What Ibogaine Feels Like

This is the question people ask first, and it has a better answer than it used to. Until recently everything written about it came from individual accounts. There is now one large measurement, and it disagrees with the accounts in interesting ways.

The seven dimensions

The Ibogaine Experience Scale asked 499 people what had happened to them, most of them on site and the rest within a day or two. Seven distinct dimensions came out of the analysis.

That those separate statistically is itself the finding. The experience is not one thing with a volume knob. Someone can have a great deal of one dimension and almost none of another, and two accounts that sound contradictory can both be accurate.

How long, really

The same study gives the best duration figures available.

Two thirds put their most intense effects between the second and fourth hour. The mean total duration was about nineteen hours. Individual answers ran from almost nothing to eighty-five, a spread the paper reports alongside a standard deviation too small to be consistent with it — one of several reasons to treat the extremes cautiously.

A hospital series in the Netherlands measured it from the outside instead: the subjective experience lasted three to seven hours in fourteen patients given a single 10 mg/kg dose under continuous monitoring.

The timings everyone quotes have a shaky origin

Almost every description of ibogaine uses a three-phase scheme: an acute or visionary phase of four to eight hours, an evaluative phase of eight to twenty, and a residual phase running a day or more.

That scheme comes from a 2001 review whose author described it plainly as a composite built from interviews with patients and treatment guides together with general descriptions in the literature. It was never an observational study.

The part accounts leave out

Reading first-hand reports, you would not know how physically incapacitating this is.

In the Dutch hospital series, every one of the fourteen patients was unable to walk without support. Ataxia peaked two to six hours after the dose and needed a nurse to reach the bathroom. Most had recovered by twenty-four hours; five had not, and were clear a day later.

Nausea and vomiting are among the most commonly reported effects, and they matter beyond discomfort: vomiting depletes potassium, and low potassium lengthens the QT interval further. What the side effects are sets out the full documented list.

Why two people differ so much

Part of the variation is what people bring. Part of it is pharmacology, and that part is measurable.

Ibogaine is converted by a liver enzyme, CYP2D6, whose activity varies widely between people on genetic grounds. In the Dutch series, clearance rose by about thirty litres per hour for each point of genotype activity score, from a baseline near zero. Two people of the same weight given the same milligrams per kilogram are not receiving the same exposure, and the genotype is almost never measured beforehand.

Noribogaine covers that in full, including why the experience ending is not the same as the drug leaving.

What it is not like

The comparison people reach for is a psychedelic trip, and most accounts resist it. The word that recurs is oneiric: dreaming while awake, often with the sense of watching one’s own life rather than participating in it. It lasts several times longer than psilocybin or LSD, the visual character is different, and the physical load is far heavier.

Ibogaine and psilocybin sets the two against each other on evidence rather than on feel.

The thing that will not feel like anything

This page is about sensation, so it should end on the one part that has none.

The mechanism that kills people on ibogaine produces no symptom whatsoever. A prolonged QT interval cannot be felt. There is no fluttering, no pain, no warning, and the arrhythmia can begin many hours after someone believes the difficult part has passed.

Every account you read was written by somebody for whom that did not happen. Ibogaine and the heart is the page that matters more than this one.