of it from an analogue.
CYP2D6: Why Response Varies Between People
One enzyme does almost all the clearance, its activity varies enormously between people, and almost nobody measures it before dosing by weight.
Ibogaine Clinical Trials: What Has Actually Been Run
Every registered ibogaine trial and whether it reported. Two randomised trials finished in 2024 and neither published. One noribogaine trial did.
GDNF and BDNF: What the Growth Factor Claim Rests On
Two proteins carry most of the neuroplasticity argument. In the study usually cited, one rose only as messenger RNA and never as protein.
How Ibogaine Works
The honest answer is that nobody knows. Here are the proposed mechanisms, what each rests on, and which ones a dosed human could plausibly reach.
Ibogaine for Depression and Anxiety
Most people now going for ibogaine are not going for addiction. The evidence base is still an addiction evidence base.
Ibogaine for Alcoholism
Nine people have ever received ibogaine in a study that set out to treat alcohol dependence. Five of them finished it. Here is what it found.
Ibogaine for Peripheral Neuropathy and CIDP
The nerve-repair claim is about the brain. Peripheral neuropathy is a different tissue, and autoimmune neuropathy is a different disease entirely.
Ibogaine for Opioid Addiction: What the Evidence Shows
Withdrawal suppression is the best-documented effect in the field. Staying off opioids afterwards is a different claim, and the evidence is far weaker.
Ibogaine for Parkinson's and MS
The neuroregeneration claim rests on a growth factor. That growth factor has been given to people with Parkinson's, twice, in randomised trials.
Ibogaine for PTSD: One Cohort, Six Papers
The veteran results are the most cited in the field. They come from thirty self-selected men, followed for one month, analysed five separate times.
Noribogaine: The Metabolite That Outlasts the Drug
Ibogaine is converted to noribogaine by an enzyme whose activity varies widely. The metabolite lasts far longer, and blocks the cardiac channel harder.
Ibogaine for Other Addictions: Cocaine, Nicotine and Beyond
Beyond opioids the evidence thins fast, and then stops. Here is what exists for each substance, and where there is nothing at all.
Ibogaine Success Rate: Why There Isn't One
Where the figures clinics quote actually come from, why none of them is a rate, and what the published follow-up record shows instead.
Tabernanthalog: Sold by the Kilogram, Never Given to a Human
Tabernanthalog has no registered trial and no human data. Manufacturers are offering it in kilogram quantities to ibogaine clinics, for research use.
What Ibogaine Is
A plant alkaloid, isolated in Paris in 1901, sold in France for decades and banned in America since 1970. What it is and how it got here.
What Science Doesn't Know Yet
An inventory of absences. Each one is a question somebody looked for and did not find, which is a different thing from a question nobody asked.
Biopiracy and the Nagoya Protocol
Gabon has been bound since 2014 and has legislated at home since 2019. What the protocol obliges, and what the international register actually shows.
The Babongo and Iboga
Bwiti's own account places them at its origin. The anthropology describes something more uncomfortable and more interesting than the Western telling.
The Bwiti: Peoples and Branches
Not one religion and not one people. The branch names circulating in English flatten a set of distinctions the scholarship keeps carefully apart.
The Bwiti Religion
A living initiatory religion in Gabon, with branches, a history and members. What the published record says, and where it stops.
The Iboga Ceremony
No two are the same, and that is not vagueness. Participants meet beforehand to decide how the ritual will run, and almost every vigil includes variations.
Overharvesting and the Threat to the Species
The species is assessed Least Concern with an empty threats table. No peer-reviewed study has ever counted a population or measured the harvest.
The Fang and Iboga
The best-known form of Bwiti is Fang, and it is the youngest. It emerged around 1910, probably in colonial forestry worksites.
Iboga in Gabon
An understorey shrub uprooted whole to harvest, a plant of national heritage, and an export the law has suspended. What the Gabonese texts actually say.
Bwiti Initiation
The secrecy is not a wall around a fact. Anthropologists describe it as a system that organises who stands where, which is why the content stays out.
Bwiti Instruments: the Ngombi, the Mongongo and the Rest
A harp, a mouth-resonated bow, struck sticks. What each one is, why the two best-known are constantly confused, and why the confusion is not simple.
The Ngil Mask That Sold for 4.2 Million Euros
A Fang mask bought for 150 euros resold for 4.2 million. A French court heard three claims on the money and rejected Gabon's along with the others.
What the West Gets Wrong About Bwiti
Fang Bwiti was born around 1910, probably in forestry worksites. That is the first of a dozen things the scholarship says and the coverage does not.
Mitsogo and Missoko: A People and a Rite
One is a people of southern Gabon. The other is a branch of Bwiti. They are not two options on the same menu, and the market treats them as if they were.
The Mitsogo and Iboga
The word Bwiti is theirs, and so is the branch with the fullest published record. Most of what English calls Bwiti was borrowed from them.
Bwiti Music and Ritual Instruments
The mongongo is not the harp. And the female harp presented as ancient turns out to be neither ancient nor originally what it now is.
Iboga and the Peoples of Gabon
Gabon has dozens of peoples and iboga belongs to some of them. Which ones, how the classifications work, and why the tidy lists should be distrusted.
Who Wrote Iboga Down
A British trader sent 141 Gabonese items to Oxford. His son, born in Libreville, wrote the first Gabonese account of the plants and the rites.
Fang and Kota Reliquary Figures in Western Museums
The objects that guarded ancestral remains are now in American museums, accessioned in 2002 and 2005. Their own records do not say how they left.
Iboga as a Rite of Passage
Two different things are both called initiation. One marks a stage of life, the other answers a misfortune, and the English word hides the difference.
Roi Denis and the Convention of 1839
Two leagues of the estuary, ceded in perpetuity for cloth, powder, guns, tobacco, brandy and ten white hats. Everything else came through that door.
After Treatment: Integration and Relapse
The most dangerous week is the one after. If you stopped opioids and then use again, your tolerance is gone and the dose that was normal can kill you.
Ibogaine Treatment in Canada
Not a controlled drug, but a prescription drug that is not authorised for use. The regulator's stated reason for listing it was seizure powers.
How to Evaluate an Ibogaine Clinic
Nobody accredits ibogaine providers. The body most of them cite is a dormant company in strike-off proceedings, registered as a conference organiser.
What Ibogaine Treatment Costs
One independent study puts a clinical stay at seven to ten thousand dollars. Every other figure comes from a seller. What the number hides.
Where to Get Ibogaine Treatment: The Legal Map
Where to get ibogaine treatment, answered with law rather than names. No directory, no provider, no referral fee. Unscheduled rarely means permitted.
Ibogaine Treatment in Florida
Florida lists ibogaine by name in its own Schedule I. And no bill has ever proposed ibogaine research or access there, unlike nine other states.
Ibogaine Treatment in Mexico
Most ibogaine clinics serving Americans are in Mexico, because its drug law does not name the substance. What that absence does, and what it does not.
What an Ibogaine Treatment Actually Involves
The published protocols, hour by hour, and the gap none of them close. Every one stops monitoring inside the window in which people have died.
Ibogaine Treatment in New Zealand
The only country where it can lawfully be prescribed. It is also where a regulator found a clinic operated unsafely, and where a study records a death.
Ibogaine in Oregon: The Bill That Did Not Pass
Oregon HB 4110 would have let physicians provide ibogaine. It died in committee, and the state says so in its own end-of-session report.
Red Flags: When to Walk Away
A regulator investigated a death and found one page of written procedures. These are the warnings that were visible beforehand.
Iboga Retreats vs Medical Clinics
Researchers surveyed 49 psychedelic retreats. A third excluded cardiovascular conditions. Fifty-nine per cent said facilitators dosed during ceremonies.
Ibogaine Treatment in South Africa
Scheduled as a prescription medicine and separately required to be registered. Nothing is registered, and that combination is what actually binds.
Ibogaine Therapy Explained
It is called therapy. In the flagship study, no psychotherapy occurred during treatment at all and the experience was completely self-guided.
Ibogaine Treatment in Texas
Texas put fifty million dollars into ibogaine trials and still offers no lawful treatment. What the programme is, and what it changes for you now.
Ibogaine Treatment in Tijuana
There is no Tijuana rule and no Baja California rule. The only standard that reaches an ibogaine clinic there is a national addiction norm from 2009.
Ibogaine Treatment in the United States
Three lawful routes exist on paper and none is open in practice. In 2025 a man was sentenced to 48 months for distributing ibogaine in a case involving a death.
Ibogaine for Veterans: What Access Actually Looks Like
The most-cited ibogaine evidence in veterans is one cohort of thirty men, and it is not the only cohort. What the route involves, and who pays.