Ibogaine in Colorado

What Proposition 122 actually did

Colorado voters approved the Natural Medicine Health Act in November 2022. It does two separate things, and conflating them is the source of nearly every wrong statement about ibogaine in Colorado.

It decriminalised personal use and possession of a named set of natural medicines: psilocybin, psilocin, ibogaine, DMT and mescaline other than peyote. This is not a reading of ours. The Colorado Legislative Council Staff put it plainly in the fiscal note to a 2026 bill: “The personal use and possession of ibogaine was decriminalized as a part of Proposition 122.”

It created a regulated programme of licensed healing centres where an approved natural medicine may be administered by a trained facilitator. That programme opened with psilocybin. Ibogaine is not in it.

Three routes exist on paper in Colorado, and none of them gets a person ibogaine today.

And the federal offence stands. Possession of a Schedule I substance is a federal crime in Colorado exactly as it is in every other state. A state declining to prosecute is not a state granting permission, and it binds no federal agency.

The road to the regulated programme

Colorado did not simply exclude ibogaine and stop there. The Act required the Natural Medicine Advisory Board to study whether it should be added.

In 2025 the board recommended inclusion, with a condition that has no parallel elsewhere in American drug policy: that the medicine be acquired through the Nagoya Protocol, the international framework governing access to genetic resources and the sharing of benefits with the communities that hold them.

Ibogaine is therefore inside the statutory definition of natural medicine, conditionally. The definition reaches it on the board’s recommendation, but a substance only enters the regulated programme once the executive director of the Department of Revenue approves its inclusion, and that approval has not been given. The fiscal note records a further condition: the department must have sufficient funding to run the programme before any substance is added.

So ibogaine is named in the statute and absent from the healing centres. Those are different things, and conflating them is where most reporting on Colorado goes wrong.

HB 26-1325, and what it is conditional on

In 2026 the legislature passed HB 26-1325, sponsored by Representatives Caldwell and Feret with Senators Ball and Pelton. The Governor signed it on 4 June 2026 and it took effect on 12 August 2026. Its ibogaine provisions are modest in money and unusual in design.

A research pilot, if funded

Conditional on receiving $150,000 in gifts, grants or donations, and on federal approval, the Behavioral Health Administration must create a pilot programme on the safety and effectiveness of ibogaine for mental health conditions and substance use disorders. Up to five pilot sites may be approved. The BHA must help those sites file an investigational new drug application with the federal government.

No state money

The fiscal note is explicit: no appropriation is required, and the administration may spend donations without one. Projected revenue and expenditure is $151,536 in FY 2026-27 and $154,670 in FY 2027-28. Set against Texas at $50 million, Colorado has built the mechanism and left others to pay for it.

A semi-synthetic pathway, added rather than substituted

The definition of natural medicine, as set out above, already reaches ibogaine on the board’s recommendation. What the bill adds is “ibogaine derived from a semi-synthetic process using the tabernanthe iboga plant or voacanga africana plant” and, more consequentially, it carves that out of the general exclusion of anything produced by chemical synthesis, modification or conversion. Plain ibogaine stays in on the existing route, and the bill’s own declaration describes it as derived from root bark. The board may also recommend further genera that could be cultivated to produce semi-synthetic ibogaine, naming Tabernanthe, Voacanga africana and Tabernaemontana, which is a quiet acknowledgement that harvesting Tabernanthe iboga root bark at scale is not a sustainable supply route.

Medical rules attached

The Department of Regulatory Agencies must adopt requirements for the use and administration of ibogaine: medical prescreening, continuous medical monitoring during a session, oversight by trained medical professionals, and extended integration or aftercare. Given that the danger here is cardiac, prescreening is the provision that matters, and the statute names the instrument: an electrocardiogram, along with blood tests and genetic tests.

The benefit-sharing requirement

One clause deserves separating out, because no other US state has anything like it.

A licensee seeking to cultivate, manufacture, test, dispense or administer ibogaine must establish a benefit-sharing plan that directly benefits indigenous communities, in consultation with those communities or their authorised representative, and must document that consultation.

The asymmetry is worth noting. For a licensee under the healing-centre statute, consultation is mandatory. For a research pilot site, the plan is required but the consultation only may be undertaken, and internationally recognised principles of equitable benefit sharing are something an applicant may consider.

Iboga is a sacrament of the Bwiti tradition in Gabon, where the plant is protected as national heritage and is already under pressure from overharvesting and trafficking. A Colorado licensee cannot begin work without addressing that first. Whether the requirement produces real reciprocity or a compliance document is an open question, and the drafting gives a partial answer already: the obligation is firmest where a business is licensed and softest where the research happens.

The wider issue is covered in the Bwiti and Gabon section.

Where this leaves a Colorado resident

Holding a small amount for personal use is no longer a state offence. Everything else is unchanged.

There is no shop, no clinic and no facilitator who may lawfully give you ibogaine. Buying it means an unregulated supplier, usually online, with no assurance of what is in the package and no cardiac screening at any point. That is the scenario behind most of the deaths on record, and decriminalisation makes it more likely rather than less, because it removes a deterrent without adding a safe route.

If the pilot programme is funded and federal approval arrives, five sites may eventually run research under medical supervision. That is the realistic path, and it is not a treatment offer.

Colorado in context

Colorado is the only state to have gone beyond research funding. Nine states have legislated on ibogaine since 2025 and eight of them did the same thing, which is to build a route into the federal trial system: Texas with $50 million, Arizona with $5 million, Kentucky, Mississippi and Oklahoma with frameworks and no money. Colorado alone changed what happens to a person holding the substance.

It also did the least with public money. The pilot is funded by donations, and the $151,536 projected for its first year is three ten-thousandths of what Texas put up. Set against that, the Nagoya condition and the benefit-sharing plan are the more consequential exports: no other American instrument on this subject asks where the plant came from.

The federal position explains why decriminalising possession is the outer limit of what any state can do, why ibogaine is illegal explains how the federal listing came about, and the status by country table sets out the regimes available elsewhere.