The Dreaming

The Dreaming

(This article was originally published in the UK newspaper "The Independent on Sunday", 28th March 1999)

Preparing Iboga rootbark for ritual purposes

Could the root of an obscure African plant contain the secret to combatting addiction? The search for a substance capable of breaking the chains of chemical dependency - the so-called "magic bullet" - is one of the enduring preoccupations of modern medicine. Most people have concluded that the search is a futile one - that addiction is a disease without cure. Yet a growing alliance of activists claim that conventional wisdom is wrong: there is a substance capable of ending an addicts' craving for a fix - it is called ibogaine, and it is said to possess miraculous powers of healing.

Ibogaine is a naturally occurring alkaloid found in the root of an African plant called tabernathe iboga. In Africa, ibogaine is used in religious ceremonies to induce visions, but in the West, it is being used to treat addictions to heroin, cocaine, alcohol and nicotine. Howard Lotsof, the man who first drew attention to ibogaine's anti-addictive properties, claims that after a single dose of ibogaine most people abstain from using drugs for more than three months. It is an astonishing boast to make on behalf of a drug that is illegal in America, and almost unheard of in Britain. If ibogaine were made widely available, Lotsof believes the effects would be revolutionary: "I think there could easily be a 30 per cent reduction in drug use within three years - for many drugs of abuse, that is."

So far, there is little hard data to assess ibogaine's performance. Despite the reams of testimony posted on the Internet, the drug remains an expensive luxury and is comparatively rare; only about 300 people have been treated with it in the past decade. I decided to find someone who had taken ibogaine and could vouch for it's effects. Chris Sanders, the organiser of the Ibogaine Project in London, did not know of anyone in the UK who had taken the drug; nor did Howard Lotsof. But Karl Naeher, whose "clinic" in northern Italy is the only place in Europe where Ibogaine treatments are currently available, told me he had recently treated an Englishman called Richard.