Program Notes
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Guest speakers: Andrew Tatarsky and Lakshmi Narayan
https://awake.net/Date this lecture was recorded: April 22, 2019
Today’s podcast features a recording of a recent session of the Psychedelic Salon LIVE in which our guests were Dr. Andrew Tatarsky and Lakshmi Narayan. In an interactive conversation with several of our fellow saloners, Andrew and Lakshmi told of their work in beginning the process of rescheduling ibogaine in a medical category that will better facilitate the work of treating opioid addictions.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And today I’m going to play part of a conversation that we had on the Psychedelic Salon Live last Monday evening.
00:00:35 ►
Our guests that evening were Dr. Andrew Tatarsky and Lakshmi Narayan,
00:00:46 ►
who have both been actively working to expand our community’s knowledge about the medical potential of the Iboga plant, as well as ways in which its primary active component, Ibogaine, is having success in curing addictions, particularly opioid addictions.
00:00:53 ►
As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’ve been gravitating toward having all of the interviews
00:00:57 ►
for the Salon Podcast be conducted in one of our live salon gatherings, which take place at 6.30
00:01:03 ►
p.m. Pacific time every Monday night.
00:01:06 ►
And what I’ve discovered in conducting interviews this way is that they become significantly better
00:01:11 ►
conversations if I’m not the only person asking the questions. As you will hear in a few minutes,
00:01:17 ►
there were some questions from our fellow salonners that I think added a lot to the interview,
00:01:23 ►
and they were questions that I hadn’t thought of
00:01:25 ►
myself. So I think that as we get this format perfected over time, it’s going to provide some
00:01:31 ►
really interesting and informative conversations, such as the one that we are about to join in right
00:01:36 ►
now. Mainly, you know, we’ve had one conversation about EBogaine a number of months ago.
00:01:47 ►
What you all are doing or working with, as I understand it,
00:01:54 ►
in addition to trying to get it reduced on the medical schedule,
00:01:58 ►
is you actually are working with people in opioid reduction and harm reduction,
00:02:06 ►
which, you know, is next to the environment,
00:02:09 ►
is one of the biggest scourges that’s going on in the world right now,
00:02:12 ►
at least in the U.S. world.
00:02:13 ►
So maybe, Lakshmi, if you would kind of introduce yourself and Andrew,
00:02:18 ►
and then maybe we can, I’ll start with some questions,
00:02:22 ►
and I know our group here will have questions too
00:02:25 ►
okay great uh so can you hear me okay sure yeah okay so um uh my name is lakshmi narayan and
00:02:34 ►
i’m the founder and creative director of awake media and also the producer of a program called
00:02:42 ►
a campaign called i go the saves uh whose intent is to spread the word and
00:02:48 ►
change the law around Ibogaine and Iboga. For those who don’t know what Iboga is, it’s a root
00:02:56 ►
bark from West Africa that has the amazing property of interrupting opioid addiction in a single treatment without withdrawals.
00:03:09 ►
And yet, this quality has been known since 1962 when it was discovered by Howard Lotsoff,
00:03:19 ►
who was a drug addict in New York who had the reputation of taking anything.
00:03:24 ►
And somebody gave him Ibogaine
00:03:26 ►
and he and some friends took it and they were all heroin addicts and they were able to,
00:03:33 ►
they had no cravings when they came out of that session. So since 1962, Howard Lotsov
00:03:39 ►
has been, had been trying, he’s now passed away, trying to get the medical establishment to do
00:03:46 ►
research, to follow up on it. And he knocked on many, many, many doors. And I, in a sense,
00:03:53 ►
I’m just picking up that same message and torch, like many people who in the Ibogaine industry have
00:04:00 ►
done and are doing, including Dr. tatarski who has it has a
00:04:06 ►
different he comes from a clinical background and he’ll tell you about it
00:04:10 ►
so we’re making a movie I burger saves and we’re raising money to make the
00:04:16 ►
movie and we also want to make an app called rescheduleaine, that will take petition signatures virally.
00:04:26 ►
And so that’s the plan.
00:04:29 ►
And we are also putting up a lot of informational blogs
00:04:32 ►
and on awake.net along with a directory of practitioners.
00:04:40 ►
So the thing is, a lot of addicts have never heard of iboga or ibogaine and so
00:04:47 ►
we want to get the word out to those people who will then travel to other countries to do it
00:04:54 ►
and that’s what’s going on right now let me ask you to begin withshmi, how did you first develop an interest in it yourself?
00:05:07 ►
Well, I’ve been a psychonaut for 20 years.
00:05:13 ►
And I started doing, I’m a media person, I started doing design work for psychedelic organizations
00:05:21 ►
to help them to brand themselves so that they could be accepted by a
00:05:26 ►
mainstream audience. That’s kind of what I’ve done for MAPS and WVC and other organizations.
00:05:33 ►
So I was referred to Crossroads Ibogaine, who had a psycho-spiritual weekend, which was not
00:05:40 ►
for addicts, although their main program was for addicts. It was a seven-day flood dose program.
00:05:48 ►
So I was invited to do the psychospiritual weekend, which I did.
00:05:52 ►
And I was diagnosed with diabetes too just 20 minutes before the treatment began
00:06:00 ►
in the blood test that they take.
00:06:02 ►
And so I went in knowing that I was diabetic
00:06:06 ►
and I took the Ibogaine and during this 12 to 36 hour journey I was
00:06:12 ►
I was honestly I’m still a little dumbfounded and dumbstruck by the power of that Ibogaine
00:06:23 ►
experience and I’m somebody who has a lot of experience with entheogenic medicines,
00:06:28 ►
but Ibogaine is like nothing I’ve ever experienced.
00:06:33 ►
And Dr. Tretarski, how did you first become involved in Ibogaine?
00:06:39 ►
Okay, and by the way, you can call me Andrew.
00:06:42 ►
Oh, okay.
00:06:43 ►
I’m more comfortable that way.
00:06:44 ►
Okay. So I’ll give you a kind of a quick backstory about how I got to my interest in ibogaine.
00:06:54 ►
I’m a clinical psychologist and I’ve been working with people with drug problems for basically my entire career for over 35 years. And early on, I came to see firsthand how limited
00:07:09 ►
the disease model abstinence approach to treatment is for the overwhelming majority of drug users.
00:07:17 ►
I saw that in my clinical practice. I saw that most people don’t want it. It doesn’t help most people. In fact, some people really get hurt
00:07:25 ►
by a treatment that presumes that addiction is a disease and that people need to commit to
00:07:33 ►
stopping or else they are considered to be failures. There are so many, I think, problems
00:07:38 ►
with that model, which maybe is another podcast. So because of that experience, I began to look around for alternatives,
00:07:48 ►
and I discovered the harm reduction framework,
00:07:51 ►
which is a whole different way to think about supporting people
00:07:55 ►
in making positive change.
00:07:57 ►
That is that we don’t require that people stop using or stop their behaviors
00:08:03 ►
in order to invite them into supportive therapies and counseling relationships.
00:08:10 ►
Our job is to really support people in discovering what’s true for them and what goals and what approach to positive change best suit them.
00:08:19 ►
And also, we think of problematic drug use or what we call addiction as being a
00:08:25 ►
multiply determined, you know, bio, psychosocial, spiritual process,
00:08:30 ►
really not a disease. And, you know,
00:08:33 ►
that naturally brought me to develop a real curiosity in a whole range of
00:08:39 ►
different approaches to supporting people and including the whole range of psychedelic medicines and iboga.
00:08:49 ►
And so as I became involved with the harm reduction and psychedelic communities back in the early
00:08:57 ►
90s, I actually had the good fortune to meet Howard Lotsoff. And Howard was one of the most wonderful, warm, generous, kind of humble human
00:09:08 ►
beings. And he told me about his experience with ibogaine. And so partly because at the time
00:09:16 ►
through the 90s and the 2000s, harm reduction was, and I think in many places still is a very controversial subject.
00:09:26 ►
I kind of stayed on the edges of the psychedelic and the ibogaine world.
00:09:32 ►
But I met an increasing number of people who had very powerful,
00:09:38 ►
positive experiences with psychedelics in general and ibogaine in particular.
00:09:44 ►
The personal stories of people
00:09:47 ►
that have experienced what Lakshmi was talking about were just undeniably convincing that this
00:09:53 ►
is a wonderful, powerful medicine that really needs to be made available to people with a wide
00:10:02 ►
range of addictive issues and other issues. I guess about three or four
00:10:07 ►
years ago, with all of the sort of the growing body of research suggesting what, you know,
00:10:14 ►
traditional people have known for centuries, that psychedelics are powerful medicines for healing
00:10:21 ►
and spiritual growth and so on, had reached the pitch and the, you know, the popular media was kind of getting this information out,
00:10:31 ►
I thought there’s enough evidence to support, you know, credible professionals in coming out in support of the research.
00:10:48 ►
out in support of the research. And so I actually have been over the last few years increasingly public and as an advocate and a supporter of these medicines. Three years ago, I was invited
00:10:58 ►
to present at the Global Ibogaine Conference in Tepoztlan, Mexico, and that was really my first immersion in the ibogaine community.
00:11:07 ►
And I’ll tell you, it’s a wonderful community because it’s a community that honors diversity.
00:11:16 ►
You know, we might say that ibogaine is a biopsychosocial spiritual medicine because it
00:11:23 ►
really addresses all of those dimensions and also provides a
00:11:27 ►
wonderful community for folks. One last thing, and then I’ll shut up. We can open up the conversation.
00:11:36 ►
About eight years ago, I started a center in New York City called the Center for Optimal Living.
00:11:42 ►
And this center is really a home and a platform for advancing harm reduction psychotherapy,
00:11:49 ►
integrative.
00:11:50 ►
Our work is integrative harm reduction psychotherapy.
00:11:53 ►
And about three years ago, we opened up a very special program, which we think is pretty
00:11:58 ►
unique, called the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program.
00:12:08 ►
Called the psychedelic education and continuing care program, of course because psychedelics are not FDA approved
00:12:12 ►
and not regulated we we thought
00:12:20 ►
You know the proliferation of underground psychedelic use may do wonderful things for some people but it may pose tremendous risks for others and so we thought there should be a
00:12:22 ►
but it may pose tremendous risks for others.
00:12:29 ►
And so we thought there should be a community or a space where people could come for knowledgeable,
00:12:39 ►
compassionate, supportive education and therapeutic services for all of the issues surrounding psychedelics. So we offer psychedelic integration services in groups and individually.
00:12:45 ►
We offer counseling on the front end.
00:12:48 ►
Like if somebody’s curious, you know, should I be doing a psychedelic?
00:12:52 ►
How do I kind of navigate all, you know,
00:12:56 ►
that sort of potential pitfalls of underground use?
00:13:02 ►
And so in that context, we’ve seen a tremendous number of people and we’ve seen
00:13:08 ►
some people post-ibogaine experiences, as well as people who have had ayahuasca experiences and
00:13:15 ►
psilocybin and so on. So something I feel very passionately about. We need both because of the tremendous need to have
00:13:27 ►
a wide range of effective help for people that are struggling with addictions, but also my sense
00:13:34 ►
is that Ibogaine has much more potential value for lots of different kinds of people.
00:13:42 ►
Well, you know, Andrew, you say what I’ve been thinking for a long time,
00:13:45 ►
but you say it’s so much better than I can. And, and what,
00:13:49 ►
what is the name of the center again that you’ve started?
00:13:53 ►
It’s called the Center for Optimal Living in New York City.
00:13:57 ►
People can find us at centerforoptimalliving.com.
00:14:03 ►
And, you know, we’re, we’re a home, we’re a hotbed of, you know, sort of licensed,
00:14:12 ►
you know, legitimate professionals who are radical critics of the way that drug use and people who
00:14:19 ►
use drugs are treated in this society. And we’re really advocating for a wide range of changes
00:14:27 ►
moving toward what we call compassionate pragmatism. You know, this is something that
00:14:33 ►
I’ve been kind of dreaming of and advocating for is a true two-pronged attack. One is like what
00:14:41 ►
you’re doing with the educational part and the other is the community
00:14:45 ►
part where where young people are learning that well we have to kind of start creating our own
00:14:51 ►
rituals too and you know that that uh as Lakshmi can attest to and you can too Andrew that you know
00:14:58 ►
20-25 years ago you were lucky if you could find somebody to talk to that had tried one of these things before. And now at least we’re getting a lot more, you know, traction, it seems like.
00:15:11 ►
What kind of acceptance or resistance did you get when you were first doing that from your peers?
00:15:30 ►
from your peers? You know, I’m in New York City, and we’re in a bubble because,
00:15:48 ►
you know, I’ve been working explicitly advocating for harm reduction therapy for 25 years. And we’ve got a big, a large and growing community of professionals and lay people who have been embracing this approach in New York City.
00:15:54 ►
And when we opened our psychedelic program three years ago,
00:15:59 ►
well, when I opened the center, which was based on harm reduction therapy eight years ago, it was a real experiment. I didn’t know what to expect. Would it be too controversial?
00:16:25 ►
their ideal relationships to substances as they define it.
00:16:30 ►
So we need to keep our agendas and our values out of the way to support people in their process. Now that in a sense, I can say here,
00:16:34 ►
it’s just been occurring to me.
00:16:36 ►
What we’re doing in the therapy space is we’re legalizing drug use.
00:16:42 ►
It’s not our job as helping professionals to dictate what people should be
00:16:51 ►
doing in their own relationships with substances. So I didn’t know how it would work out, but I got
00:16:58 ►
to tell you that over the eight years, we have had no opposition in New York. We’ve had a growing amount of support from families,
00:17:09 ►
from individuals, from other professionals, from college counselors. And the same thing is true
00:17:18 ►
with our psychedelic program. When we opened it three years ago. I was afraid it might be too controversial and it might really, you know,
00:17:26 ►
threaten our center.
00:17:28 ►
I even, you know, consulted with my attorney.
00:17:32 ►
And we’ve had nothing but support.
00:17:36 ►
So, you know, part of what our attitude has been is that we’re not being
00:17:41 ►
defensive.
00:17:41 ►
We are not being apologetic.
00:17:44 ►
We’re saying this is the state of
00:17:46 ►
the art. This work, you know, respectful, compassionate, supportive work for grown-up people
00:17:53 ►
to support them in making healthy choices for themselves is what should be, you know,
00:18:01 ►
the way that all of these services are delivered. And it seems like the community agrees.
00:18:08 ►
That’s great. Lorenzo,
00:18:11 ►
you didn’t let me finish the point of what I was saying about Ibogaine and,
00:18:17 ►
and my first experience and why it was so amazing.
00:18:20 ►
Oh, okay.
00:18:21 ►
Why it was so amazing is that it took away my addiction to sugar and it stays in your
00:18:28 ►
system for three months afterwards. And during that period, I was able to completely reverse
00:18:34 ►
my diabetes too. So Ibogaine is an amazing medicine on many fronts. And diabetes is a
00:18:42 ►
slow killer. We’re not even talking about diabetes but anyway that was
00:18:45 ►
the point now now was that with just one uh experience with ibogaine one experience with
00:18:52 ►
ibogaine yeah and did you what were there therapists there too or was it just a solo experience no no
00:18:59 ►
there were other people there there were doctors and nurses and people checking your EKG and monitoring you and several other people doing it. But I mean as a therapist were there
00:19:10 ►
people interacting with you so it was an internal experience? It’s an internal
00:19:16 ►
experience and it uses the model of the computer so you have images coming to
00:19:22 ►
you like a slideshow or videos it uses that same
00:19:27 ►
technological model that we are so familiar with so um it’s a little bit different from
00:19:34 ►
normal experiences um normal psychedelic i wouldn’t call them normal but you know
00:19:40 ►
psychedelic experience the uh the only, I’ve never experienced it myself,
00:19:46 ►
but I’ve had,
00:19:47 ►
I’ve talked several times with Giorgio Samarini from Italy,
00:19:51 ►
who has really done a lot of work with Ibogaine.
00:19:54 ►
And,
00:19:54 ►
and I talked to some of the people he worked with.
00:19:57 ►
And then out here in California,
00:19:59 ►
I went to a couple of sessions that were,
00:20:02 ►
were heroin addicts.
00:20:05 ►
One I went to in Hollywood that a bunch of kind of artistic film people
00:20:11 ►
that had been heroin addicts had been to the clinic in Tijuana
00:20:14 ►
and with one session had been cured.
00:20:17 ►
I had heard about personal experiences with various addictions,
00:20:24 ►
but I’ve never
00:20:25 ►
heard it about but your your since your case to lash me that’s that’s pretty
00:20:32 ►
amazing I think it’s totally amazing it’s a slow killer but it’s a killer
00:20:36 ►
nevertheless and there’s also one case of a person who has used Ibogaine for
00:20:42 ►
Parkinson’s and you know this person, Andrew?
00:20:47 ►
Yeah, his name is D.
00:20:48 ►
Yeah, and he doesn’t like his name to be made public,
00:20:51 ►
but he’s had an amazing restoration
00:20:56 ►
of certain abilities in his body
00:20:58 ►
that were dying with Parkinson’s.
00:21:01 ►
Yeah, I think there is a study
00:21:02 ►
that has demonstrated, at least supported,
00:21:07 ►
the idea that ibogaine may be an effective treatment for Parkinson’s.
00:21:13 ►
You know, this Parkinson’s and diabetes opens up a whole new vista for me because I could,
00:21:20 ►
you know, I could understand the opioid addiction pathways and some of that,
00:21:25 ►
but diabetes, Parkinson’s, those are really different diseases
00:21:32 ►
that it seems like Ibogaine is really working at the core level of body regulation of some way,
00:21:40 ►
and it’s got to be done in the mind, I would think.
00:21:48 ►
I don’t know. that’s really fascinating i i had never heard those stories before there’s not enough stories like that out there because people
00:21:54 ►
are afraid to do ibogaine because it’s so powerful and certainly not for something like diabetes
00:21:58 ►
so um but the fact that the potential is there it tells tells you. So this is the other part of what I wanted to share is that you could say that
00:22:09 ►
we have a psycho-spiritual crisis right now because people don’t have access to
00:22:14 ►
medicines that will take them into these realms of consciousness where you can
00:22:18 ►
heal trauma and soul shocking kinds of experiences.
00:22:24 ►
And there are so many of those.
00:22:25 ►
And this isn’t just like one generation.
00:22:29 ►
It’s generations and generations of people who haven’t had that access.
00:22:33 ►
And what we’re seeing in our culture right now,
00:22:36 ►
the increase in mental health, the increase in imbalances and anxiety, etc.,
00:22:41 ►
you can attribute it all to what Terence McKenna said
00:22:44 ►
was the forbidden fruit of antiquity.
00:22:47 ►
And that’s what Iberga is. It’s the forbidden fruit.
00:22:51 ►
And the Galbanese, they even think of it as the world tree
00:22:56 ►
or the tree of life.
00:23:00 ►
So, sorry.
00:23:02 ►
That’s okay.
00:23:04 ►
Well, let me go ahead. I’ve got got some more questions but let me open it up here
00:23:08 ►
to some of the other people uh uh anybody here would like to uh chime in here and ask a question
00:23:13 ►
while we uh are here yeah just just one question yeah go ahead james hi yes um the difference is
00:23:21 ►
there a difference between aboga and ibogaine? Because I’ve gone on an aboga experience,
00:23:28 ►
and it was a 24-hour intensive experience that one can’t describe.
00:23:33 ►
Actually, it went on for months after that.
00:23:35 ►
But I just wanted to ask that question because I know ibogaine is a liquid.
00:23:42 ►
Aboga is a root.
00:23:43 ►
It’s like licorice.
00:23:45 ►
And anyway, that’s my question.
00:23:50 ►
Well, I’m not a doctor, but what I know about it is that iboga is the whole root.
00:23:56 ►
It’s got several other alkaloids in it other than ibogaine.
00:24:00 ►
And ibogaine is the primary alkaloid of the iboga root, and it’s extracted. Ibogaine can be had from other plants as well as iboga. the is the root they both deliver a similar experience
00:24:26 ►
but i don’t know enough about the delivery andrew i think you’re you’re the person to answer that
00:24:32 ►
yeah i i don’t know any more than what you just shared
00:24:38 ►
okay but i think but i think it should be mentioned that iboga, the root, has been used in traditional spiritual practice by the Bwiti in Gabon.
00:24:52 ►
So it has a whole history before ibogaine was discovered as an addiction interrupter. And one thing that’s quite interesting is that some of the
00:25:06 ►
people who have been cured, if you can use that word, you know, by Ibogaine have gone back to
00:25:16 ►
Gabon to become Bwiti priests. And the Gabonese, the Bwiti have been very accepting of Westerners, you know, Americans going back, becoming priests and bringing the Bwiti religion or spiritual practices to the United States.
00:25:35 ►
So it’s a very interesting, you know, cultural exchange.
00:25:42 ►
You know, I’m curious, Andrew, because first of all, I think that’s really positive and
00:25:47 ►
it’s exciting that they’re being accepted. But I wonder also if we’re in a danger of
00:25:52 ►
iboga tourism, like the ayahuasca tourism problem has turned up. Are there a lot of people going
00:25:59 ►
back to Gabon? I don’t think so, because, I mean, I just don’t think that has been a phenomenon yet
00:26:10 ►
because I think Ibogaine has been brought to a number of places around the world so I don’t think
00:26:19 ►
Gabon is a place you would go if you wanted to get treated.
00:26:28 ►
So if you were interested in the spiritual practice,
00:26:31 ►
you mentioned Daniel Pinchbeck. His book, Breaking Open the Head,
00:26:34 ►
was about his trip to Gabon for spiritual purposes.
00:26:41 ►
And I know from his book,
00:26:43 ►
he had a very challenging experience down there.
00:26:46 ►
He did.
00:26:47 ►
You know, this is not something that you’re going to do for fun. I mean, this is serious,
00:26:55 ►
serious business. You may go back to Gabon for, you know, for a very serious spiritual interest. Or you might, you know,
00:27:08 ►
travel to Mexico or Canada or where else? I think Portugal. Yeah, Australia and New Zealand have,
00:27:22 ►
you know, clinics that are offering Ibogaine. Portugal.
00:27:26 ►
Like you said, Andrew, this is really serious stuff.
00:27:30 ►
I have had more than one opportunity to use Ibogaine, to have the experience,
00:27:37 ►
but I’ve denied, I’ve turned it down every time because I know the preparation going in
00:27:43 ►
and then the time afterwards and I never had
00:27:45 ►
I you know I wanted to commit you know a significant amount of time because uh you know
00:27:51 ►
I’m a psychonaut I’ve done a lot of different things but that’s one thing that I think is is
00:27:55 ►
such an important medicine that it should definitely be treated as a very serious experience with a lot of forethought.
00:28:08 ►
Well, somebody put it to me like this, that, that ayahuasca is here and ibogaine is up here.
00:28:14 ►
That is what everybody tells me that is to use both of them.
00:28:18 ►
And I’ve never heard anybody disagree with that.
00:28:22 ►
It’s a huge electrical experience when you’re having it um yeah
00:28:27 ►
although you know in the in the witi villages that there’s over 200 villages that have um
00:28:35 ►
their own particular style of ritual it’s evolved there’s over 200 villages doing it
00:28:41 ►
in in gabon and there are plantations in Cameroon and other parts of the world.
00:28:48 ►
So I think that this is partly what we want to do is we want to spread the word
00:28:55 ►
that you can have this experience.
00:28:57 ►
But, you know, it’s a really tricky subject.
00:29:00 ►
And the reason is because of its medical risks as well as its spiritual properties.
00:29:07 ►
And both of these make it a really naughty problem in terms of legislation, in terms of people embracing it as a system to use for addiction.
00:29:20 ►
Because without medical oversight, it can really be dangerous to do it unless you’re
00:29:26 ►
doing it in the weedy context where you’re eating large quantities of root bark, which is really
00:29:31 ►
hard to swallow. So not many people are going to go in for it. So if you just look at this as saying,
00:29:36 ►
yeah, this medicine could end the opioid epidemic if it was taken seriously. It could,
00:29:43 ►
but what would it actually take for that to happen?
00:29:46 ►
It would take a huge mobilization. It would take a paradigm shift in healthcare so that they
00:29:52 ►
accepted the body, mind, spirit dimension into the healthcare paradigm. If you look at that,
00:29:59 ►
and you’ll see that, well, we divided up everything that’s medical and everything that’s spiritual into two
00:30:07 ►
separate camps one is religion the other is corporate health care but how do you bring those
00:30:12 ►
two together again you know so it’s really a problem it’s not an easy easy thing and i really
00:30:18 ►
don’t know how it’s going to happen exactly we’re hoping to influence it but we don’t know how well I think you’re
00:30:26 ►
starting you know in the right place with Bert you know the preaching to the
00:30:30 ►
choir here because we all understand the importance of all kinds of psychedelic
00:30:35 ►
experiences because the body mind and spirit being integrated is so important
00:30:40 ►
in all kinds of health both mental and physical as you mentioned the beginning, something kind of caught my attention because I know
00:30:49 ►
how difficult it is to kind of to get any kind of a schedule change.
00:30:54 ►
You know, we’ve been working on that for years with various substances.
00:30:57 ►
But you said something about an app to gather signatures.
00:31:00 ►
I’d never really thought of that before.
00:31:02 ►
What is that you’re talking about?
00:31:04 ►
I’d never really thought of that before. What is that that you’re talking about?
00:31:15 ►
So I had this idea of making an app called Reschedule Ibogaine and making it a petition app because you can now get signatures, you know, on you can do that and it’s legal.
00:31:23 ►
So then it becomes a viral tool because anybody can download the app and sign and we want to collect signatures. I then found this thing called Arrest API, which is in the White House.
00:31:29 ►
And it was put in by Obama, but it’s still there.
00:31:32 ►
And if you collect 100,000 signatures and submit it through the API to the
00:31:38 ►
White House, they have to respond in writing.
00:31:40 ►
So this is my plan, that I want to make the app,
00:31:44 ►
collect 100,000 signatures and submit it.
00:31:47 ►
You know, if we have a hundred thousand signatures,
00:31:49 ►
a lot of other things can happen, but.
00:31:52 ►
If you get that app developed, be sure to let me know.
00:31:56 ►
And I know that the people here in the salon will pass the word.
00:31:59 ►
And there’s, there’s a lot of connections out of here too.
00:32:01 ►
And you were just on Zach Leary’s show.
00:32:03 ►
I know he would help pass it out too. You know, there’s a lot of different ways of here, too. And you were just on Zach Leary’s show. I know he would help pass it out, too.
00:32:06 ►
You know, there’s a lot of different ways we can get the word out.
00:32:09 ►
I really believe you can get 100,000 signatures.
00:32:12 ►
And I think more importantly, though, would be the press that you would get along with it.
00:32:17 ►
I don’t have much faith that the government would respond in any meaningful way to that.
00:32:22 ►
But if you did something like that, that’s the kind of buzz you can get out.
00:32:26 ►
We get, you know,
00:32:27 ►
Cory Doctorow or somebody that’s writing
00:32:29 ►
for Buzz Flash
00:32:31 ►
and some of these other big publications
00:32:34 ►
that I think that if you get something like that going,
00:32:37 ►
if it does take hold and catch,
00:32:40 ►
I think we can get a lot of publicity.
00:32:42 ►
And, you know,
00:32:43 ►
the opioid epidemic is hitting people in every economic strata.
00:32:50 ►
You know, it’s the billionaires’ kids are having the problems the same as the poor people’s kids.
00:32:55 ►
So this is something that’s more, to me, it’s a matter of getting, like you’re doing, I guess,
00:33:01 ►
getting the information out and watch people understand that there is a way that is not just a pie in the sky, but it, there’s a lot of documented cases where
00:33:12 ►
cures or at least remissions at the very least have been taking place. So do you care to talk
00:33:18 ►
about any of those examples of, you know, diabetes? It just blows me away that it could do something with that.
00:33:26 ►
How about any young people that have had an opioid epidemic addiction that have had that broken?
00:33:35 ►
Well, I just wanted to mention before I speak to that, that MAPS, who I imagine everyone here knows what MAPS is,
00:33:48 ►
they are just starting up a study of ibogaine.
00:33:52 ►
So that is a very, very important development.
00:33:57 ►
And, you know, it’s likely that that will be something that will get press coverage and get it out there.
00:34:01 ►
Because this is the first ibogaine study, I think, in many, many years.
00:34:06 ►
And, you know, MAPS knows how to work media.
00:34:09 ►
So that’s an important thing.
00:34:11 ►
There’s a lot of stuff going on in the background that 20 years ago, you know,
00:34:17 ►
nobody knew what iboga was.
00:34:20 ►
Nobody knew what MDMA was.
00:34:22 ►
They’d heard about ecstasy is all.
00:34:23 ►
And I think today thanks
00:34:25 ►
to two maps to Hefter to the work that you’re doing to the ketamine Association
00:34:30 ►
all of this is becoming a lot more mainstream than it was certainly even a
00:34:36 ►
decade ago and so you can talk about these things and I think that’s a
00:34:41 ►
definitely a step in the right direction. But now, yeah.
00:34:47 ►
I think Kenya had a question.
00:34:49 ►
Maybe we’ll get.
00:34:50 ►
Yeah, somebody has a question.
00:34:51 ►
Yes, it’s me.
00:34:52 ►
Sorry.
00:34:55 ►
I’m a substance abuse counselor here in Arizona.
00:35:06 ►
And I was wondering, how do you talk to other professionals about this without them thinking you’re out there that’s interesting i’ve been i’ve been dealing with that issue for all the time that i’ve been
00:35:13 ►
doing media and i think you have to find ways to reframe ideas that people have and you just
00:35:20 ►
have to figure out what it is what is it that they think about it and how do you reframe it in ways where they understand that it’s a medicine.
00:35:27 ►
And I’ve been calling it entheogen so that I can remove it from the psychedelic framework,
00:35:35 ►
even though I don’t stay away from using the word psychedelic once in a while,
00:35:40 ►
but I call it entheogen because that at least gives you an opening and they
00:35:45 ►
haven’t immediately prejudged it i i i agree with your your approach there lakshmi that that uh if
00:35:52 ►
to to establish a rapport with somebody uh you it’s easy it’s better to not have that wall up
00:35:59 ►
ahead of time and iboga it seems to me comes in a class by itself because it hasn’t had the pink of the psychedelic world and all like that.
00:36:08 ►
It’s a plant that comes from Africa, and you don’t hear about psychedelics come from Africa very often.
00:36:14 ►
And so I think it’s a good approach to talk about an herb from Africa that is working with addiction.
00:36:21 ►
Andrew, you want to say something?
00:36:22 ►
Yeah.
00:36:26 ►
A couple of thoughts.
00:36:35 ►
You know, one of the best ways to influence people is, I think, sort of picking up on what you were saying, Lakshmi, is to engage people in a kind of collaborative inquiry. This is actually
00:36:43 ►
the central part of our harm reduction therapy, which
00:36:47 ►
is, you know, we want to listen empathically to people to kind of get their perspective.
00:36:52 ►
We want to be curious about it. You know, we want to reflect empathy, like I really hear where
00:36:58 ►
you’re coming from, so that people don’t feel challenged, don’t feel on the defensive. And then we can raise questions. We
00:37:07 ►
call it a collaborative inquiry. Well, kind of let’s think more together about these issues.
00:37:11 ►
Like, how’s that working? And then we can sort of think together to educate ourselves,
00:37:18 ►
to look at the research. You might say, hey, you know, I found out about this amazing stuff. I mean,
00:37:26 ►
there’s research on it. And then telling stories. And this is, you know, when you asked the question,
00:37:34 ►
Lorenzo, about young people, there’s a woman that came to mind that I know Lakshmi also knows,
00:37:39 ►
a woman named Juliana Mulligan, who I can talk about because she has come out publicly about
00:37:46 ►
her Ibogaine experience in Women’s Day magazine. If you Google Juliana Mulligan,
00:37:53 ►
Women’s Day magazine, you’re going to see a picture of her with her arm like this,
00:38:00 ►
and she’s got the Ibogaine molecule tattooed on her bicep and um she is one of the most
00:38:07 ►
delightful you know lovely brilliant you know wonderful people and she talks about having had
00:38:16 ►
a seven-year serious heroin uh problem uh living on the street, she was, you know, arrested where they detoxed her against her will
00:38:30 ►
in prison. And she went through the worst hell, you know, kicked out of her house. Just,
00:38:36 ►
she calls it seven years of higher education in the nature of addiction. So she’s been able to
00:38:42 ►
spin it in a very positive way. But she had
00:38:45 ►
an Ibogaine experience that nearly did kill her. I think she cardiac arrested five times during the
00:38:53 ►
session. And luckily, they were able to bring her back. But she’s one of the best advocates for it
00:38:59 ►
because, you know, she’s left her addiction behind. And she’s in school now i mean she’s living i think
00:39:08 ►
an increasingly wonderful life and she credits ibogaine with that so i think telling stories
00:39:14 ►
of real people there are a lot of videos out there there’s videos of dimitri Mugianis, who was another important figure in this work, he had a 15-year addiction to crack, cocaine, and heroin.
00:39:34 ►
He went through the treatment, and there’s video of this.
00:39:37 ►
He was interviewed two days later.
00:39:39 ►
He was like, I can’t believe it.
00:39:42 ►
I have no urges.
00:39:43 ►
I have no craving.
00:39:44 ►
I have no desire for drugs.
00:39:45 ►
This is like whacked. What’s going on here? But these are the stories we hear over and over again.
00:39:51 ►
Share them. Share the video with your colleagues and have a discussion group about it.
00:39:58 ►
The people have convinced me. I’ve just known more and more people with these seemingly
00:40:04 ►
miraculous stories.
00:40:06 ►
The thing is, and maybe we can discuss this, I’m sure Lakshmi, you have ideas about this, like
00:40:11 ►
with any psychedelic assisted treatment, it’s not a silver bullet. It’s not, you know, I mean,
00:40:20 ►
you know, the benefit that we get from these things needs to be, you know,
00:40:25 ►
wrapped in supportive relationships in, um,
00:40:30 ►
psychedelic integration or aftercare work.
00:40:33 ►
People need communities around them, uh, to support, you know, the changes.
00:40:39 ►
Um,
00:40:40 ►
Yeah.
00:40:42 ►
It’s also a relationship. Sorry, you didn’t mean to interrupt,
00:40:45 ►
but it’s also a relationship with Sorry, you didn’t mean to interrupt. But it’s also a relationship with the substance, because what people find is they’ll take it one time and it’ll interrupt their addiction.
00:40:55 ►
And they might begin to see what the root cause of their problem is.
00:40:59 ►
But if they’ve had a trauma that is from childhood or from a long time it’s not gone in one treatment you realize
00:41:06 ►
that you need to go within again you need to have maybe another kind of psychedelic experience maybe
00:41:12 ►
with ibogaine or with somebody something else so what are you doing you’re changing your relationship
00:41:16 ►
to substances in general your addiction but also to substances and to how you and to your own psyche.
00:41:25 ►
You know, you’re developing a dialogue within.
00:41:28 ►
So it just takes time.
00:41:30 ►
The whole thing takes time.
00:41:33 ►
I have a quick question for you guys.
00:41:36 ►
Can you guys hear me all right?
00:41:38 ►
Yeah, Kevin, go ahead.
00:41:39 ►
All right, so I know in our model here in the U.S. at least,
00:41:44 ►
there’s a lot of addicts, especially long-term addicts,
00:41:47 ►
are pushed towards longer-lasting opioids like methadone and suboxone and things like that.
00:41:54 ►
And I’ve heard that Ibogaine cannot break through with the longer-lasting opioids like it can with shorter-lasting like heroin or morphine or oxycodone or something like that.
00:42:06 ►
I just didn’t know if you guys could speak to that at all and what is done if that is the case with, you know,
00:42:12 ►
the masses that are being sent to clinics and being put on these medications
00:42:16 ►
and how Ibogaine might be able to help those folks as well.
00:42:21 ►
You want to speak to that, Lakshmi?
00:42:24 ►
No, I don’t know enough about it. Okay. Well,
00:42:30 ►
you know, there are a lot of important issues in what you’re raising.
00:42:36 ►
First of all, I think it’s important to note that these medication-assisted treatments,
00:42:45 ►
methadone and suboxone,
00:42:47 ►
are the most life-saving treatments
00:42:50 ►
for people that have had long-term opiate addictions.
00:42:56 ►
So the research suggests that this is the best treatment
00:43:00 ►
for somebody statistically if you want them to stay alive. Now, that doesn’t mean,
00:43:10 ►
and I think it’s also important to distinguish between addiction, which is problematic drug use,
00:43:18 ►
and dependence on methadone or buprenorphine, which basically, like insulin, takes care of
00:43:24 ►
the physiological piece. It doesn’t takes care of the physiological piece.
00:43:26 ►
It doesn’t take care of the psychological and the social pieces. And what a substitution treatment
00:43:33 ►
like that can do is stabilize somebody so you can address a lot of the other issues.
00:43:38 ►
And then people may say, now I want to go off it. Or like, you know, like, like, you know, SSRIs for depression,
00:43:46 ►
it’s a personal choice. Some people want to stay on them forever. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
00:43:53 ►
Other people are like, no, I want to get off the medication. I want to be drug free or I want to be,
00:43:58 ►
you know, and what we can do in this is we can help people figure out how to negotiate that.
00:44:06 ►
But for people who want to get off it, I’m not sure about methadone and buprenorphine.
00:44:10 ►
I have seen some stories of methadone, people dependent on methadone,
00:44:14 ►
who have been able to detox with ibogaine.
00:44:19 ►
I think suboxone might be more complicated.
00:44:23 ►
But what people can do is if they’re on methadone,
00:44:26 ►
if they’re on an opiate that you cannot detox from on Ibogaine,
00:44:31 ►
what you can do is transition to a shorter acting opiate.
00:44:36 ►
And then that could be sort of the interim step toward Ibogaine.
00:44:41 ►
So there’s a lot of options there. Yeah.
00:44:48 ►
Okay. There are pre-care programs that will help you to do that and to detox before you go to the clinic or wherever you’re doing it.
00:44:54 ►
Yeah. So you would want to, if you or one wanted to have this treatment, you’d want to consult
00:45:03 ►
with medical people who are really expert.
00:45:05 ►
I’m a psychologist. I’m not a medical doctor, so I’m not an expert in that area.
00:45:10 ►
But, you know, the more reputable clinics all have highly knowledgeable, experienced medical people
00:45:18 ►
that will help, you know, counsel people through those questions that you’re raising.
00:45:25 ►
Appreciate it. Thank you guys. Sure. And, and, you know, you, you both have made a good point,
00:45:31 ►
an important one tonight about the fact that, that this isn’t something that is done casually
00:45:36 ►
by people that don’t know what they’re doing, that you really need a medical staff there
00:45:40 ►
that knows what they’re doing and can provide assistance if an emergency happens.
00:45:46 ►
Of course. And also in terms of the medical risk, there’s a pre-screening always, at least in
00:45:54 ►
reputable clinics, where there are people, you know, if people have certain heart issues,
00:46:02 ►
they may be counseled not to get the treatment because there’s too much of a
00:46:06 ►
risk. Now, the other thing is, you know, like in the psychedelic medicine world at large,
00:46:16 ►
it’s like the Wild West, I think. So there are lots and lots of disreputable practitioners.
00:46:24 ►
Some people call these drive-by clinics.
00:46:27 ►
Like, you know, you go in, you give them your money,
00:46:29 ►
and when they’re done, they throw you out on the sidewalk,
00:46:32 ►
sometimes literally, you know, with no money.
00:46:36 ►
So if you’re going to do it, you’ve got to be really educated.
00:46:43 ►
ICERS in Europe is one place that is very knowledgeable about this.
00:46:50 ►
Claire Wilkins, who is one of the, you know, has been one of the longest, she’s had some of the
00:46:57 ►
longest, the most experienced in doing this is a person that I always go to, Claire, if I want any advice about, you know, who’s reputable
00:47:07 ►
and who’s not. So you really want to do your homework if you’re, you know, considering a
00:47:13 ►
treatment. I started a directory on awake.net of a few reputable clinics. So you can start there if you like and check them out. What is the URL again, Lakshmi?
00:47:26 ►
Awake.net.
00:47:28 ►
But, yeah, I looked at the movie, and I recommend that people take a look at that.
00:47:34 ►
I’ll see that the link is on the website when we do the podcast of this, too.
00:47:40 ►
But on your website, I noticed that you have a place to access some reputable practitioners
00:47:47 ►
do you want to talk about that well part of the part of the reason when we started to put this
00:47:54 ►
campaign together we realized that not only did we need to get the word out but with 200 people
00:47:58 ►
almost dying every day we needed to give people access to practitioners and just like Andrew was saying it’s like a wild
00:48:07 ►
west out there and there are clinics which you know that’s totally unregulated so there are
00:48:13 ►
people there are addicts who will go uh former addicts who will do Ibogaine become completely
00:48:19 ►
enthusiastic about it and want to share it with other people who are addicted they’ll start a clinic you know and
00:48:25 ►
then they’ll be doing doing this but what happens is the pressure of making a living might make them
00:48:32 ►
be a little lax about the standards of admission and they might you know it’s almost like they
00:48:39 ►
maybe they don’t mean to but they might soften soften the entry restrictions or the health conditions.
00:48:52 ►
And that’s what happens. That’s why there are fatalities, I believe. Ibogaine is not
00:48:59 ►
that much more dangerous than a lot of medical drugs that are used within the healthcare system.
00:49:08 ►
And so you know that the danger can be regulated if it was lethal.
00:49:14 ►
Well, you know, it sounds like the situation is similar to in particularly the early days of ayahuasca and even today to where,
00:49:22 ►
and I can relate to it to a degree that you have
00:49:26 ►
an experience you’ve never had anything like this before and you become evangelical about it you
00:49:30 ►
know and uh but if you’re if you get too evangelical before you you’ve gone through the the uh
00:49:36 ►
apprenticeship that’s when you can get other people in trouble as well and you know it’s like
00:49:42 ►
with ayahuasca i i uh i i only did it with, you know, I was fortunate to
00:49:47 ►
be in a group with a Peruvian ayahuasquero who had come up and we could do it in authentic
00:49:52 ►
ceremonies. I wouldn’t really trust some North Americano who had done ayahuasca four times in
00:49:59 ►
these running ceremonies. And it sounds like if you’re not careful, you can get into a situation like that with iboga as you can with ketamine or anything else.
00:50:08 ►
And so once again, it’s a question of doing your homework and talking to people who know these people who’ve had an experience.
00:50:18 ►
Don’t just go out to the Internet and contact the first one you can find because it’s a process that should take some time to do it right.
00:50:29 ►
And actually, the people who would be searching for Iboga
00:50:33 ►
may not essentially be the people who are addicted,
00:50:37 ►
but it may be their loved ones who are caring for them
00:50:40 ►
and worrying about them and looking for things.
00:50:42 ►
And would you have any advice for somebody
00:50:45 ►
who does have a loved one who is addicted and is kind of out of control? If you could find,
00:50:53 ►
if I was in that situation, I found what I would consider a reputable iboga clinic,
00:50:59 ►
how would you approach an addict that was not responding to you and your
00:51:06 ►
family essentially?
00:51:07 ►
Well, I’m not a doctor,
00:51:10 ►
but what I’ve heard from people who run clinics is that even though Iboga can,
00:51:16 ►
can interrupt addiction for it to be a lasting recovery,
00:51:21 ►
the addict needs to want it.
00:51:23 ►
The person who’s addicted needs to want it. So, you know,
00:51:27 ►
you can force somebody to the clinic, but it’s not going to last. I’ve heard that from
00:51:34 ►
several people who have had clinics. This sort of hinges on what my life’s work has become all about, which is that people who are addicted or are struggling with problematic relationships to substances are suffering.
00:51:58 ►
If you’re not suffering with your drug use, your drug use is not problematic.
00:52:04 ►
And then I would say,
00:52:05 ►
leave the person alone. You know, human beings have the right to make choices about what should
00:52:12 ►
have. I believe they have the divine right to make choices about what to put in their bodies.
00:52:17 ►
But people who we might call addicted are struggling, they’re suffering.
00:52:22 ►
And they may not be ready to go to an ibogaine clinic. They may not
00:52:26 ►
be ready to stop. And I would argue that the data suggests the majority of people that are
00:52:32 ►
engaged in high-risk behavior or problematic behavior are not ready to stop. So we need to
00:52:40 ►
normalize. That’s one thing, to tell the loved one. If your addicted loved one is not ready to
00:52:46 ►
stop, that’s normal. And this is the essence of a harm reduction approach or philosophy for me.
00:52:54 ►
We need to start where that person is ready to start. We need to support them wherever they’re
00:53:00 ►
ready to begin their journey. The biggest problem is when you start trying to get somebody to do something
00:53:07 ►
that they’re not ready to do, you set up a battle.
00:53:10 ►
And that breaks down, that can wreck a relationship.
00:53:15 ►
So we often need to reassure the loved one that your drug-using loved one is suffering.
00:53:22 ►
And what we need to do is support you in developing a relationship
00:53:26 ►
where you can, a mutually supportive relationship, where you can actually begin a conversation about
00:53:33 ►
what are you ready to do? What do you feel like you need to do? What positive steps are you ready
00:53:40 ►
to take? And I love to use the analogy of exercise because everybody understands,
00:53:49 ►
we all know that frequent exercise is one of the healthiest things we can do.
00:53:55 ►
The overwhelming majority of us are not doing it on a regular basis.
00:54:01 ►
How do we get ourselves or our loved ones to begin exercising?
00:54:08 ►
We don’t drag them to the freaking gym, right? We don’t get a bunch of big goons to drag you to the gym.
00:54:14 ►
What we do is we try to figure out what are the obstacles,
00:54:18 ►
how can we maybe reward ourselves or the people we love for buying a set of sneakers or take a tour of the gym.
00:54:27 ►
So let’s begin a conversation, begin to educate ourselves, begin to think about what are the obstacles, begin to come up with solutions.
00:54:38 ►
We might now watch some videos together about Ibogaine.
00:54:41 ►
We might watch Lakshmi’s video or read the story about Juliana.
00:54:46 ►
So that I think it’s, we want to help people in a slow process toward that ultimate positive change
00:54:54 ►
that we all, you know, want to make in our lives. And one other question, I guess it’s not
00:55:02 ►
really worth asking now that you’ve talked about Parkinson’s and diabetes, but are there cases where alcoholics have been cured for foot and remission, I should say?
00:55:15 ►
I believe so.
00:55:16 ►
I believe that Ibogaine has worked for alcoholism, although Dr. Polanco of Crossroads says that he would not recommend Ibogaine as the first drug of choice for alcoholism.
00:55:30 ►
And I’m not sure what the reasons are for it medically, but he says there are other ways.
00:55:35 ►
You know, because Ibogaine is a hard medicine, it’s hard to go through and it has all these other potential medical risks.
00:55:43 ►
I think with opioid addiction, it does what no other medicine can do.
00:55:50 ►
And that’s why it’s such a boon.
00:55:54 ►
And there’s never been a time when it’s more necessary than right now, too.
00:55:59 ►
It’s hitting so many people.
00:56:02 ►
Does anybody, we’re at the end of our hour here.
00:56:04 ►
Does anybody have any other questions before we kind of wrap it up or?
00:56:10 ►
Okay. Well,
00:56:11 ►
I just wanted to chime in and say that it’s interesting seeing the correlation
00:56:15 ►
here. You know, for me, I’ve never had an Ibogaine experience myself.
00:56:19 ►
I’ve always been interested.
00:56:20 ►
I actually discovered it through Daniel Pinchbeck’s book years ago as well.
00:56:25 ►
But to see and be a part of this community and kind of trying to spread awareness about what these various psychedelic medicines can do for all sorts of ailments, physical or spiritual or otherwise.
00:56:38 ►
I think it’s interesting to see Ibogaine kind of take its its its place sort of answering the demand of this
00:56:48 ►
epidemic that we’re in and you know just listening to you guys speak about this um it’s very curious
00:56:55 ►
to see how i think maybe quicker than we may realize um it could become prevalent because of exactly what it treats and people going
00:57:06 ►
through, you know, years of struggling and medicines,
00:57:10 ►
whether it is the Suboxone and the methadone or, you know,
00:57:13 ►
going to a therapist and all these other things that, you know,
00:57:16 ►
like you just said, Lakshmi,
00:57:18 ►
that it’s happens to have this miraculous effect,
00:57:22 ►
particularly on breaking that habit of opioid addiction. And,
00:57:25 ►
you know, it’s, it’s, for me, it was interesting to see how this sort of fringe psychedelic
00:57:31 ►
medicine may now find a forefront. So yeah, I just wanted to comment.
00:57:37 ►
You know, Chris, that’s a really, really good observation. I hadn’t thought of it until you
00:57:41 ►
started talking about it in that, you know, 20 years ago when I first heard about Iboga, there was no opioid epidemic.
00:57:49 ►
There was a lot of heroin usage and there was a lot of people with heroin problems.
00:57:54 ►
But now it’s reached down to the teenage level with the opioid epidemic.
00:57:58 ►
And as you just pointed out, at the same time that has has risen to the foreground all of a sudden here comes iboga it’s
00:58:05 ►
like the plant knew that she was or he was needed to understand iboga is a grandfather and uh ayahuasca
00:58:12 ►
is a grandmother is what i’ve been told but in any event i think these plants know more about what’s
00:58:18 ►
going on than we ever give them credit for and uh we need to to honor them for that. Andrew and Lakshmi, do you
00:58:25 ►
have any final words you’d like to
00:58:27 ►
leave us with?
00:58:29 ►
Well, just that
00:58:31 ►
please support our campaign.
00:58:33 ►
We’re going to be putting out another Kickstarter soon.
00:58:36 ►
We’re trying to raise money to make this movie
00:58:37 ►
and it’s really important
00:58:40 ►
for everybody, for culture
00:58:41 ►
to learn about this medicine
00:58:43 ►
and learn how wonderful it
00:58:45 ►
is and support the the socio-political change that would be needed in order for
00:58:51 ►
it to be available to us for our own spiritual evolution so you have a
00:58:58 ►
website how do you keep how do we keep track of what you’re up to you can go to
00:59:03 ►
awake net and that’s my website and there’s um
00:59:07 ►
a bunch of blogs about ibogaine a directory of iboga practitioners and the latest uh kickstarter
00:59:15 ►
will be on there and and ed it’s it’s a really uh rich site there’s all kinds of information on
00:59:22 ►
there uh including that a really good short
00:59:25 ►
movie right in the beginning that’s give you a lot of information but there’s all
00:59:29 ►
kinds that I’ve only spent about an hour on that website so far but there’s a lot
00:59:33 ►
of information there so I’ll link to it again and I want to share that I was
00:59:41 ►
honored to have just been invited to start writing a blog for psychologytoday.com,
00:59:47 ►
and I posted my first post today. So my blog is called Beyond Disease,
00:59:56 ►
Rehumanizing Our View of Addiction. And what I really believe is that we need this rehumanized view of addiction as a complex process.
01:00:10 ►
And I think that that new view of addiction is very consistent with what Ibogaine does and other psychedelics.
01:00:21 ►
Because as we know, it’s not just psychedelics don’t just affect
01:00:25 ►
the body, they affect the mind and the spirit. And, you know, this transformational experience
01:00:33 ►
can be very healing for addictive process. And I will be doing some blog posts on Ibogaine and
01:00:40 ►
psychedelics. Lakshmi and I talked about possibly collaborating on some things so
01:00:46 ►
um you know i intend to bring the conversation about psychedelics and ibogaine um into the blog
01:00:54 ►
well if if you and lakshmi will keep me informed about this and send me links i’ll i’ll keep
01:01:00 ►
publicizing them here and then you know in in few months, as you guys get closer to your
01:01:05 ►
video or have another milestone or something you’d like to talk about, I’d love to have you back here
01:01:10 ►
and, you know, to keep people informed because, you know, like I just said in the beginning,
01:01:17 ►
next to the environment, at least in the United States, when it comes to the future of young
01:01:23 ►
people, the opioid epidemic is coming in
01:01:26 ►
right in close to number two, because we’re losing so many young kids, and particularly in the poorer
01:01:31 ►
neighborhoods. Just because they’re poor doesn’t mean they’re not really bright, and we’re losing
01:01:36 ►
some great minds. So I do want to keep this at the forefront of our listeners here in the podcast,
01:01:42 ►
and I certainly appreciate your time being here
01:01:45 ►
and look forward to the next time that we can do this.
01:01:47 ►
So thank you all for being here tonight.
01:01:50 ►
Thank you very much for having us.
01:01:52 ►
Thank you.
01:01:53 ►
Aloha.
01:01:54 ►
Aloha.
01:01:56 ►
Keep the old faith and stay high.
01:02:01 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:02:04 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:02:09 ►
In the program notes for this podcast,
01:02:11 ►
which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com,
01:02:14 ►
I’ve added some links to the websites that were mentioned in this interview.
01:02:18 ►
And if you follow those links,
01:02:20 ►
you will most likely be able to find whatever information
01:02:23 ►
and connections you’re looking for when it comes to the world of Ibogaine. And while I realize that there won’t
01:02:29 ►
be many of our fellow slaughters who ever have an Iboga experience, however, I do believe that
01:02:35 ►
this information could be vitally important to somebody who’s trying to kick an opioid addiction,
01:02:40 ►
or if you know somebody who is in that situation. And the important information here is
01:02:45 ►
that there actually is a cure that can save them from the torment they’re now experiencing. So even
01:02:52 ►
if this information isn’t something that you can use right now, be sure to file it away in the back
01:02:56 ►
of your mind should you ever have the need for it in the future. And by the way, I’ll be hosting
01:03:02 ►
another live session tonight and I hope to see you there
01:03:05 ►
for tonight’s salon I plan on returning to the conversation that we started a couple of weeks ago
01:03:10 ►
in which well I’m trying to figure out how and where I’ll be spending the final 20 years or so
01:03:15 ►
of my life and since I’m already 76 years old you can see that I remain very optimistic about
01:03:21 ►
how long I’m planning to stay around on this little blue planet.
01:03:29 ►
And already, some of the suggestions that have come up are beginning to change the way that I’m thinking about what some may think of as their long, boring final years. Not me. I plan
01:03:36 ►
on making these next 20 years some of the most exciting, fun, and interesting times of my life.
01:03:42 ►
And I hope that you’ll be spending them with me here in the
01:03:45 ►
Psychedelic Salon. But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.