7 ms·

What's frustrating is that Ibogaine has been known about for a long time. I remember reading, 20 years ago, about how Ibogaine had cured some people of alcoholi

What's frustrating is that Ibogaine has been known about for a long time. I remember reading, 20 years ago, about how Ibogaine had cured some people of alcoholism. It was all anecdotal at the time, but clearly there's something worth studying. I understand the hesitancy around drugs, but we've lost so much progress as a result of the bureaucratic red tape.

sunshine_reggae 3y ago
> What's frustrating is that Ibogaine has been known about for a long time. Not just Ibogaine - pretty much all of the "psychedelics". And it's just big pharma doing their evil deeds. Should have been obvious by now.
jdietrich 3y ago
Research has long been held up by legal obstacles, but articles like this are promoting an entirely false optimism about psychedelics. I live with a treatment-resistant mental illness, I have participated in clinical trials for psychedelics and I follow the field closely. Sadly, what we are seeing is almost certainly a hype bubble rather than a genuine breakthrough. We now have a useful body of research on psychedelics as a treatment for psychiatric disorders. We can be reasonably confident that they do indeed work, but the effect size in depression and anxiety appears to be very similar to SSRI antidepressants or cognitive behavioural therapy. Research into addiction is more limited, but plausible effect sizes are again comparable to existing treatments. We're much less confident about the risk profile (especially in real-world clinical settings), so any marginal benefits in efficacy might be outweighed by safety risks. Psychedelics might still prove useful as a second- or third-line treatment for a minority of patients, which I don't want to underplay - severe mental illness is truly awful and each additional patient in remission is a person given a second chance at life. They might provide insights that guide us towards better treatments in the future, but in this respect the NMDAR-agonists (ketamine etc) look far more promising. Unfortunately, the promise of psychedelics as a revolution in psychiatry is a busted flush. I wish I wasn't saying this, but the data doesn't care what my wishes are. We have reached the point in the curve where decent, well-meaning researchers are tinkering with the analysis post-hoc to try and make psychedelics look marginally more effective than existing treatments. A lot of money has been committed to research, the results are deeply disappointing, serious researchers are trying to salvage something useful, but all the while there's a steady drumbeat of deluded quacks and uninformed journalists continuing to peddle a narrative that has been thoroughly demolished. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8399008/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8399008/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278160/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278160/
worik 3y ago
Ibogain is dangerous Which is why researchers are looking at Psilocybin and LSD particularly Psilocybin as it is short acting making everything easier and cheaper I think they should look more at DMT. Businessman's acid.
ethanbond 3y ago
Remember that the bureaucratic red tape keeping these drugs from market has to do with moralism around psychoactive drugs. Plenty of other safe and effective treatments have made it through the “excessive” red tape because actually the red tape isn’t the issue. Dismissiveness and fear of psychoactivity is.
- naasking 3y ago
  > Plenty of other safe and effective treatments have made it through the “excessive” red tape because actually the red tape isn’t the issue. Dismissiveness and fear of psychoactivity is. Probably money is the issue. None of these compounds can be patented now.
- njoubert 3y ago
  You're painting an unfairly one-sided picture here, as so many pro-psychedelic people do. These are highly potent chemicals that also have negative physical and psychological effects. It's not as simple as "these substances cure a condition and the fear of psychedelics keep them repressed". You are saying the equivalent of the college stoner friend saying "you can't get addicted!" about weed. Even this article points to fatal heartbeat irregularities as a dangerous side effect that has limited ibogaine's study.
  - callalex 3y ago
    Good thing nobody is forcing you to consume anything then.
  - engineer_22 3y ago
    I agree, it's important to soberly identify and weigh all the risks associated with any treatment. But it's also important to recognize medical risk alone is not what has stopped the serious evaluation of entheogenic or hallucinogenic substances.
  - jurynulifcation 3y ago
    Look at the analogs act, and the banning of salvia in many US states, and tell me that such things as negative externalities are actually weighted in the decision to ban things. Look at 2CB. It was banned for having chemical proximity to DOB, which is banned for having chemical proximity to DOM. 2CB was banned for the entire justification of "posing a risk to the public health." Where? How? I've never found data published to justify this scheduling, other than chemical proximity. Why was DOM banned? Posing a risk to the public health. Again, I can find no data. Salvia is even more clowning. Republican legislators heard that it's a more potent psychedelic than LSD and rushed to ban it without even knowing what "potency" means for such a comparison. This has led to such beautiful pieces of law as Florida (I believe) banning salvia divinorum and all chemical derivatives thereof. Salvia divinorum is a plant. There are no chemical derivatives. They should have specified its principle component, salvinorin A, and its derivatives. These banning were made entirely out of moral panic, with not even a modicum of pharmacological or chemical understanding.
leptons 3y ago
>I understand the hesitancy around natural drugs FTFY. The amount of psychoactive pharmaceutical drugs cooked up by big companies is immense. It seems to be a slow process for natural substances, because there's no money in that and it can't really be patented to maximize profits.
- numbsafari 3y ago
  It’s also really had to control quality of “natural” substances. Sure, the box might say “100% organic bobloblaw”, but it could just be viagra.
  - leptons 3y ago
    Chocolate from all kinds of produces has high levels of heavy metals, yet it's still sold everywhere. It's not hard to control the quality, and safety, but it's easier to look the other way and profit. https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcement/toxic-chocolate#chocolate-tables https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem... And many pharmaceuticals start from natural substances that had to be refined. There's nothing humans don't understand about refining and purifying, we've done it for a very, very long time. It's a solved problem. Greed is not.
  - HarryHirsch 3y ago
    The Pharmacopoia shows that it's easy to control quality of natural drugs - maximum acceptable level of contaminants or adulterants, minimum level of active principle (nowadays with HPLC). It's just that the feeble government can't rouse itself to enforce truth-in-advertising standards.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      When it comes to natural medicine, the FDA loves to capitalize on instances of adulteration and mislabeling. This enables them to trumpet the allegedly unsafe nature of anything they don't regulate, and lets them spread F.U.D. about those products, until finally they can yank it all from the market. There are plenty of reputable manufacturers who wouldn't think of adulterating medicine or misleading their customers, but all it takes is a couple sleazy Chinese vendors on Amazon to spoil the entire apple-barrel.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
When I first learned of it I researched it and it seemed like the risks to heart health are significant with ibogaine, but I’m unaware of mitigation efforts that could make research ethical and safe.
- staticautomatic 3y ago
  You mean like the administration of magnesium in this study?
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Oh sure, I guess that. I think when I researched it the articles just said the heart risks were high and this limited research possibility. I hadn’t seen anything previously about magnesium for this.
riazrizvi 3y ago
I read bureaucratic red tape, and I imagine a group of people gathering actual information on how this goes down including input from hospitals and law enforcement where problems occur. As opposed to word of mouth, which is whatever you want it to be. Some people have committed homicides while on LSD [1], that they would unlikely have committed otherwise. Here's a crazy story a New Zealand friend of mine told me. She knew a guy who had gotten high on LSD while vacationing in France, and wandered into some stranger's backyard. The homeowner came out and they stabbed them with a pitchfork and killed them. They went to French prison for life, but were released as part of a deal France made with New Zealand for the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by the French Secret Service. They released all New Zealanders and repatriated them, and this guy, lucky SOB he is, was set free. [1] - https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9pmz/acid-lsd-fuelled-murder-homicide https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9pmz/acid-lsd-fuelled-murd...
- cbsks 3y ago
  Wait until you hear what people do under the effects of alcohol!
  - riazrizvi 3y ago
    What are the numbers? In terms of likelihood of me jumping to my death or doing murder, per 1000 nights on it, say? LSD vs Alcohol.
  - jorl17 3y ago
    This can be seen as more of an argument against alcohol than in favour of other drugs.
    - cbsks 3y ago
      I agree. I also am aware that it’s a fallacy to say “X is worse than Y, so don’t worry about Y”. Both X and Y can be bad at the same time! We definitely need more harm reduction education about psychedelics.
    - mnky9800n 3y ago
xattt 3y ago
You mention curing alcoholism, but my casual observation is that there is almost always a history of psychosocial trauma, likely with residual PTSD, that leads to substance abuse. The ibogaine treatment very likely allowed individuals to move past their traumatic experience and no longer had a reason to self-medicate.
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  Something I’ve read in a few ibogaine trip reports is the experience of something scaring them out of their addiction. “If you ever do heroin again, I will personally rip your soul in half” kinda shit. Certainly a different mechanism than resolving underlying trauma.
  - error_logic 3y ago
    That might still be more comforting emotionally than whatever painful uncertainty about something they didn't feel control over from the past which led to the self-medicating in the first place. Knowing what you can avoid to stay safe is a lot more tolerable than never knowing when you're going to get pummeled. Just that sense of control is huge.
bravura 3y ago
The use is much older: William S. Burroughs tried ibogaine in the 1950's to treat his heroin addiction.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  So how did that work out for him?
jeroenhd 3y ago
My reading through the history of this drug is that there has always been a significant risk of cardiac events. It's a promising drug, but until we find out what causes some people to die shortly after taking it, it's not safe for common medical use. Psychoactive drugs also seem to have a tendency to expose/accelerate symptoms for diseases like schizophrenia for people who are not (yet) suffering, while at the same time showing promising results for treating such illnesses. The outright ban because of the fear of hallucinogenics is ridiculous, but a lot of the red tape is also warranted, especially for drugs that have a long-lasting (sometimes even lifelong!) effect after a single dose.
darksaints 3y ago
There are hundreds of anecdotes about people with near-impossible to conquer opiate addictions that have managed to quit using ibogaine. I personally know someone who tried and failed on three occasions with traditional rehab, but she has been 10 years clean after ibogaine. It’s really frustrating how much our drug approval process biases towards patentability. There are probably hundreds of extremely beneficial drugs out there that have no chance of approval simply because no drug company is willing to do trials for an unpatentable drug.
baq 3y ago
+1. Erowid had plenty of self-reported but for some reason believable accounts of people kicking opioid addiction with ibogaine. Having never had experience with either can’t confirm the efficacy but definitely can confirm the fact that it was talked about. E.g. https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=86136 https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=86136
tinco 3y ago
The pesky red tape surrounding drugs where people died during clinical studies? This thread has everyone suggesting there's been a a miracle drug that doctors have been ignoring. Doctors have not been ignoring it. This drug fucks with your heart rhythm, people died taking it. Doctors are also still researching it, addiction is a serious affliction and there's loads of research done on possible solutions.

sunshine_reggae 3y ago

> What's frustrating is that Ibogaine has been known about for a long time. Not just Ibogaine - pretty much all of the "psychedelics". And it's just big pharma doing their evil deeds. Should have been obvious by now.

jdietrich 3y ago

Research has long been held up by legal obstacles, but articles like this are promoting an entirely false optimism about psychedelics. I live with a treatment-resistant mental illness, I have participated in clinical trials for psychedelics and I follow the field closely. Sadly, what we are seeing is almost certainly a hype bubble rather than a genuine breakthrough. We now have a useful body of research on psychedelics as a treatment for psychiatric disorders. We can be reasonably confident that they do indeed work, but the effect size in depression and anxiety appears to be very similar to SSRI antidepressants or cognitive behavioural therapy. Research into addiction is more limited, but plausible effect sizes are again comparable to existing treatments. We're much less confident about the risk profile (especially in real-world clinical settings), so any marginal benefits in efficacy might be outweighed by safety risks. Psychedelics might still prove useful as a second- or third-line treatment for a minority of patients, which I don't want to underplay - severe mental illness is truly awful and each additional patient in remission is a person given a second chance at life. They might provide insights that guide us towards better treatments in the future, but in this respect the NMDAR-agonists (ketamine etc) look far more promising. Unfortunately, the promise of psychedelics as a revolution in psychiatry is a busted flush. I wish I wasn't saying this, but the data doesn't care what my wishes are. We have reached the point in the curve where decent, well-meaning researchers are tinkering with the analysis post-hoc to try and make psychedelics look marginally more effective than existing treatments. A lot of money has been committed to research, the results are deeply disappointing, serious researchers are trying to salvage something useful, but all the while there's a steady drumbeat of deluded quacks and uninformed journalists continuing to peddle a narrative that has been thoroughly demolished. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8399008/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8399008/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278160/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10278160/

worik 3y ago

Ibogain is dangerous Which is why researchers are looking at Psilocybin and LSD particularly Psilocybin as it is short acting making everything easier and cheaper I think they should look more at DMT. Businessman's acid.

ethanbond 3y ago

Remember that the bureaucratic red tape keeping these drugs from market has to do with moralism around psychoactive drugs. Plenty of other safe and effective treatments have made it through the “excessive” red tape because actually the red tape isn’t the issue. Dismissiveness and fear of psychoactivity is.

naasking 3y ago
> Plenty of other safe and effective treatments have made it through the “excessive” red tape because actually the red tape isn’t the issue. Dismissiveness and fear of psychoactivity is. Probably money is the issue. None of these compounds can be patented now.
njoubert 3y ago
You're painting an unfairly one-sided picture here, as so many pro-psychedelic people do. These are highly potent chemicals that also have negative physical and psychological effects. It's not as simple as "these substances cure a condition and the fear of psychedelics keep them repressed". You are saying the equivalent of the college stoner friend saying "you can't get addicted!" about weed. Even this article points to fatal heartbeat irregularities as a dangerous side effect that has limited ibogaine's study.
- callalex 3y ago
  Good thing nobody is forcing you to consume anything then.
- engineer_22 3y ago
  I agree, it's important to soberly identify and weigh all the risks associated with any treatment. But it's also important to recognize medical risk alone is not what has stopped the serious evaluation of entheogenic or hallucinogenic substances.
- jurynulifcation 3y ago
  Look at the analogs act, and the banning of salvia in many US states, and tell me that such things as negative externalities are actually weighted in the decision to ban things. Look at 2CB. It was banned for having chemical proximity to DOB, which is banned for having chemical proximity to DOM. 2CB was banned for the entire justification of "posing a risk to the public health." Where? How? I've never found data published to justify this scheduling, other than chemical proximity. Why was DOM banned? Posing a risk to the public health. Again, I can find no data. Salvia is even more clowning. Republican legislators heard that it's a more potent psychedelic than LSD and rushed to ban it without even knowing what "potency" means for such a comparison. This has led to such beautiful pieces of law as Florida (I believe) banning salvia divinorum and all chemical derivatives thereof. Salvia divinorum is a plant. There are no chemical derivatives. They should have specified its principle component, salvinorin A, and its derivatives. These banning were made entirely out of moral panic, with not even a modicum of pharmacological or chemical understanding.

leptons 3y ago

>I understand the hesitancy around natural drugs FTFY. The amount of psychoactive pharmaceutical drugs cooked up by big companies is immense. It seems to be a slow process for natural substances, because there's no money in that and it can't really be patented to maximize profits.

numbsafari 3y ago
It’s also really had to control quality of “natural” substances. Sure, the box might say “100% organic bobloblaw”, but it could just be viagra.
- leptons 3y ago
  Chocolate from all kinds of produces has high levels of heavy metals, yet it's still sold everywhere. It's not hard to control the quality, and safety, but it's easier to look the other way and profit. https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcement/toxic-chocolate#chocolate-tables https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem... And many pharmaceuticals start from natural substances that had to be refined. There's nothing humans don't understand about refining and purifying, we've done it for a very, very long time. It's a solved problem. Greed is not.
- HarryHirsch 3y ago
  The Pharmacopoia shows that it's easy to control quality of natural drugs - maximum acceptable level of contaminants or adulterants, minimum level of active principle (nowadays with HPLC). It's just that the feeble government can't rouse itself to enforce truth-in-advertising standards.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    When it comes to natural medicine, the FDA loves to capitalize on instances of adulteration and mislabeling. This enables them to trumpet the allegedly unsafe nature of anything they don't regulate, and lets them spread F.U.D. about those products, until finally they can yank it all from the market. There are plenty of reputable manufacturers who wouldn't think of adulterating medicine or misleading their customers, but all it takes is a couple sleazy Chinese vendors on Amazon to spoil the entire apple-barrel.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

When I first learned of it I researched it and it seemed like the risks to heart health are significant with ibogaine, but I’m unaware of mitigation efforts that could make research ethical and safe.

staticautomatic 3y ago
You mean like the administration of magnesium in this study?
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Oh sure, I guess that. I think when I researched it the articles just said the heart risks were high and this limited research possibility. I hadn’t seen anything previously about magnesium for this.

riazrizvi 3y ago

I read bureaucratic red tape, and I imagine a group of people gathering actual information on how this goes down including input from hospitals and law enforcement where problems occur. As opposed to word of mouth, which is whatever you want it to be. Some people have committed homicides while on LSD [1], that they would unlikely have committed otherwise. Here's a crazy story a New Zealand friend of mine told me. She knew a guy who had gotten high on LSD while vacationing in France, and wandered into some stranger's backyard. The homeowner came out and they stabbed them with a pitchfork and killed them. They went to French prison for life, but were released as part of a deal France made with New Zealand for the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by the French Secret Service. They released all New Zealanders and repatriated them, and this guy, lucky SOB he is, was set free. [1] - https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9pmz/acid-lsd-fuelled-murder-homicide https://www.vice.com/en/article/7k9pmz/acid-lsd-fuelled-murd...

cbsks 3y ago
Wait until you hear what people do under the effects of alcohol!
- riazrizvi 3y ago
  What are the numbers? In terms of likelihood of me jumping to my death or doing murder, per 1000 nights on it, say? LSD vs Alcohol.
- jorl17 3y ago
  This can be seen as more of an argument against alcohol than in favour of other drugs.
  - cbsks 3y ago
    I agree. I also am aware that it’s a fallacy to say “X is worse than Y, so don’t worry about Y”. Both X and Y can be bad at the same time! We definitely need more harm reduction education about psychedelics.
  - mnky9800n 3y ago

xattt 3y ago

You mention curing alcoholism, but my casual observation is that there is almost always a history of psychosocial trauma, likely with residual PTSD, that leads to substance abuse. The ibogaine treatment very likely allowed individuals to move past their traumatic experience and no longer had a reason to self-medicate.

travisjungroth 3y ago
Something I’ve read in a few ibogaine trip reports is the experience of something scaring them out of their addiction. “If you ever do heroin again, I will personally rip your soul in half” kinda shit. Certainly a different mechanism than resolving underlying trauma.
- error_logic 3y ago
  That might still be more comforting emotionally than whatever painful uncertainty about something they didn't feel control over from the past which led to the self-medicating in the first place. Knowing what you can avoid to stay safe is a lot more tolerable than never knowing when you're going to get pummeled. Just that sense of control is huge.

bravura 3y ago

The use is much older: William S. Burroughs tried ibogaine in the 1950's to treat his heroin addiction.

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
So how did that work out for him?

jeroenhd 3y ago

My reading through the history of this drug is that there has always been a significant risk of cardiac events. It's a promising drug, but until we find out what causes some people to die shortly after taking it, it's not safe for common medical use. Psychoactive drugs also seem to have a tendency to expose/accelerate symptoms for diseases like schizophrenia for people who are not (yet) suffering, while at the same time showing promising results for treating such illnesses. The outright ban because of the fear of hallucinogenics is ridiculous, but a lot of the red tape is also warranted, especially for drugs that have a long-lasting (sometimes even lifelong!) effect after a single dose.

darksaints 3y ago

There are hundreds of anecdotes about people with near-impossible to conquer opiate addictions that have managed to quit using ibogaine. I personally know someone who tried and failed on three occasions with traditional rehab, but she has been 10 years clean after ibogaine. It’s really frustrating how much our drug approval process biases towards patentability. There are probably hundreds of extremely beneficial drugs out there that have no chance of approval simply because no drug company is willing to do trials for an unpatentable drug.

baq 3y ago

+1. Erowid had plenty of self-reported but for some reason believable accounts of people kicking opioid addiction with ibogaine. Having never had experience with either can’t confirm the efficacy but definitely can confirm the fact that it was talked about. E.g. https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=86136 https://erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=86136

tinco 3y ago

The pesky red tape surrounding drugs where people died during clinical studies? This thread has everyone suggesting there's been a a miracle drug that doctors have been ignoring. Doctors have not been ignoring it. This drug fucks with your heart rhythm, people died taking it. Doctors are also still researching it, addiction is a serious affliction and there's loads of research done on possible solutions.