Of the iboga documentaries we could verify, exactly one depicts serious harm. It shows a client collapsing onto life support and the provider going to prison. The rest range from independent to made by people with a direct stake, and this page tells you which is which.
Film has done more to move opinion on this subject than the medical literature has. That makes it worth knowing who made each one and what they stood to gain.
The films we could verify
| Film | Director | Year | Origin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ibogaine, Rite of Passage | Ben De Loenen | 2004 | Netherlands, 50 min |
| Iboga Nights | David Graham Scott | 2014 | United Kingdom, 94 min |
| Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, series 3 episode 4 | — | broadcast series | VICE TV, 44 min |
| In Waves and War | Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk | 2024 | United States, 107 min |
| I’m Dangerous with Love | Michel Negroponte | 2009 or 2010 | United States |
The one that shows what can go wrong
Iboga Nights, 2014, won best British film at a documentary festival and was supported by the British Council. Its own synopsis records that one client collapses and ends up on life support, and the provider is jailed. The director ends the film grappling with the ethics of having involved himself so deeply in a controversial detox option.
That is the only film on this list that depicts a serious adverse outcome, and it is the one we would suggest watching first. Not because harm is the whole story, but because every other film you will encounter assumes it away.
The one driving current policy
In Waves and War, 2024, premiered at Telluride and reached Netflix in November 2025. Its production companies are established documentary houses.
Its subjects are also the interested party, and the chain is worth setting out because it is not hidden, merely unmentioned in the film’s reception.
The couple at its centre founded a veterans’ organisation in 2019. That organisation collaborated on the Stanford study the film features, and has funded treatment for over a thousand people. And that study’s own competing-interests statement records that three authors are shareholders in the company that offers the ibogaine treatment, and that one founded a company dedicated to sourcing and converting ibogaine precursors.
None of that makes the veterans’ experiences untrue. It means a documentary about a study is made by, and about, people who own part of the treatment. Ibogaine for PTSD sets out what that study does and does not establish, including that its headline instruments do not appear in its public registration.
The first one, and a sequence worth noticing
Ibogaine, Rite of Passage, 2004, screened at Rotterdam and is generally treated as the film that introduced the subject to a European audience. It was independent when made.
Five years later its director founded an organisation that now runs an iboga community engagement initiative and conducts research on therapeutic ibogaine. We note the order: film first, advocacy organisation afterwards. That is a different situation from making a film about your own programme, and it is not nothing either.
What we are not listing, and why
Several titles appear on lists of iboga documentaries. We could not verify them to a primary source, one film-database service refused our requests throughout, and in at least one case the reference cited on the source list appeared to be promotional material rather than a distributor record.
Rather than pad this page, we have left them off. If a title you have heard of is missing, that is the reason.
The 2019 film Dosed does involve iboga and ibogaine.
Its 2022 sequel, Dosed: The Trip of a Lifetime, does not. It follows a terminally ill cancer patient using psilocybin. It is routinely listed as an iboga documentary on the strength of the shared title, and it is not one. The sequel was also distributed by its own production company, which is worth knowing when weighing how a film reached you.
How to watch any of them
The same method this site applies to a study applies to a film.
Who paid, and what do they hold? A production company with no stake is a different proposition from an organisation that funds treatment.
Who is not in it? Almost every iboga documentary follows people for whom it worked, and none follows the seventy per cent who relapsed in the largest follow-up study, or the families in the fatality series.
Where does it stop? Films end at the moment of transformation, which in the published cohorts is where the measured effect is at its maximum, before it declines. When ibogaine doesn’t work is the part after the credits.
What does it show about the room? Monitoring equipment, medical staff, distance to a hospital. A camera records these whether or not the film comments on them.
Common questions
Sources
3 sources · How we source
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