How the Psychedelic Right Embraced an African Plant

O
n a crisp November day in Aspen, Colorado, Rick Perry is stumping for iboga, a psychedelic shrub native to the Congo Basin rainforest in Central Africa known for producing powerful waking dreams. It is the heart of Bwiti, a centuries-old spiritual discipline primarily practiced in Gabon, and recently, the darling of the American psychedelic right. “ Take on the mantle of being the Johnny Appleseed of iboga, every one of you,” the former governor of Texas tells the audience while a delegation from Gabon watches impassively. “The medicine clearly showed me things that I’d never seen before,” Perry later tells me. “In the presence of God, I knew it — he loves me with great intensity. Pure white light.”

How iboga made its way from the jungles of Gabon to the lips of Rick Perry is a story that often feels like a waking dream itself. Just a few years ago, “the psychedelic right” would have sounded like a record-needle scratch, but as more and more veterans find healing from psychedelics, and return to tell the tale in masculine and religious terms, a new demographic of Americans is getting hip to the fact that psychedelics are plants of divine providence. Iboga is “from God, from eternity,” one Bwiti elder in Aspen tells me. Meanwhile, Perry says iboga may be the biblical tree of life. “The leaves of the tree will heal the nations,” he predicts, quoting Revelations 22:2.

Perry and his wingman, Bryan Hubbard, an eloquent lawyer who would be played by Zach Galifianakis in the movie version of this story, are the main evangelists behind Americans for Ibogaine, a lobbying group that hosted the conference in Aspen. They were there to build on their recent success in Texas; last summer, after a landslide vote in the legislature, Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 2308 into law, placing $50 million of longhorn taxpayer money toward studying ibogaine, the main active molecule in iboga (much like psilocybin in “magic” mushrooms), with hopes of developing a new drug that can curb opioid addiction. This means that Texas, a place where weed is still illegal, is now the top state investor in psychedelic research.

And not just any psychedelic.

In Aspen, everyone kept referring to ibogaine as a dark horse. “It was really a niche within a niche,” says Dalibor Sames, a chemistry professor at Columbia University who thinks ibogaine could be the next “antibiotic” in terms of its impact on humanity. “It was even a niche within psychedelic-underground culture.”

Now, Americans for Ibogaine wants to take it mainstream. While initial research suggests it could be an effective treatment for a wide range of conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Americans for Ibogaine focuses on opioid addiction, which kills nearly 10 times as many people today as in 1999. Small studies suggest it can dramatically reduce opioid dependence — often with just one dose.

“There’s nothing that comes close to being as powerful a negative-pattern interrupter,” says Trevor Millar, co-founder of Ambio Life Sciences, an ibogaine clinic in Mexico, where the drug is unregulated. Other psychedelics might help someone psychologically get past addiction, “but nothing’s going to cut through those withdrawals that come from opiates. Ibogaine is the only thing we know that can do that.”

So far, more than a dozen states have passed legislation to study ibogaine, including Arizona, home of former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who retired from the Senate in 2024. Sinema, alongside Perry, has emerged as a leading champion for ibogaine, although her advocacy has drawn scrutiny; one recent whistleblower complaint alleges she has not abided by the mandatory two-year cooling-off period designed to prevent former federal employees from lobbying. Sinema, in response, said she was acting as a private citizen speaking for an issue “I care very personally about.”

Either way, ibogaine’s popularity has already made the jump from a few former politicians turned believers to institutions with far-reaching influence. In December, the American Legislative Exchange Council jumped on board to promote ibogaine in a model bill, the first time the conservative think tank has ever recommended anything pertaining to drugs other than increasing penalties.

Then, on April 18th, the Trump Administration signed a landmark Executive Order expediting psychedelic research, including on ibogaine. The directive also orders the Department of Health and Human Services to “allocate at least $50 million from existing funds to support and partner with State governments” – such as Texas – that are already developing psychedelic drugs. 

“This decisive step [is] to confront one of the most urgent public health challenges facing our nation, the mental health crisis,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while Joe Rogan, who was reportedly the middleman between Americans for Ibogaine and President Trump on the shift in federal policy, stood by his side.

Yet for all of the breathless enthusiasm surrounding iboga, scientists admit they have only a nascent idea of how it works. “When you take iboga, they call you a banzi, which means you’re a ‘baby,’” says Joseph Barsuglia, a clinical psychologist, paid adviser to a number of ibogaine clinics, and Bwiti practitioner. “You’re reset to this innocence.”

“Banzi” is also the perfect word for where the West is in its relationship to iboga, raising complex questions about how traditional experts in Gabon should be compensated if Texas succeeds in developing an iboga-derived drug. “I’m a 10-year student in Bwiti, and I’m in preschool,” Barsuglia admits. Jonathan Dickinson, another ibogaine researcher who has been initiated into Bwiti, agrees: “There’s a lot of thought that’s gone into that for a very long time. Brilliant scholars designed that, you know?”

‘Gabon’s Gift to the World’?

Before iboga came to the West — before, even, it was the sacrament of Bwiti — it was stewarded by the Babongo people, also known (nonpejoratively in Gabon) as the Pygmies. No one knows for sure how iboga traveled from deep inside the rainforest, where the Babongo traditionally reside, to the various other ethnic groups who use it today. According to anthropologist James W. Fernandez, who wrote an ethnography about Bwiti in 1982, one branch, Fang Bwiti, developed partially in response to French colonial rule. Many Fang men were exposed to the Bwiti religion and iboga in French lumber camps — similar to how in Brazil ayahuasca spread among rubber tappers in the early 20th century as a way to resist and heal from colonization.

Bwiti ceremonies often involve harp music, drumming, and dancing. Some rituals emphasize the retrieval of one’s spiritual name. Others are about balancing masculine and feminine principles, using white and red body paint to represent the two.

According to Me Boubeyi Bouale, grand master of the Missoko branch of Bwiti, an initiate would be asked, “Who is your mother? The mother of your mother — who is she?” The goal is to go back as many generations as possible; Bouale says he stopped at 10. The point is to show “there are no fences between the world of the dead and the world of the living,” he says in French via an interpreter. “The link is always working.”

Iboga’s association with addiction came much later, in Lexington, Kentucky, at the first U.S. “Narcotic Farm,” a type of Progressive Era prison that the U.S. experimented with starting in the 1930s to try to treat drug addiction more humanely. Nestled into the bluegrass hills, inmate-patients could play golf, milk cows, or take up in the farm’s jazz band, packed with so many hepcats like Benny Green, Chet Baker, and Sonny Rollins that some addicts would reportedly get locked up on purpose just to practice their scales. During the 1950s, they were also, thanks to MKUltra, the CIA’s covert mind-control program, given a lot of drugs for free.

In 1955, Narcotic Farm doctor Harris Isbell is credited with conducting the first known experiment linking ibogaine to addiction treatment when he gave 250 mgs each to eight Black morphine addicts. Due to the secretive nature of the program, not much else about this initial human trial is known. Seven years later, in New York, a 19-year-old heroin addict named Howard Lotsof unwittingly repeated the Kentucky experiment when a chemist friend suggested he try ibogaine for fun. After a distinctly not-fun trip that lasted some 30 hours, Lotsof was surprised to realize he had no desire to shoot up. Amazed by this unexpected side effect, Lotsof gave ibogaine to several fellow addicts, and most of them also reported immediately kicking their habit — unheard of in the world of heroin-addiction recovery.

Ibogaine access became Lotsof’s life purpose until his death in 2010. In 1987, with the help of the esteemed Gabonese pharmacologist Jean-Noël Gassita, Lotsof, his wife, Norma, and their colleague Bob Sisko traveled to Gabon where they met with President Omar Bongo, himself a student of Bwiti. In an exchange recorded in the 1997 book The Ibogaine Story, Lotsof invoked the legacy of slavery, insinuating that if Bongo gave him a supply, he would be able to help African Americans suffering from addiction, descendants of those “kidnapped perhaps from this very land.” Bongo was astonished to learn Lotsof had eaten iboga, and agreed to give him 40 kilos of the bark. “This will be Gabon’s gift to the world,” he purportedly told Lotsof.

Following his visit to Gabon, Lotsof filed several ibogaine patents, and almost got an FDA trial off the ground in 1995. But it wasn’t completed due to lack of funding, as well as concerns about cardiotoxicity following a woman’s death during an ibogaine treatment in the Netherlands in a clinic overseen by Lotsof. Now, 30 years later, Americans for Ibogaine is determined to finish what Howard and Norma Lotsof started.

An Awakening in Appalachia

After “dark horse,” the second most common term I heard in Aspen was “moon shot.” Americans for Ibogaine’s initial idea was for Texas to put up $50 million of public money — an amount that only the wealthiest biotech companies and philanthropists have traditionally committed to psychedelic research — and find a private drug developer to do a dollar match. This public-private entity was supposed to then execute a single FDA trial. But on March 31, Texas announced a major pivot: It now plans to develop the drug alone. The reason given by state Rep. Cody Harris? None of the applicants were willing to give the state 20 percent of all commercial revenue. Now, the medical-research center UTHealth Houston will carry out the FDA trial, with lawmakers promising to shake the missing $50 million out of the state’s oil-flush budget next January.

To date, it seems that no state has ever developed a drug, placing Texas in deep, uncharted waters. But the move also reflects a dawning realization among both Republicans and Democrats that states are going to have to take charge on funding psychedelic research given the federal government’s previous aversion. “If we’re gonna sit around and wait for the federal government, we’re not gonna be successful,” Perry advised the audience presciently in November. “They will follow our lead though.”

Were Americans for Ibogaine just a Rick Perry venture, it would be easier to dismiss as the trippiest new form of extractive capitalism. But the picture is somewhat complicated by Bryan Hubbard, its CEO.

Raised by union coal miners in Virginia and educated at the University of Kentucky, where he received his law degree, Hubbard was exposed to the opioid epidemic while working for a Kentucky firm that handled Walmart’s worker-compensation claims. Yet despite also being from Appalachia, Hubbard is no J.D. Vance. Instead, he preaches with such a grip on class consciousness that often I wondered, in Aspen, whether the spirit of Mother Jones had possessed his body.

“The Gabonese were doing it for centuries. If we do whatever we want, we’re gonna fail.”

“The arrogance of Western empiricism,” he opened the conference in his Holy Ghost drawl, “has driven a tremendous amount of scientific advancement and the improvement of the human condition.” But, he acknowledged, so-called progress has also “been a double-edged sword” for many Indigenous and poor people, who have given up their “knowledge and resources” in exchange for nothing but “hardship.” Having watched corporations strip coal out of his native Virginia and dump OxyContin back in, Hubbard knows this pattern well. The only way to heal it with respect to iboga, he says, is to insist on “cultural and economic reciprocity” with Gabon, so that “the traumas imposed on my people … are not replicated in any project that I have anything to do with.”

“Traumas imposed on my people” is not your standard GOP bootstrapping talk. Rather, Hubbard’s politics come down to God and smart spending. “The separation from the reality of divine love is the source of all human suffering,” Hubbard tells me. “There is not an institution within American society that has the credibility to reestablish spiritual reality. Not the government, not the chamber of commerce, not the organized church. It has got to come from on high. Which means it comes straight from the ground.”

In 2022, Hubbard was tapped to chair Kentucky’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, a task force charged with sagely investi­ng the state’s $842 million of opioid settlement money. He was maddened by the treatment options: abstinence combined with an opioid derivative such as methadone or Suboxone. He crunched Kentucky’s Medicaid numbers. According to his estimates, the average person, in an attempt to get clean, goes through the system five times, costing taxpayers roughly $700,000. There had to be a better way.

‘Like I’d Been Given a New Brain’

Hubbard first encountered the word “ibogaine” on Julia Reibelt’s Substack, “The Journey,” in 2022. But it was a phone conversation with a woman named Juliana Mulligan that would change his path forever. Today, Mulligan is a licensed psychotherapist who specializes in ibogaine-assisted therapy. In her youth, she struggled with opioid addiction.

In 2011, in a desperate attempt to save her own life, Mulligan traveled to a clinic offering ibogaine in Guatemala City — and nearly died. The doctor had accidentally given her twice the safe dose, causing her to go into cardiac arrest. “[He] thought he had a magical shamanic ability to know how much ibogaine I needed, which meant he was not measuring the dose at all,” she recounted in Aspen.

But when Mulligan awoke in the hospital, her first thought wasn’t anger or fear — it was freedom. “Oh, my God,” she thought. “This is the future of substance-use-disorder treatment.” The cravings were gone. So was the guilt and shame. “I literally felt like I had been given a new brain,” she says. “I saw all of those years of suffering as my internship.”

Despite almost dying, Mulligan was “on fire” for ibogaine, and dreamed of somehow making it an FDA-approved treatment, a process that can cost up to a billion dollars due to the high costs of clinical trials. Now, here was Hubbard, a government insider with potential access to major money. By 2023, Hubbard had hatched a now-familiar plan: Take $42 million from Kentucky’s opioid settlement fund, find a private drug developer to match the amount, and initiate an FDA trial. He floated the unorthodox idea to Daniel Cameron, the former attorney general of Kentucky. Cameron, who was running for governor as a Republican, seemed on board. But before the initiative could get off the ground, Cameron lost to Andy Beshear — a Democrat who still makes Hubbard’s lip curl — and the political winds changed.

Just miles from the Lexington Narcotic Farm, Hubbard watched his dream to bring ibogaine back to Kentucky die on the vine. Demoralized, he took the idea to Ohio, then South Dakota, but it was deemed too outlandish, and state budgets were strapped. Finally, in August 2024, the nonprofit Texans for Greater Mental Health, which advocates for psychedelic policy, came calling. The state legislature was about to have a $16 billion budget surplus, they informed him. Texas, they wagered, was ready for its next big project.

Hubbard’s next call was to ex.-Gov. Perry, who had been supportive of ibogaine for some time after watching it transform the lives of Marcus and Morgan Luttrell, brothers and Navy SEALs who used ibogaine to treat PTSD. “ I ain’t from your state and don’t want to come in as an outsider without a horse to ride,” Hubbard recalls telling Perry. “Is this something you might want to get interested in?”

“Well, you know, I left office in 2015,” Perry replied. “The new guy never likes the old guy hanging around, so I’ve stayed pretty well out of sight. But this is the most important thing I could possibly do with the rest of my life.”

A ‘Living Entity’?

One POV notably absent in the Texas Legislature last summer was that of Gabon. In Aspen, a motley delegation was trying to establish a dialogue. In its ranks were Ambassador Noël Nelson Messone and several members of Blessings of the Forest, an NGO that often acts as a middleman between Gabon and the West on matters of iboga, facilitating the first and only fair-trade shipment of it in 2023. Also present was Stéphane Lasme, a former NBA player whose company, Reset Health, is in the running to supply iboga to UTHealth Houston. But the most commanding presence in the group was Me Moubeyi Bouale, the Bwiti grand master.

“We shouldn’t call it a drug, but a ‘scanner’ that reads what needs adjusting in the body and brain.”

Initiated into Bwiti by his father after he completed law school, Bouale now leads an organization of about 3,000 practitioners and 69 temples across Gabon. Wearing a knit skull cap and speaking French, Bouale explained that traditional medicine has been declining in Gabon for a long time. Logging has pushed elephants out of the jungle and into villages. Villagers, in turn, have left their homes for the city. Now, due to increased demand, the same poachers who hunt ivory are hunting iboga (though there are other sources of ibogaine, such as the Voacanga plant, which many clinics are now using to reduce pressure on the slow-growing iboga shrub). Whereas before, Bwiti practitioners would simply walk into the forest, find an iboga plant, and strip the root bark, now they must walk for days to find enough for a ceremony. In some cases, alcohol is being used as a substitute.

While there is no monolithic opinion in Gabon about whether iboga should be shared with the West, or how, there is a general consensus that Gabon needs to receive a share of any windfall derived — simple in theory, but revolutionary in practice. According to U.S. law, plants cannot be patented, but modified compounds can. Historically, this has meant that pharmaceutical companies can profit off medicines like aspirin without ever paying Indigenous people, even though they were the ones who first treated sick settlers with willow bark, later found to contain salicylic acid, which Bayer then tweaked into aspirin. Today, some estimates put yearly sales of aspirin around $2.5 billion.

Now, Bouale is on a mission to make sure iboga doesn’t go the way of the willow. Speaking virtually last summer at the biennial conference hosted by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, Bouale argued that ibogaine is “not a chemical formula,” but a “living entity” that grants singular knowledge about self and the divine. “We are not against research,” he said. “We are not against worldwide access to this medicine.… But we are against postcolonial erasure and amnesia.”

Bouale wants the U.S. to sign the Nagoya Protocol, a 2010 international treaty designed to ensure benefit-sharing from genetic resources. The Nagoya Protocol has been used successfully, if modestly, before: In 2019, South Africa compelled the rooibos-tea industry to pay the San and Khoi peoples 1.5 percent of their tea’s pre-export price, as they were the ones who first shared its benefits with the individuals who later commercialized it.

There is just one problem — the U.S. is not a signatory, nor is Texas interested in adopting its framework. “I thought Nagoya was a type of company that made Mexican food down in Texas,” replied Perry when I brought it up in Aspen. “I think you’re narrowly focusing on a very tiny little sliver that may or may not make any difference.”

‘This Is Going to Save My Life’

Chase Rowan, an Army Ranger who credits ibogaine for saving his life, thinks the Gabonese perspective is paramount. “They know what the fuck they’re doing,” he says of the Bwiti healers. “They were doing it for centuries. If we want to just take ibogaine and do whatever we want to do, we’re gonna fail.”

Rowan is one of the spokespeople for Americans for Ibogaine. A self-described “adrenaline junkie” who had previously struggled with substance abuse, he deployed to northern Iraq in 2005, where he “saw a whole lot of stuff.” Then, in a freak accident a month after returning home to Fort Worth, Texas, he jumped out of a plane during a routine training exercise, and his parachute malfunctioned. He hit the runway going 50 mph, and though he miraculously survived, he received eight staples in his head, and had trouble walking for six months. Somehow, he was not in terrible pain, he says. But when the doctors asked him if he was, “the addict came out in me.”

“Yeah, I got a little pain,” he told them.

Within six months of going to the Department of Veterans Affairs for the first time, Rowan says, he was getting 60 OxyContin, 60 Adderall, and 45 Klonopin in the mail on the first of every month. The VA, he says, was the “greatest drug dealer” ever. OxyContin led him to heroin. Heroin led him to fentanyl. He went to rehab twice — “it was awesome,” he says, “like high school” — but would relapse as soon as he was stressed.

In 2022, after his second time totaling his car while driving high, his wife took the kids and left. Alone, unemployed, and in the depths of withdrawal, Rowan fixated on suicide — a fate that had claimed seven of his veteran friends. He wrote his letters and made plans to hang himself in the garage. It was April 29, 2023.

He remembers the date because the next day he happened to hear Joe Rogan interviewing Dakota Meyer, a fellow veteran, about how ibogaine helped him overcome his PTSD. Rowan, who knew nothing about ibogaine at the time, started bawling. “This is going to save my life,” he thought.

Rowan got himself to a psychedelic church run by Justin LaPree, a Marine veteran who connected him to the Mission Within, an ibogaine clinic in Mexico run by Dr. Martín Polanco. Polanco is widely celebrated for having apparently administered ibogaine to more people in the West than any other doctor; over the past 25 years, he’s reportedly treated more than 5,000 people, including 1,300 veterans. But Rowan’s hopes were dashed by the price: $6,500. “Fuck!” he told the lady on the phone. “I don’t have that.”

After white-knuckling sobriety for five months, Rowan eventually scraped together the money. He hopped on a plane to San Diego, where a van was waiting to take him to Tijuana. There, in a beautiful house overlooking the Pacific, he swallowed his first capsules of powdered ibogaine, and asked the most straightforward question he could think of: “Why do I use drugs and alcohol, and why can’t I stop?”

Rowan says ibogaine answered his question with a crystal-clear life review that he describes as “every addict’s dream.” He experienced himself as a 12-year-old, the night his mother woke him up and drunkenly told him that his dad had died. He saw his wife and kids chasing him, begging him to come back as he left on another bender. “But the crazy part,” says Rowan, is that ibogaine didn’t make him feel what he was feeling in those moments. “It allowed me to feel what they were feeling.”

‘A Deep Intelligence’

This kind of radical introspection is only part of ibogaine’s magic, says Dalibor Sames, the chemistry professor at Columbia. The other part is how it effectively eliminates opioid cravings and withdrawal symptoms, partially by detoxifying opioid receptors, allowing patients an opportunity to make new decisions without being influenced by intense cravings or pain. These new choices then get laid down in what scientists call a “critical learning window.”

According to Dr. Gül Dölen, an ibogaine researcher at UC Berkeley who spoke alongside Sames in Aspen, “ ibogaine seems to be special in that it reopens this window for the longest.” The concept of critical windows was popularized in the 1930s by the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, who found that geese hatchlings will form a lifelong bond with anything moving nearby in their first 48 hours of life. Now, science recognizes many more critical periods for learning skills like language and motor function. This may be why, Dölen speculated, there are anecdotal reports of injured patients walking again post-ibogaine.

If Dölen’s hypothesis is correct, it would track with how Bwiti members have long explained iboga as taking initiates back to the womb. “By returning initiates to the uterine condition … it restores them to their own integrity — their pristine conditions,” wrote Fernandez, the anthropologist.

Additionally, Sames tells me, ibogaine is unique in how the molecule seems to interact with multiple systems in the body at once. Traditionally, scientists have thought of pharmacology in terms of locks and keys: A drug binds to a receptor, triggering a change. Ibogaine, on the other hand, says Sames, “is just not doing that.” Instead, he describes it as an octopus whose tentacles are “brushing through and tweaking the entire living matrix.”

“We shouldn’t really call it a drug,” he says, musing that ibogaine is more like a “scanner” that reads, from a system-wide vantage, what needs adjusting in the brain, body, and spirit. Sames’ awe for ibogaine was perhaps one of the most striking parts of the conference, as was his willingness to describe the molecule as possessing a “deep intelligence” based on how it behaves at the neurochemical level — not so different from how Bwiti lore describes iboga, phenomenologically, as a teacher.

At the same time, Sames, like many of the researchers I spoke with, has a personal stake in wooing audiences with the miraculousness of ibogaine; in addition to being a professor, he is the co-founder of Gilgamesh Pharma, a biotech company that, in 2024, was awarded a $14 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop a safer ibogaine analogue — a chemical compound that is structurally similar but modified to reduce certain side effects. In the case of ibogaine, Gilgamesh wants to make a drug that minimizes its cardiac risks — a potential side effect that is likely to be its biggest hurdle in the eyes of the FDA.

According to one 2012 estimate, ibogaine fatalities occur in an estimated one out of 300 patients. Dr. Martijn Arns, a scientist who runs Brainclinics Foundation in the Netherlands, and is close to publishing an updated study, believes the more accurate number of deaths may be “tenfold less.”

Nevertheless, they still happen. In 2022, a patient died at Beond, a popular treatment center in Cancún, Mexico. Then, as I was writing this article, a patient died at Ambio, the clinic in Tijuana. “The increasing complexity of powerful synthetic opioids and numerous other additives that appear in street drugs introduce a complex and opaque set of variables that can be difficult to mitigate,” said Ambio in a statement, suggesting that fentanyl had been a factor in the patient’s death.

For Hubbard, these tragic outcomes are why ibogaine must be medicalized in the United States “so as to assure that there is a uniformly applied clinical standard that assures safety.” But he also counters that ibogaine deaths must be contextualized. “ In the United States, every year at least 3,000 people die of methadone overdoses, and it’s never talked about,” he tells me. Meanwhile, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 54,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2024.

Barsuglia, one of the researchers who’s been initiated into Bwiti, says Western doctors have much to learn from Bwiti experts about how to keep charges safe. Fatalities are generally attributed to how ibogaine can prolong the heart’s QT interval, meaning the organ takes too long to recharge between beats. To counteract this, the standard protocol is to give patients a magnesium drip, something that Bwiti healers accomplish with a banana. They also make patients sit upright to keep the heart from slowing, a basic yet effective technique. “One of my teachers, he saw our clinic, and he’s like, ‘You guys are putting people in the dead-man’s pose,’” Barsuglia tells me.

He feels certain such methods are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Bwiti knowledge about how to administer ibogaine safely. “There’s probably thousands of different rituals and plants and techniques they use to address the different things that can come up,” such as anxiety or dehydration, he says. “I’ve seen dozens, personally.” But, he reminds me, Bwiti is a protected oral tradition.

“I’m telling you things I know that are public, but there are things that only they could share.”

Stacking Psychedelics

Despite owning equity in clinics such as Beond, Barsuglia thinks conserving Bwiti access and knowledge is more important than getting ibogaine to the masses, an opinion that Americans for Ibogaine does not share. It’s easy to understand why; for individuals and families in the midst of suffering, there is no price too high for relief. One of the most chilling testimonies during the conference was from an athlete whose traumatic brain injury was so bad he wanted to hurt his children every time he heard the sound of their laughter; he credits ibogaine with saving his life and theirs.

But Americans for Ibogaine is also driven by something far higher-octane than ordinary human empathy, and that’s direct religious experience. Many of ibogaine’s biggest proponents have had vivid downloads of themselves as apostles tasked with spreading the gospel of plant medicine. (These visions, it should be noted, are not the product of white saviorism alone; there is also, in Gabon, Bwiti belief about how the time has come for iboga to travel abroad and heal humanity.)

But in a strange wrinkle to the story, many Westerners aren’t receiving this message from ibogaine, but from 5-MeO-DMT, a totally different psychedelic that many clinics are now offering as a complementary chaser to ibogaine. Also known as bufo, it is derived from the Sonoran Desert toad. Millar, who runs Ambio, says he is grateful for 5-MeO-DMT because it can speed up the recovery time from ibogaine, a 24- to 48-hour period that can involve intense nausea and vomiting. And, he says, it “puts an exclamation point at the end of the week.… It tends to be a very spiritual experience.”

At the Mission Within, Rowan received several exclamation points. His first two hits of bufo didn’t work; the staff reported he crawled on the floor saying, “I can’t be fixed.” But the third catapulted him into heaven, he says. He saw his seven Ranger buddies who had died by suicide, as well as other friends whose lives had ended prematurely due to addiction. “Then all of a sudden, my head gets turned very slowly,” Rowan recalls, and he knew it was God’s hand. Rowan was looking at a city full of people, but he couldn’t see their faces. He was made to understand he was looking at the people still in anguish on Earth. “You’re the conduit to get them to me,” God told him.

“I came out of that fucking medicine and stood up. I’m in a full-body sweat, tears. Fists clenched, flexing every muscle. I looked out over the ocean and was like, ‘Let’s fucking go.’”

Rowan had a classic, if testosterone-juiced, bodhisattva experience: the epiphany that no one is enlightened until all sentient beings have been freed from suffering.

“This makes me nervous to say this,” Rowan says, “but I feel such a strong calling right now that this is like a discipleship.”

Rowan left Tijuana feeling his life had meaning again. But not everyone thinks layering 5-MeO-DMT on top of ibogaine is a good idea. For one, it introduces two variables in the data, even if just anecdotally. Ibogaine is “not really officially what actually turned my life around completely,” Rowan tells me on the last day of the conference. “What turned my life [around] was 5-MeO-DMT.”

The unstudied combo also risks commodifying two extremely spiritual substances, says Mulligan, the therapist who nearly died from ibogaine. “Sometimes the best thing is for people to sit through that discomfort and work through it. We have this tendency within capitalism to think, ‘Oh, more is better.’ And that’s just not the case.”

Hubbard, for his part, says bufo helped his own ibogaine recovery tremendously. When I caught  up with him in March, he was on his way to a meeting at the Pentagon, and told me that ibogaine’s rollout in the U.S. is beginning “to take on an air of inevitability.” At the time, they seemed like bold words given how the FDA had just declined to fast-track a psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression. But Hubbard, ever the believer, was holding the vision. “We are in a race against time,” he said. Humanity is profoundly spiritually ill. “And the advancement of plant medicine is the best shot.”