Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Richie Ogulnick
Date this lecture was recorded: December 17, 2018.
Today’s program was recorded during last Monday’s live session of the Psychedelic Salon. It features a conversation/interview with Richie Ogulnick, who is a leading expert on the healing properties of ibogaine, particularly in ways it is being used to treat addictions of various kinds. In addition to telling the story of how this African medicine made its way to New York City and beyond, Richie also provides rich details about the various protocols used in ibogaine therapy.
Richie Ogulnick Website
https://www.ibogainealliance.org/iboga/bwiti/
Psychedelics Today Podcast
with Lex Pelger
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
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Now, if you’re new here to the salon, I probably should explain that there are two main tracks for this podcast.
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Let’s call them the Salon Classic and the New Salon, and, well, sort of in recognition of the mess that Coca-Cola made with their changeover to a new flavor years ago.
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And I’m really hoping that the same thing doesn’t happen
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here. You know, one night, actually, I had dinner with the man who was the president of the Coke
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Company back at that time, and I asked him how the blowback was from that decision. And he had a lot
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of stories, but my favorite one was about a letter that made its way, unopened, to the executive offices of Coke, and
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it was addressed to the idiot who runs the Coke company. And he told me that after his secretary
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gave it to him, he took it across the hall and gave it to the chairman of the board and said that,
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well, it must be for you. Well, since I’m the only one here, I guess that I’ll have to take the
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blame for the new system in case it goes bad. But hey, it really shouldn’t be that big a deal.
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What I’ve begun doing is to play new programs that fit the classic salon track, and publishing them first on my supporters’ private RSS feeds on Patreon.
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And then, three months later, the very same programs will appear here on the classic RSS feeds.
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So if you think about it for just a minute, the fact that a 1989 Terrence McKenna talk reaches you three months after a few other people heard it first,
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well, I don’t see how that should cause you too much stress in your life.
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So today, the reason, however, that I’m calling this a Salon 2 podcast and releasing it immediately on the classic Salon feeds in addition to the Patreon feed is because the Salon 2 track is here for you and our other fellow Saloners to contribute to.
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track, but almost all of them were created by Lex Pelger, who now has his own podcast that’s titled Psychedelics Today, and you can easily find it at www.psychedelicstoday.com
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slash podcast.
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And soon I hope that I’ll be able to begin podcasting a series of programs here on the
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Salon 2 and chat with us. Well, last Monday evening our guest was Richie Oglenick, who spoke with us about
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his work with the African plant Iboga. Well, rather than have me do a proper introduction of Richie,
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I think that maybe you can better understand his story as he unfolds it himself here in our
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conversation. Now, if you pause for a moment after you listen to Richie’s story and then reflect on
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it a bit, well, I think that
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you’re going to see how unlikely it is that he became somebody who I think of as the Johnny
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Appleseed of Ibogaine. And I mean that in the most positive way. You know, years ago, I listened to
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my friend Myron Stolaroff talk about the amazing Al Hubbard and called him the Johnny Appleseed of
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LSD. Well, once you hear Richie Olgenick’s story, I think that you’re going to see him in a very similar way.
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And as you listen to this interesting adventure,
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you may also want to keep in mind what the medicine women and men in the Amazon say about ayahuasca,
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which is that she will find you when she is ready for you.
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which is that she will find you when she is ready for you.
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And I think that it’s safe to say that the series of coincidences Richie encountered once the spirit of Ibogaine reached out for him,
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well, they may have been something more than unconnected coincidences.
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And when seen through this lens, the plot thickens even more.
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Now, from time to time, you’ll hear a little beeping sound which
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I didn’t realize was being recorded but what that sound is is the sound the
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software makes whenever someone new joins the session. So please think of
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those little beeps as a sound of somebody opening a door and coming in to
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join us here in the salon. Also you’ll notice that sometimes the sound seems to
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drag a little bit and I apologize for that.
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One day I’ll get a faster computer that can keep up with recording the sound a little better, but until then I think we can live with it.
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So, now please join me, Richie Oglenick, and a few dozen of our fellow salonners last Monday night as we talked about the healing potential of the ibogaine plant
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well well listen uh we’ve got uh none of our uh regulars with the exception of kevin
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uh oh wait yeah and tim katz here a couple others i guess so brooke yeah but in any event uh here
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comes another person dan hi dan and uh your uh microphone is off you know that yeah yeah some
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some of the people uh will uh voluntarily uh uh and and you’ll see i’ll do this from
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time to time if i have to cough or something like that okay and uh and then if i’m going to take a toke i’ll do that okay and uh yeah that won’t be
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necessary i know we we’ve been doing this uh you know it’s been kind of a just a real casual thing
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like a real salon but uh depending on you know you know how the thing goes and if it has a good flow and all,
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it doesn’t take too much editing.
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I can edit the audio from this and put it out in a podcast.
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And since we’ve had, you know, practically nothing ever in the salon about Iboga.
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Yeah.
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This is great.
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We’ll see.
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Yeah, this is a great opportunity for us.
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Yeah, this is a great opportunity for us.
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And see, I’ve always put off interviewing people because I don’t think I’m very good at it.
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You know, I get so nervous thinking I’ve got to come up with another question.
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You know, it’s just, I know, it’s just me.
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You know, it’s a confidence thing.
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And so, but here I found we’ve got all of these great people here.
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And so the questions actually become more relevant to the wider audience than just to me. So, so I’m going to keep
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into the salon here.
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Okay. So I see that there’s a phone icon.
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That’s somebody that has dialed in by the phone.
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You know, and I encourage people to come in and lurk if they’d like to.
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Oh, okay.
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You know, I’ve often been a lurker in my life in various forums.
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Then there’s a name.
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It says Penguin, but it doesn’t have a number or an icon.
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Yeah, Pete, you can put anything in there that you want.
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You can put anything in there that you want.
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And, you know, people call into the phone.
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I encourage lurkers.
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And, sure, they may be DEA agents,
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but I couldn’t imagine them having nothing better to do than this.
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And so nothing’s talking here about buying or selling or stuff like that.
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What we’re interested in is the philosophy and psychology and everything surrounding all of these experiences that most of us have had.
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most of us have had. I’ve been doing this for 14 years now. And all together,
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there’s been, I’d say maybe 20% of the people that have corresponded with me have never tried psychedelics and are probably never going to. They’re leery of them but they’re no pun intended if you’re thinking about the good doctor there
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but uh i and i have to tell you this uh richie that i i i am sort of a light-hearted guy and so
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i’ll try not to make too many uh corny jokes tonight but uh we we’ve got a a good little
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crowd here tonight and so uh uh as i i said a few minutes ago, uh, we’ve,
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we’ve never really done anything about Evogain. Uh, I’ve,
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I’ve only come in in contact, uh, indirectly, uh,
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through, uh, Giorgio Samarini, uh, who, uh, made, uh, uh,
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appearances at Palenque and then a couple of the people that ran clinics,
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one up in Vancouver and one down here, Tijuana,
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in Southern California, Tijuana area. But, you know, basically,
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I think what I’d like to do is just to, you know, start out by saying, Hey,
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tell us a little bit about yourself and, and how you,
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you got on this path and then lead us into the plant itself.
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Okay, sure.
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Sure, I could do that.
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Okay.
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Well, actually what happened was, oh, there’s a mushroom.
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There’s a mushroom staring at the moment.
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Oh, there you go, another person.
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Hello.
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Richie, I’ll tell you what, if you go up to the very top of your thing,
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go to either speaker view or gallery view.
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If you go to gallery view, you’ll see us all.
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All right. There you go. Let’s get
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started. I don’t want to bore people.
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I’m sure you won’t. Ask anything you like.
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Let’s just start with, you know,
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Evogain is not an easy substance to come into contact with.
00:10:23 ►
How did you start on all this
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path you’ve been doing this a long time well i was yeah back in 1989 um i received a call from
00:10:35 ►
a friend of mine who i met uh on the streets of new york as i sold my uh my cross with rings and he was selling his wife’s earrings.
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He was an ex-engineer troubleshooter for international communications
00:10:52 ►
companies.
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He used to go up for five weeks and rewrite a 300 page manual to help save a
00:11:01 ►
half a million dollars a day. And it was a very high pressure job.
00:11:04 ►
He quit it. and i saw him
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on the streets of new york as i sold my rings i was a craftsperson
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crafting for 21 years and we kept the privy of the latest um modalities and he called me
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one day and he said did you ever hear of ibogaine and i said no and he was interested because
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he was an alcoholic pretty severe um struggle with alcohol and he was interested because he
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heard of a couple of naturopathic physicians friends of his who witnessed a few sessions
00:11:41 ►
in hotel rooms in the netherlands that were going for like a ridiculous amount of money,
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like 18,000.
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Whoa.
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And I didn’t quite understand what was going on.
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I had never heard about Ibogaine.
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So I walked to the Herbarian Library
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at the University of Florida in Gainesville right now,
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and I came across a one-page article about a little corporation called NDA
00:12:15 ►
created by a Howard Lotsoff.
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And I called Howard, and he sent me a packet, this was before computers,
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of a nice thick packet of information.
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And in the packet were subjective experiences of after they ingested ibogaine,
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irrespective of whether they were doing a bundle of heroin a day or 300 milligrams of OxyContin,
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whatever they were doing, it completely eliminated the symptoms of withdrawal, and it brought them to a psychoactive experience where they deeply, I mean, very deeply over a 36-hour period reflected upon why they got into the addiction process in the first place. And I was so, I was so cameroon and i didn’t know how did you make
00:13:53 ►
your connection how did you know cameroon was where you wanted to go i knew that the plant
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grew in west central africa um it was gabon camon, Republic of Congo, and a couple of other countries.
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And the easiest country to deal with was Cameroon, because in Gabon, it was already very difficult to
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bring Iboga out of the country. And I didn’t want to go to the Republic of Congo because it was really, really dangerous.
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So I heard that in southern Cameroon, I could perhaps go to the pygmies there who grew it.
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And I can see if they wanted me to be the harbor of Ibogaine to the world. I figured, you know, I’d get a sleeping bag and a mosquito net, and I would go to the
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pygmies, and they would look around me and through me and decide if they trusted me and if they
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wanted me to share Ibogaine with the world. Richie, let me interrupt for a second now.
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First of all, how old were you at this time? Well, I had just turned 40.
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Okay.
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And had you ever done anything like this before?
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Yes.
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Yes, I have in one way, shape, and form.
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I was born in 49.
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Always, you know, and so 1967 was ground zero in Haight-Ashbury at the time.
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So, yeah. And my college days, I was, you know,
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there were guidance counselors that were running after me with Martin
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Buber in their hand.
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And I was trying to turn the whole student body around to LSD.
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I guess, you know, I, I had me, I guess I sort of assumed that.
00:15:49 ►
You know, what I was getting at is anthropological work,
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you know, going into another country and native tribes and research.
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Had you ever had any preparation for that?
00:15:59 ►
No, absolutely not.
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No, in fact, I think I must have gone to a backyard three times with a phone in my hand.
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I had never camped out.
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I mean, I’m this little Jewish guy from the Bronx on his way to check out the Pygmies
00:16:15 ►
to see if they would want me to be the person that shared iboga with the world, I was very naive. And my intention was to pick up 40,000 doses for three cents each,
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go to Needle Park in Europe, call CNN.
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One quarter of the people would show up for their free needles a week later.
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And that would basically be the end of my messianic complex.
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But it didn’t work out that way.
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I ended up in Cameroon, and I didn’t know where to go,
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so the first place I went was a university.
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There was thousands of kids walking around this university
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with glass on the streets.
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There wasn’t one kid that was carrying a book.
00:17:06 ►
And I spoke to a few professors and they shared with me that they hadn’t been paid for four months. And I just wanted to speak
00:17:13 ►
with someone that may be able to help me. So I walked up to an organic chemistry department’s
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door and I knocked on the door and there was a couple of guys playing cards.
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And I asked them, do you know anything about Ibogaine?
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And they said, I think someone can help you if you come back tomorrow.
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So I went to my bed and breakfast out of town.
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And I came back the next day and I knocked on the door.
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out of town and I came back the next day and I knocked on the door and a 300 pound six foot five guy answered the door and he said he said you’re looking for ibogaine where did you come from the
00:17:58 ►
bronx god will strike me down if I don’t work with you. I’m probably the only chemist on the continent of Africa that has spent the last year and a half perfecting the extraction process to extract ibogaine from Abinathia iboga.
00:18:16 ►
And he practically carries me to a 150-year-old wooden chest, and he takes out a vial of 13 grams of,
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said 13 grams of ibogaine hydrochloride.
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What was his background?
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I mean, what was his nationality?
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He was a Cameroon.
00:18:39 ►
He spoke English fluently.
00:18:42 ►
Half the country spoke French, and half the country spoke English fluently. Half the country spoke French and half the country spoke English.
00:18:48 ►
And he had indeed perfected the extraction process.
00:18:56 ►
And he had a very pure white powdered, pure ibogaine hydrochloride.
00:19:04 ►
And he wanted to share it with me.
00:19:09 ►
So I said, well, how much are you going to charge me?
00:19:11 ►
He said, well, about $1,000 a gram.
00:19:14 ►
And I said, well, I have $4,000 in my pocket.
00:19:18 ►
He said, here’s the 13 grams.
00:19:20 ►
Come back.
00:19:21 ►
Come back and pay me what you owe me, and then I’ll make more in the interim.
00:19:28 ►
So I did. I received the 13 grams from him. And I mean, this transpired over a series of
00:19:39 ►
so many synchronistic events. And one of them, for example, one of many that brought me to his door in the first place
00:19:48 ►
was that when I went back to the West,
00:19:53 ►
carrying the 13 grams of Ibogaine in the heel of my shoe,
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I really didn’t know the protocols to work with Ibogaine
00:20:03 ►
psychotherapeutically or spiritually. We had
00:20:07 ►
some idea as to how to work with it addiction interruption wise because we had some information
00:20:13 ►
from Howard which we can get into later if you like. But the day that I came back from Africa
00:20:21 ►
literally was the day that a 66 year old client of a dear friend of mine, a therapist,
00:20:29 ►
dropped this chapter from an out of print book called The Healing Journey by Claudio Naranjo,
00:20:35 ►
a Chilean therapist, in her lap. And the title of the chapter was I Began Fantasy and Reality.
00:20:47 ►
of the chapter was Ibogaine, Fantasy and Reality. And it documented about 40 lower dose psychospiritual and therapeutic sessions with Ibogaine. And this 66-year-old
00:20:55 ►
gentleman had a facial tick, and he was wondering if his therapist, my friend,
00:21:01 ►
knew anything about Ibogaine. And keep in mind mind my friend and a couple of family members were the only people
00:21:10 ►
that knew I was coming back with Ibogaine that day.
00:21:14 ►
But this is just an example of how this few week period just transpired in a
00:21:23 ►
very, very interesting way.
00:21:26 ►
Now you had,
00:21:27 ►
you had had no personal experience with it and you’re still willing to spend
00:21:30 ►
that much money to, to buy some of it?
00:21:34 ►
Absolutely.
00:21:36 ►
Wow.
00:21:37 ►
Because I read those transcriptions and it was a done deal.
00:21:42 ►
As soon as I read those transcriptions.
00:21:51 ►
They were unbelievable how beautiful an experience people had with no symptoms of withdrawal,
00:21:56 ►
plus a metabolite that fills up certain receptor sites in the biochemistry,
00:22:07 ►
the opioid, alcohol, nicotine receptor sites that eliminated a significant amount of the craving. Now, of course, after months and years, and it was about the time when I came back from Africa, it was actually 13 days
00:22:15 ►
later that River Phoenix, the young actor, overdosed in front of an LA club. And given that he was brought up and raised in Gainesville, Florida,
00:22:26 ►
where I lived, his dear friend came to me for an Ibogaine treatment.
00:22:33 ►
And that was the beginning of my turning over from making my jewelry
00:22:41 ►
to moving on and doing the Ibogaine work.
00:22:46 ►
And then very shortly thereafter, literally weeks thereafter,
00:22:50 ►
a dear friend of mine published an article, and this was 1993,
00:22:56 ►
in Magical Blend magazine, 65,000 people.
00:23:01 ►
It was a New Age magazine located in California. And it was years that I worked
00:23:09 ►
through referrals from people that initially sent letters and postcards. People were coming
00:23:18 ►
from Australia, from all over the world, mostly from the United States and Canada, just to do a psycho-spiritual session with me underground in Florida.
00:23:28 ►
Now, how did that word all spread, you know?
00:23:31 ►
Well, the article was really the beginning.
00:23:39 ►
It really reached a lot of people that were very, very interested.
00:23:43 ►
And then the addicts began to come.
00:23:46 ►
But first, there was a few of us, mostly there were therapists,
00:23:51 ►
and we would surround ourselves with a couple of therapists.
00:23:54 ►
And we began to explore the different dose ranges
00:23:58 ►
through the chapter from Claudio Naranjo’s book,
00:24:03 ►
The Healing, the Ibogaine fantasy and reality chapter.
00:24:07 ►
And we began to start with, you know, five and a half milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
00:24:13 ►
And we moved up to six and a half. And over a period of a few months,
00:24:17 ►
we then began to experiment with a higher dose. And at that point, we began to recognize that there was a certain amount of time during the session
00:24:28 ►
that people were analogical and there was no directive therapy that could be had
00:24:35 ►
because they were moving into the spiritual experience.
00:24:39 ►
And there was no capacity to have a directed therapeutic session.
00:24:49 ►
So then we began to explore the psychospiritual protocols.
00:24:58 ►
And then people were coming and I was training ex-addicts and a few doctors and paraclinicians to do the work.
00:25:01 ►
And they opened up centers in different parts of the world.
00:25:04 ►
And now Ibogaine is in about 30 countries.
00:25:07 ►
It was probably a couple of hundred active Ibogaine providers in the world.
00:25:14 ►
So, so all of this,
00:25:16 ►
this therapy is really recently developed here in the West.
00:25:22 ►
It isn’t necessarily a therapy that’s been done in West
00:25:25 ►
Africa? The psycho-spiritual rite of passage and initiatory experiences have been happening
00:25:35 ►
both in a further western part of Africa with Iboga, and the Pygmies brought it to
00:25:43 ►
West Central Africa. That is a further eastern part
00:25:46 ►
and then they brought it 300 years ago to west central africa but yes it hasn’t been available
00:25:53 ►
very very long in um in the west and and uh can you you said that a little earlier that I think sometimes this is like a 36-hour experience.
00:26:08 ►
Can you take us, let’s say I was having a lot of difficulty with alcohol,
00:26:15 ►
and I, you know, because I have talked to people, I guess, with heroin addictions,
00:26:19 ►
I know that have gone through a bogo, but let’s take an alcoholic.
00:26:23 ►
What would be the protocol that
00:26:25 ►
you would uh deal with an alcoholic right well there’s many different um models and
00:26:35 ►
they’re you know it’s from the shaman model to the western medical model to all the models in
00:26:42 ►
between and and you know, different providers align themselves
00:26:47 ►
to a particular model that they’re really attracted to, whether it’s an underground model
00:26:52 ►
or whether it’s, you know, a couple of doctors and a couple of nurses and a, you know, an eight-room
00:26:58 ►
center located in Mexico. It depends on the model, But basically, when it comes to alcohol specifically, a person would need to not drink any alcohol for 7 to 10 days to make absolutely sure that they’re not going to go through any seizures during the Ibogaine experience from alcohol.
00:27:25 ►
Right.
00:27:26 ►
And so if they’re morning drinkers and they’re severe, you know, alcoholic,
00:27:31 ►
then they have to go through the three to four day detox,
00:27:37 ►
which I witnessed people go through before I conducted treatments with them.
00:27:44 ►
And then they would, you know, settle in their
00:27:47 ►
room and meet a few people. And very possibly after, of course, receiving an EKG and a liver
00:27:58 ►
panel to make sure that their liver is, you know, eligible to do Ibogaine,
00:28:05 ►
and their heart, most importantly, is available to do Ibogaine,
00:28:11 ►
that they then could begin the session the next day.
00:28:17 ►
And it’s basically a three-stage session.
00:28:22 ►
It’s different from any other psychoactive.
00:28:24 ►
You really think you’re the granddaddy of psychoactives because after a couple of days
00:28:32 ►
of having this deep experience, often that’s just the beginning.
00:28:37 ►
That’s just the beginning.
00:28:38 ►
It’s almost like the unfolding of a new language.
00:28:42 ►
And sometimes people have called me eight to ten months later and they finally say to me,
00:28:46 ►
all of the intentions that I came into the session with
00:28:48 ►
have finally been understood, resolved,
00:28:51 ►
and maybe, just maybe, I’ll do it again six months or a year from now.
00:28:56 ►
But it’s something that people do more often than at the most
00:29:01 ►
a few times in a lifetime.
00:29:03 ►
But do you want me to go back and go through a more specific step-by-step?
00:29:09 ►
Yeah, before I do that, your feed cut out just a little bit here,
00:29:16 ►
so you may have to turn your video off, but don’t do it just yet.
00:29:23 ►
But let me ask the rest of our people here if somebody
00:29:28 ►
else has some questions, some ways they’d like to go. And I think you have to maybe hold up your
00:29:34 ►
hand or you can unmute yourself. I’m not quite sure. There’d been some feedback, so I muted some
00:29:40 ►
of the microphones. But I see, David, you’ve unmuted yourself. Do you have a question?
00:29:46 ►
Yeah, I had a question.
00:29:48 ►
I’m not sure if you answered this directly, Richie, but I was just curious about your
00:29:57 ►
first experience with Ibogaine yourself.
00:29:59 ►
Sure.
00:30:00 ►
How did that go, like your subjective experience of…
00:30:03 ►
Yeah, yeah. It was a smaller dose, and it was, again, with a couple of therapists.
00:30:10 ►
And my intention was to work through to take a deeper look at my relationship with mother.
00:30:21 ►
look at my relationship with mother.
00:30:24 ►
And
00:30:25 ►
it was
00:30:28 ►
really meaningful because
00:30:31 ►
there were
00:30:32 ►
astoundingly clear
00:30:35 ►
pictorial
00:30:37 ►
results
00:30:38 ►
which
00:30:40 ►
brought me back to reliving
00:30:43 ►
but being aware of living,
00:30:46 ►
not merging with the pictorials, but being, you know, there’s a witness component,
00:30:54 ►
and you’re just kind of like watching and witnessing.
00:31:00 ►
And specifically, one of the snippets that took place during that particular experience was that I noted that it wasn’t since I was eight years old at the time that I had thrown up, when I got sick when I was seven or eight years old
00:31:31 ►
and I was running to the bathroom because I had to throw up really badly and I was throwing up
00:31:38 ►
in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. And when I was throwing up in the bathroom,
00:31:46 ►
my mom, being the clean freak that she was,
00:31:52 ►
took my neck and she said, you throw up here.
00:31:56 ►
She was like, you know, so off her, you know,
00:32:01 ►
off her mark because I was making a mess of the whole place.
00:32:06 ►
And that was the last time I threw up.
00:32:08 ►
And it was like this whole emotional, you know,
00:32:11 ►
correlation to my mom being so angry at me, you know.
00:32:17 ►
So at that moment, I realized that during the Ibogaine session,
00:32:22 ►
I realized, oh, okay, so now I actually have a choice.
00:32:27 ►
Now I could see more. I chose not to, but I could have, and it would have been okay.
00:32:36 ►
So that’s just an example of, you know, part of the session at that directive therapeutic dose of five and a half milligrams per kilogram
00:32:49 ►
of body weight of ibogaine hydrochloride. And how long does that experience last?
00:32:58 ►
Well, the flood doses now, which are the psychospiritual doses, which run more from 6.5 to 12 milligrams per kilogram.
00:33:09 ►
The first stage is your basic, you know,
00:33:13 ►
feels like you’re going 200 miles an hour off of a cliff,
00:33:16 ►
but looking to talk about it stage.
00:33:18 ►
It goes on for four to six hours.
00:33:20 ►
But then you’ve got the second stage, which is a 30 to 40
00:33:26 ►
hour, very
00:33:27 ►
deep, self-reflective experience,
00:33:30 ►
which is more
00:33:32 ►
linear than the
00:33:36 ►
first stage, which is completely
00:33:37 ►
non-linear. But the second
00:33:39 ►
stage, you’re basically under the
00:33:41 ►
covers with your eyes closed
00:33:43 ►
in a waking dream state for
00:33:46 ►
about 30 to 40 hours.
00:33:49 ►
And then the third stage is basically reintegrating back into some semblance of normalcy.
00:34:01 ►
So it’s really a two-day of day process I spend a good three or four days
00:34:06 ►
with people on a one to one
00:34:09 ►
situation
00:34:10 ►
but I’ll spend as much time
00:34:12 ►
I’ll spend days and days with a person
00:34:14 ►
as much time as is necessary
00:34:16 ►
as that person feels
00:34:18 ►
because sometimes it’s really
00:34:20 ►
cool
00:34:21 ►
to help the person
00:34:23 ►
remain deconstructed and remain in a condition of not
00:34:29 ►
knowing and and be still deeply into a sense of presence because what happens during ibogaine is
00:34:36 ►
that a whole bunch of extraneous file cabinets are thrown out of the system like there’s one
00:34:43 ►
therapist that told me the thing that she got out of Ibogaine the most
00:34:47 ►
is that about 60 or 70% of her thoughts, she thinks, are our.
00:34:53 ►
It’s so much less now.
00:34:54 ►
And she’s able to empathize and be present so much more deeply with her clients
00:34:59 ►
because she feels like a lot was discarded,
00:35:02 ►
she feels like a lot was discarded, both
00:35:04 ►
energetically and through a series
00:35:06 ►
of hours and hours
00:35:08 ►
of archetypal
00:35:10 ►
vignettes and pictorial gestalt,
00:35:13 ►
but also energetically,
00:35:15 ►
not necessarily
00:35:16 ►
consciously as well. So it’s both
00:35:18 ►
that divest
00:35:21 ►
the person
00:35:23 ►
of a lot of extraneous
00:35:24 ►
material,
00:35:26 ►
and you’re left with such a deeper sense of quietude and presence
00:35:31 ►
that potentially can remain.
00:35:35 ►
And so I love to spend an extra few days with a person
00:35:38 ►
to help them remain deconstructed.
00:35:42 ►
It’s as if you’ve got a rubber band ball,
00:35:47 ►
you know, made of like a thousand rubber bands.
00:35:50 ►
And during the process of vibing,
00:35:52 ►
all of the rubber bands just relax
00:35:55 ►
and you see all the interconnecting threads
00:35:58 ►
that define this false sense of self.
00:36:02 ►
And so you see it all
00:36:03 ►
and you’re energetically appreciating it all and you’re energetically
00:36:06 ►
appreciating it all
00:36:07 ►
and you are detached from it
00:36:09 ►
and you’re witnessing that.
00:36:12 ►
And so there’s an ability
00:36:14 ►
to discard a lot
00:36:16 ►
of that extraneous
00:36:17 ►
false
00:36:18 ►
definition. And a person
00:36:22 ►
that’s just left
00:36:23 ►
much closer to their true
00:36:27 ►
nature, if you put it that way. And it’s
00:36:31 ►
a really beautiful thing to remain that way and not
00:36:35 ►
to reconfigure out of fear, out of not being
00:36:39 ►
accustomed to living in that condition of not knowing, but just
00:36:43 ►
to abide in it and of not knowing, but just to abide in it
00:36:45 ►
and to kind of zip up the sleeping bag metaphorically
00:36:50 ►
and just live in that simple condition of not knowing
00:36:55 ►
and let it integrate instead of reconfiguring
00:36:58 ►
the way a lot of people reconfigure
00:37:00 ►
after the psychedelic experience.
00:37:06 ►
But the cool thing about Ibogaine is the metabolite that pulls up certain receptors and the fact that
00:37:11 ►
people aren’t talking about an experience that they had last night
00:37:15 ►
they’re reflecting upon their new found perception and that can go on for weeks and months.
00:37:29 ►
That’s what I’m more interested in than the actual lights and cameras, the actual experience itself. I’m much more interested in the
00:37:35 ►
after. You know, Richie, that
00:37:39 ►
when you look at it from a real high level,
00:37:44 ►
a lot of what you’re saying reminds me of my own ayahuasca experiences,
00:37:49 ►
but not on the intense level that you’re talking about here.
00:37:54 ►
And that, you know, for ayahuasca, you know,
00:37:57 ►
it’s four to six hours of the real intense experience.
00:38:00 ►
Then you sleep, we get together and have a communal breakfast
00:38:04 ►
and then discuss things for, you know, we get together and have a communal breakfast and then discuss things
00:38:06 ►
for, you know, four or five hours afterwards. But it, you know, what you’re talking about is,
00:38:11 ►
is that, that part where I’m talking about, we’re kind of coming down and discussing among
00:38:17 ►
ourselves. That’s where you’re beginning your 30 hour intensive.
00:38:20 ►
The cover is with your eyes closed. And today, you’re still in process.
00:38:27 ►
Yeah.
00:38:27 ►
My question is…
00:38:29 ►
Granddaddy, ayahuasca is the grandma or the mother.
00:38:34 ►
And Ibogaine is the grand…
00:38:35 ►
And some Ibogaine providers are now doing,
00:38:39 ►
sharing ayahuasca with people a few weeks after they do Ibogaine
00:38:44 ►
because ayahuasca tends to open up the heart,
00:38:47 ►
Ibogaine tends to quiet the mind. So it’s a nice integrative experience for some people.
00:38:54 ►
Yeah, you know, because I’ve had ayahuasca experiences where six or eight months later,
00:38:59 ►
I’ve had aha moments and things like this. But the but the the uh the the ambiance carries with you
00:39:07 ►
for a few days but nothing on the intensity of what you’re talking about here and my uh my question
00:39:14 ►
is during let’s say like 12 hours into it 20 hours into it do you still is it is it just a a mental
00:39:22 ►
situation or do you still physically feel high as well?
00:39:26 ►
Well, the thing with Ibogaine is that it’s considered an omophoric.
00:39:33 ►
It’s not really even considered a hallucinogen because when you open your eyes during the process, everything basically looks quite normal.
00:39:44 ►
And then when you close your eyes, the whole experience
00:39:47 ►
winds back up. So it’s
00:39:52 ►
really a very deep, deep self-reflective
00:39:55 ►
experience, but it’s not a hallucinogen
00:39:59 ►
per se. Now, do you start out like with an
00:40:03 ►
ayahuasca? A lot of times we start out with
00:40:05 ►
an intention. And of course, that’s abandoned and taken to other places. Do you do the same thing?
00:40:12 ►
Yeah, yeah. I tend to encourage people at least 10 days before they’re going to do
00:40:17 ►
a psychotherapeutic or a spiritual session to pick two intentions, things they want to explore and work through.
00:40:26 ►
If they have a dozen, see if they can simplify and see the connecting threads between a dozen
00:40:33 ►
and them and bring it down to two and then go into the experience with those intentions
00:40:40 ►
in mind.
00:40:40 ►
When it comes to an addiction interruption treatment, that’s not necessary
00:40:46 ►
because the Ibogaine is going to go to the outer core of the personality and it’s going to treat
00:40:52 ►
the addiction. It’s going to address the addiction and all its energy is going to go to eliminating
00:41:01 ►
the symptoms of withdrawal, eliminating craving. There could be some insights, but it’s not necessary to work with intention
00:41:10 ►
when somebody’s coming off of heroin.
00:41:14 ►
It’s too much to ask.
00:41:15 ►
Yeah, you know, I have had several acquaintances who were on heroin,
00:41:22 ►
and they were really not even close acquaintances, but people I knew.
00:41:26 ►
But they went to the Ibogaine Clinic that was open in Tijuana at one time,
00:41:31 ►
and they all had like marvelous recoveries.
00:41:37 ►
I’m talking several years later, they were still heroin-free.
00:41:42 ►
It is truly a miracle component to Ibogaine.
00:41:46 ►
It’s not a cure.
00:41:48 ►
Only the person is cured.
00:41:51 ►
But it has a miracle component by, I mean, overnight karmic retribution.
00:41:58 ►
Literally, if not gently bringing a person, it’s throwing a person into a pre-addictive state so that they have choice again.
00:42:09 ►
But they’re still carrying at least some, if not a lot of the baggage that brought them to the addictive process in the first place.
00:42:18 ►
So the Ibogaine is the beginning of a process.
00:42:27 ►
of a process. As I was on the phone with people during these last 25 years,
00:42:34 ►
at about the 10th year, after being on the phone literally six days a week for hours a day with,
00:42:51 ►
you know, wives and girlfriends mostly, and sisters and parents and addicts as well, I noticed that addiction most often has to do with abandonment from the same-sex parent.
00:42:56 ►
About 60% of the people that have called me have some kind of an emotional and or physical break with the same-sex parent.
00:43:02 ►
And then, you know, maybe 20% have an abandonment issue with the opposite sex parent. And then, you know, maybe 20% have an abandonment issue with the opposite sex parent.
00:43:08 ►
And then there’s another 15% that are just the personality type in this world that are addicted
00:43:16 ►
to experience and they’ll do anything once. So once they end up doing heroin or jumping out of a plane, they become addicted to that experience.
00:43:26 ►
But the readout was primarily addiction has to do with abandonment from the same-sex parent
00:43:34 ►
and a smaller percentage from the opposite-sex parent.
00:43:37 ►
So it’s so, so important for addicts to have the courage. And they usually receive that courage, at least from
00:43:48 ►
the Ibogaine experience. They come out of Ibogaine realizing that they have to do something different
00:43:54 ►
because most of them have already, you know, gone through cold turkey, they’ve gone through rehabs,
00:43:59 ►
they’ve relapsed, and then they come to Ibogaine. And they realize that I have to do something different.
00:44:06 ►
I have to have the courage to sit across from a same-sex therapist that I really admire and
00:44:13 ►
respect because then they’re not in control. Addicts tend to be a lot more sensitive and a
00:44:19 ►
lot more intelligent than the average therapist. So it’s really easy for them to manipulate,
00:44:23 ►
you know, in the name of
00:44:25 ►
therapy, really not doing any work at all because they feel in control of the relationship. But if
00:44:32 ►
they really admire and respect the therapist, then all bets are off. They’re no longer in control.
00:44:38 ►
And that’s when the healing happens. So I’m just talking specifically with addicts now in terms of what’s absolutely
00:44:47 ►
essential so that they don’t relapse after Ibogaine. What happens is they feel so good
00:44:53 ►
after Ibogaine. Most of the people feel like, I licked it. I got the world by the balls again.
00:45:01 ►
And if they’re in their 20s and 30s, invariably, they’re going to relapse.
00:45:06 ►
If they’re in their 40s and 50s,
00:45:08 ►
they already have, you know,
00:45:09 ►
a couple of kids that are on their way
00:45:10 ►
to college and have a mortgage
00:45:12 ►
and, you know, a support system
00:45:15 ►
and a job that they like.
00:45:17 ►
Very often after Ibogaine,
00:45:19 ►
for an addict,
00:45:20 ►
if they’re in their 40s and 50s,
00:45:22 ►
they stay clean.
00:45:24 ►
But not if they’re in their 20s and 30s.
00:45:26 ►
That’s when the work begins, after the Ibogaine, for people that are younger.
00:45:31 ►
You know, something that just kind of popped into my head here,
00:45:34 ►
I was thinking how back in the 1950s, up in Canada in particular,
00:45:41 ►
they were doing a lot of work with alcoholics alcoholics and lsd and having some really
00:45:47 ►
good results and uh this has happened uh before but uh of course lsd became a recreational drug
00:45:55 ►
and uh uh with ibogaine though it’s it’s interesting it’s it’s uh it’s really making the
00:46:02 ►
headlines uh almost exclusively almost as a therapy and it’s never really hit the record.
00:46:09 ►
It never hit the streets.
00:46:12 ►
It’s one of the only psychoactives on the controlled substance list that was created in 1970.
00:46:20 ►
But the first thing that people say when they take Ibogaine is that now I know why it never hit the streets,
00:46:26 ►
because it’s not a recreational experience.
00:46:30 ►
Yeah, you know.
00:46:30 ►
It’s a very intense, arduous, you know, life-transforming experience.
00:46:37 ►
I first encountered it at a conference out of the country,
00:46:41 ►
and it was offered to anybody that wanted to be there.
00:46:45 ►
And it was at a point in my life where I was experimenting with everything.
00:46:50 ►
But when they described that, you know, the next three days,
00:46:54 ►
you won’t be part of the conference.
00:46:55 ►
You’re going to be on this trip.
00:46:58 ►
Only one person out of, like, 80 of us even did it, you know.
00:47:02 ►
And these were some hardcore psychedelic people. So it’s,
00:47:07 ►
I don’t think you’ll ever see it on the streets. That’s right. That’s right. We, I, I went up to
00:47:12 ►
New York, um, 13 years ago. Um, and I created the underground for Ibogaine in New York city.
00:47:21 ►
Um, it’s beyond the statute of limitations, so I’m perfectly comfortable talking about it.
00:47:27 ►
And we initially were handing out brochures and flyers in front of methadone clinics in Harlem,
00:47:36 ►
in Harlem, in New York. And we did about 30 to 40 sessions, and I invited half a dozen people from all over the country to, um, to be trained,
00:47:48 ►
to work with Ibogaine and then go back to their respective cities so that they
00:47:52 ►
can share it with, you know, their, their people. And, uh,
00:47:57 ►
yeah, it was really, it was really a beautiful few months. And, and, uh,
00:48:02 ►
and after that,
00:48:03 ►
400 people in New York city received sessions in their
00:48:07 ►
apartments um over a period of several months probably a couple years actually yeah hey richie
00:48:16 ►
i got a question for you um kevin yeah hey how’s it going, Reggie? Okay. So is everybody, clinics, underground, working with the Iboga, your Ibogaine hydrochloride?
00:48:30 ►
Or are some people using just a plant-based Iboga?
00:48:35 ►
And is there a difference between the experience?
00:48:37 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:48:38 ►
Yeah, I wouldn’t work specifically with 96.5% pure Ibogaine hydrochloride if I was doing a therapeutic or a psychospiritual session.
00:48:52 ►
But when it comes to the addiction interruption, I’ll only work with a higher amount of Ibogaine from 85% to 96, 97%. The psycho-spiritual, you can work with iboga, which is the root bark shavings, which is about 7% to 11% ibogaine per gram or whatever,
00:49:16 ►
to total alkaloid extractions, which run about 35% Ibogaine, but then there’s a representation of all the other
00:49:27 ►
alkaloids located in the plant. So I like the synergy between the alkaloids and sharing as
00:49:35 ►
full a plant-based medicine as possible for the psychospiritual, but when it comes to the addiction, just the ibogaine is where it’s at
00:49:46 ►
for a lot of reasons, both physically and to interrupt the symptoms of withdrawal.
00:49:54 ►
Gotcha. Thank you.
00:49:55 ►
Sure. Hey, I got a question. So do we know how ibogaine or Iboga actually heals the physical body?
00:50:06 ►
Does it heal the brain or the brain systems in some way or the nervous system?
00:50:11 ►
Yeah, if there’s one thing that I didn’t teach myself during these last 25 years,
00:50:16 ►
it’s the pharmacology of Ibogaine.
00:50:19 ►
I left that for people that have a brain to do that.
00:50:29 ►
that for people that have a brain to do that. But there is a resetting, a rewiring of the biochemistry to a predictive state. But there’s also a, it seems to be like, you know, there’s
00:50:37 ►
more synchronicity between the left and the right hemispheres. I really have focused so much on training people and doing sessions that I
00:50:48 ►
really can’t answer that fully, but I know people that can.
00:50:52 ►
So if you’re interested,
00:50:55 ►
I can get you in touch with someone that can share more of the technical
00:50:59 ►
pharmacological aspects of how it works.
00:51:04 ►
If you have any other questions, though.
00:51:06 ►
I have a question.
00:51:08 ►
Go ahead, Brooke.
00:51:10 ►
Sorry that my face isn’t showing.
00:51:13 ►
I can’t seem to get the video to work.
00:51:15 ►
No problem.
00:51:16 ►
No problem.
00:51:18 ►
So I have actually kind of two questions.
00:51:21 ►
One is, you know, how is it used in Africa?
00:51:27 ►
Do you know anything about the tradition of how it was used?
00:51:32 ►
Yeah, you can look up Weedi.
00:51:36 ►
B-W-I-T-I is the name of the tribe that use it as their rite of passage,
00:51:44 ►
initiatory tool.
00:51:46 ►
Like, for example, they’ll take it
00:51:49 ►
and there are certain rituals that they adhere to.
00:51:54 ►
You know, one guy took some iboga,
00:51:57 ►
ran into the forest and dug up a dowry
00:52:00 ►
under a tree that was buried there
00:52:03 ►
by a family member 150 years ago.
00:52:06 ►
Wow.
00:52:07 ►
Because he was told by his ancestors or by an ancestor that that’s where it was located.
00:52:14 ►
There are friends of mine that have gone to West Central Africa, to Gabon, where about
00:52:19 ►
10% of the population are Bwitisists and have been initiated by the Bwitin
00:52:28 ►
and
00:52:29 ►
you know
00:52:30 ►
they brought some of us
00:52:33 ►
the rituals back
00:52:35 ►
I personally
00:52:37 ►
have never been attracted to that
00:52:40 ►
way of going
00:52:41 ►
I find it
00:52:43 ►
just so transforming to utilize the extraction from the root bark
00:52:50 ►
shavings and to just you know quietly you know go under the covers with eyes closed and to just
00:52:59 ►
do it in a very comfortable western model because with the Gnedi, they give you the iboga root,
00:53:09 ►
and you’ve got to ingest spoonfuls and spoonfuls,
00:53:13 ►
and invariably you’re going to throw up a lot, so you have to ingest more.
00:53:17 ►
And it’s a three-day, three-night process of purging and, you know,
00:53:23 ►
ingesting this absolutely horrible tasting stuff.
00:53:29 ►
And they’ve got their way of doing things for hundreds of years.
00:53:35 ►
Some people say that iboga was founded close to the Rift Valley where human evolution began.
00:53:46 ►
And it helped catapult us into a condition of self-awareness
00:53:53 ►
thousands of years ago.
00:53:55 ►
And then it was brought from the eastern part of Africa
00:53:59 ►
to West Central Africa.
00:54:01 ►
You know, we don’t know.
00:54:03 ►
I remember Terence McKenna speaking about mushrooms in a similar way.
00:54:08 ►
It does seem rather miraculous that it can do all these things,
00:54:13 ►
that it can address both chemically and, you know, psychospiritually,
00:54:18 ►
all of these issues in a human being.
00:54:21 ►
Do you have some way that you explain that to yourself?
00:54:27 ►
Yeah, it just enables people to go so deep, deep, deep inside themselves
00:54:32 ►
that that’s where the healing takes place.
00:54:37 ►
And some people have said it’s like 10 years of therapy
00:54:41 ►
rolled into a couple of days.
00:54:45 ►
It has its miracle component.
00:54:49 ►
It’s very profound.
00:54:52 ►
But to me, intention is everything.
00:54:56 ►
And, you know, you could do Ibogaine a half a dozen times
00:54:59 ►
and be an asshole, you know.
00:55:02 ►
So it’s not, it’s never the method.
00:55:05 ►
It’s always the person.
00:55:07 ►
And actually, if a person’s intention is so pure, they don’t need a method.
00:55:13 ►
They could be walking across the street chewing a piece of gum, and they’ll be transformed.
00:55:19 ►
So that’s another way of looking at it.
00:55:23 ►
That’s another way of looking at it.
00:55:33 ►
There are some methods in the world from deep tissue, from rolfing, to polytropic breath work, to Ibogaine. There are some very, very powerful methodologies that I do really respect.
00:55:39 ►
Now, Richie, have you had any ayahuasca experiences?
00:55:44 ►
Personally, no. I haven’t.
00:55:46 ►
Because I was wondering how, you know, basically what you describe is like a three-day ayahuasca experience, you know.
00:56:10 ►
What I’m wondering is, because you said that the first, what, four to six hours are the really, you know, kind of exciting part.
00:56:15 ►
No, it’s 40 to 50 hours. Yeah, but I mean, does it change?
00:56:17 ►
Does it vary the intensity of the?
00:56:19 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:56:20 ►
Yeah, the first four hours are just completely analogical.
00:56:27 ►
The pictorial and the archetypal vignettes are coming through so, so fast.
00:56:36 ►
I mean, one woman, single-spaced, 34 pages, documenting 16 and a half hours of visions. But then on the other hand, another woman that I
00:56:46 ►
did a session with experienced absolutely no epiphanies, no insights, and yet she went into
00:56:55 ►
a state of unity consciousness for 10 and a half months. She went back home after being frustrated because she didn’t have the visuals that she wanted to have
00:57:05 ►
with Ibogaine. And then in there, I began to realize for myself, because I wanted, I was so
00:57:14 ►
attached for people to receive what they wanted. And then I began to realize, wow, people were
00:57:21 ►
receiving exactly what they need because she had experienced in her life everything that she ever wanted she successfully received until Ibogaine didn’t give her what she wanted.
00:57:45 ►
the level of frustration within herself that enabled her to kick into a place where she was witnessing her sleep for ten and a half months.
00:57:50 ►
She was really in a very deep state of awakening.
00:57:56 ►
And I owe it to that Ibogaine gave her what she needed, not what she wanted.
00:58:08 ►
So there’s no prescription is the truth.
00:58:11 ►
You know, there’s no, it’s like there’s a lot of,
00:58:16 ►
even Ibogaine providers that are very attached to people having these,
00:58:20 ►
you know, lights and cameras, these really deep experiences.
00:58:26 ►
I’m much more interested in the effect because energetically you can still get so much out of it, even though you’re not having like some deep, deep epiphanies.
00:58:32 ►
Yeah. You know, I’ve talked to dozens of people who have had Ibogaine experiences and I’ve never
00:58:38 ►
talked to anyone who’s been disappointed. I’ve talked to some who thought, well, maybe I didn’t get as much as I
00:58:46 ►
should have or could have or whatever. And that’s true of a lot of us in a lot of experiences.
00:58:50 ►
But circling back to another question I have about it that I’m curious about, because I try to
00:58:59 ►
be kind of a down to earth kind of guy. And yet when I do ayahuasca, I have to admit that there’s a
00:59:06 ►
voice, a feminine voice that comes out of, you know, it’s a spirit of ayahuasca,
00:59:13 ►
lady ayahuasca, I think of it as. Is there a similar spirit in Iwagang?
00:59:19 ►
Yeah, there’s a granddaddy. Ah. Yeah, he’s also there.
00:59:26 ►
For a lot of people, without having read about it or anything beforehand,
00:59:32 ►
a lot of people experience him, his presence.
00:59:37 ►
Yeah.
00:59:37 ►
Yeah, it’s also, as I would imagine,
00:59:41 ►
ayahuasca can be just absolutely profound for post-traumatic stress.
00:59:49 ►
Just absolutely wonderful for post-traumatic stress.
00:59:54 ►
And in really small, low doses,
00:59:57 ►
it’s turning around symptoms of Parkinson’s.
01:00:00 ►
Really?
01:00:01 ►
Yeah.
01:00:02 ►
Yeah.
01:00:03 ►
I mean, really, really radically.
01:00:06 ►
So we’re really interested in doing more research concerning Parkinson’s.
01:00:13 ►
Our hands are basically tied behind our backs.
01:00:16 ►
So all of this research is so slow go because it’s been on the controlled substance list.
01:00:22 ►
Is there any big institution doing research on Ibogaine right now?
01:00:27 ►
There’s a lot of institutions that are doing research. Yeah, a lot.
01:00:32 ►
Not for the Parkinson’s yet, but yeah,
01:00:36 ►
more and more research is being done.
01:00:39 ►
Well, that’s encouraging because, you know, like,
01:00:42 ►
like with LSD and psilocybin and ayahuasca, you know,
01:00:46 ►
Ibogaine is another one of these plant medicines that I think humans have been accessing for
01:00:54 ►
millennia. And then somehow we got them suppressed and it’s time to get back. And I think, you know,
01:01:00 ►
even I know there’s been a lot of criticism of some of the work that MAPS is doing.
01:01:06 ►
But if you listen to the recent talk that Rick Doblin gave at Blanquet Narte in Burning Man, he’s still encouraging the the private use of these medicines and not keeping it just in the laboratory and just with the doctors.
01:01:20 ►
Because that’s where all of the leading edge stuff comes out of it anyhow. And I think it is important to understand the chemical natures,
01:01:30 ►
but I think that, you know, the,
01:01:32 ►
the in-house shamans are important as well.
01:01:36 ►
Yes. And yeah,
01:01:38 ►
so I’m interested and I’m participating in that venue.
01:01:44 ►
Obviously you’ve been participating for the last part of your adult life.
01:01:50 ►
Actually, I took a few years off until recently.
01:01:54 ►
Four years ago, I went to Vietnam because my intention when I went to Africa initially
01:02:00 ►
was to reach a lot of people, a lot of addicts.
01:02:03 ►
I always wanted to reach a lot of people, a lot of addicts. I always wanted to reach a lot of people
01:02:06 ►
with a home remedy that they can do safely, legally, inexpensively, without
01:02:13 ►
professional care. And so four years ago, I walked away from Ibogaine for the first time in 21 years. And I went to Vietnam. I went to a place where opium grows. And invariably,
01:02:30 ►
wherever opium grows in the world, there’s going to be medicine, women and men that go into the
01:02:37 ►
forests there and find active ingredients and herbs that ameliorate the symptoms of withdrawal.
01:02:46 ►
Because the families that grow opium, the elderly people in the family are allowed to stay addicted to opium in between harvests.
01:02:58 ►
But the younger people, because there’s not enough opium end up going through withdrawal. So for a thousand years, there’s been active ingredients,
01:03:09 ►
plants that have ameliorated the symptoms of withdrawal.
01:03:12 ►
So I brought back a lot of information and I connected with a Chinese herbalist
01:03:18 ►
and we created a combination of 17 different Western and Chinese herbs
01:03:24 ►
that significantly
01:03:25 ►
decreases the tolerance to opioids.
01:03:29 ►
And so we can get a person down from like three grams of heroin to 0.2 grams.
01:03:35 ►
And then it’s easier for them to jump off completely just for a hundred or
01:03:39 ►
$200 at home without professional care, without, you know,
01:03:44 ►
a methadone clinic or a suboxone doctor looking
01:03:48 ►
over their shoulder. It’s empowering addicts to, it’s like a harm reduction tool to utilize
01:03:56 ►
this combination of verbs to basically do whatever they want in terms of their relationship with their opiate of choice.
01:04:07 ►
It also helps eliminate craving for alcohol and methamphetamine.
01:04:14 ►
So I spent a few years doing that, and I was very quickly shut down by the FDA.
01:04:22 ►
But if anybody’s interested, they can just call me. We can discuss.
01:04:28 ►
Somebody else should be. Go ahead, Scott. Go ahead.
01:04:31 ►
Richie, I apologize. I missed that. What was it that the FDA quickly shut down that?
01:04:37 ►
Yeah, they sent me a four and a half page warning letter, letting me know that I was, and basically it was four and a half pages comprised of a lot of the testimonials that people sent me that I posted on my Facebook page and my website that I had, which I closed down. But they were basically saying that I was being a danger because I was deterring people away from the tried and true methods of Suboxone and methadone.
01:05:15 ►
So I shut down before they shut me down.
01:05:20 ►
I’ve got a question.
01:05:22 ►
Go ahead, Matthew.
01:05:21 ►
I’ve got a question.
01:05:22 ►
Go ahead, Matthew.
01:05:31 ►
There are some plants in the Tabernathy genus in South America, and they’re added to ayahuasca brews.
01:05:40 ►
Are you familiar with any iboga use or ibogaine use in South America or places outside of Africa?
01:05:49 ►
Sure. Well, I, yeah, I helped kind of, you know, introduce and train people that are working with Ibogaine in South America and Brazil. And well, Central America. I don’t think it’s
01:05:58 ►
located anywhere in South America except Brazil. But I heard of a plant that has Ibogaine located in it on the border of Ecuador
01:06:09 ►
and I think maybe Brazil.
01:06:15 ►
And so that eventually could be another source for Ibogaine
01:06:19 ►
in terms of extracting from that particular plant.
01:06:24 ►
The other interesting personal part of the story is that when I was eight years old and walking to public school,
01:06:32 ►
I had this vision of the state of Bahia in Brazil, where the peninsula city of Salvador juts out.
01:06:44 ►
The peninsula city of Salvador juts out.
01:06:47 ►
If you take a look on the other side of the planet in Africa, you see where it’s obvious that that part of Brazil and West Central Africa were one continent.
01:06:58 ►
And it’s exactly where iboga grows, West Central Africa.
01:07:01 ►
Ibogagros, West Central Africa.
01:07:07 ►
And when I was eight, I had this strong feeling that that part of Brazil was going to be a very important part of my life.
01:07:12 ►
And I’ve gone to that part of Brazil many times, myself alone and with my kids.
01:07:17 ►
And a dear friend of mine lives there.
01:07:20 ►
And cousins of Ibogagros on her land,
01:07:29 ►
Habanate, Montana, and probably some others as well thanks sure those little little synchronicities are really interesting aren’t they oh yeah
01:07:37 ►
that that what you just talked about the the continents uh how they fit together you know
01:07:42 ►
that’s something that all of us as schoolchildren had seen and thought of, you know.
01:07:46 ►
But the fact that Iboga maybe, you know, grew right at the place where they split is kind of fascinating.
01:07:58 ►
And the state of Bahia is on the same parallel.
01:08:05 ►
And the state of Bahia in Brazil is the African state.
01:08:10 ►
So it is very interesting.
01:08:12 ►
Yeah, yeah.
01:08:13 ►
My friend has her posada on the beach and her land.
01:08:18 ►
And it’s a beautiful place to grow iboga.
01:08:21 ►
There are people growing iboga in Brazil for many years now.
01:08:26 ►
So is it still mainly
01:08:28 ►
grown in West Africa
01:08:30 ►
though? Yes, yes. And also
01:08:32 ►
there’s some
01:08:33 ►
farms in Guyana
01:08:36 ►
and other parts
01:08:38 ►
of Africa.
01:08:40 ►
But basically it grows
01:08:42 ►
wild in West Central Africa.
01:08:44 ►
And is it legal there?
01:08:46 ►
It’s legal in Gabon and Cameroon.
01:08:52 ►
Yeah, it is actually.
01:08:54 ►
It’s not illegal except once you start hitting Europe.
01:09:01 ►
And it’s becoming more and more.
01:09:04 ►
There’s more and more countries that are putting it on the controlled substance list.
01:09:09 ►
But I know that there is a lot of relaxation, at least in Mexico and Canada.
01:09:13 ►
I don’t know if that’s still the case because there are clinics in both those places.
01:09:17 ►
It’s still the case in Mexico, but it’s no longer the case in Canada.
01:09:22 ►
They’re starting to restrict it there.
01:09:25 ►
Yeah, I heard that clinic closed up there.
01:09:26 ►
That’s too bad.
01:09:27 ►
But it is amazing, though, the results that have been had.
01:09:32 ►
And I think that if there are institutions doing research, at least there’s some hope that it won’t disappear again.
01:09:39 ►
I mean, since 1999, it’s been increasing in interest by about 5% to 10% a year.
01:09:47 ►
It never reached any kind of level of critical mass where it becomes a household word.
01:09:55 ►
But over a period of these last almost 20 years now, it’s been increasing in interest, whereas 10 years ago, a doctor would never, I would never,
01:10:06 ►
I would never have experienced a doctor referring Ibogaine to a patient, and now it happens quite
01:10:15 ►
often. But, you know, that brings us to a great point here, because I think this is worth
01:10:20 ►
podcasting this conversation to get some more information out about it.
01:10:31 ►
And so how, where would you suggest people begin? Let’s start with your website for sure.
01:10:40 ►
And how, if somebody, let’s say is interested in, or has somebody they would like to help with an application. Just have them call me i’m a i’m a phone person i’m cool but what’s your what’s
01:10:48 ►
your schedule call with me just pick up the phone the way we used to remember the way you used to
01:10:53 ►
pick up a phone and just make a call i heard about that now your website is ibogaawithrichie, right? Yeah,.com. ibogawithrichie.com
01:11:05 ►
And I know everyone in the
01:11:07 ►
community, and so
01:11:09 ►
if it’s an addiction interruption
01:11:12 ►
treatment, depending upon
01:11:14 ►
a person’s ability
01:11:16 ►
to pay, where they want to go,
01:11:18 ►
the model that they want to utilize,
01:11:21 ►
whether it’s a medical model
01:11:22 ►
or another kind of model,
01:11:24 ►
I’ll be able to comfortably refer
01:11:26 ►
them to someone that I know will take good care of them. And let me ask you this too, because,
01:11:33 ►
you know, in our podcast audience, we have a lot of young people. If somebody is, you know,
01:11:40 ►
say a college student or something and interested in heading into doing research in this direction,
01:11:45 ►
would you be happy to talk with them?
01:11:46 ►
Of course I would.
01:11:48 ►
And I could introduce them to people that they would love to speak to that know a lot more about what they may be interested in,
01:11:56 ►
in connection with Ibogaine than I can.
01:11:58 ►
Good, good.
01:11:59 ►
Because that’s, you know, that’s the thing that the Internet has brought to us is that, you know,
01:12:03 ►
we wouldn’t be hearing about Ibogaine without the net.
01:12:08 ►
And so more people that we can connect with one another, like Leary said, find the others.
01:12:14 ►
And it’s amazing how many young people are now actually beginning careers where they’re conscientiously looking into studying psychedelic research.
01:12:25 ►
I just spoke with someone an hour ago who said that MAPS is actually looking to train hundreds of people to work with MDMA and psilocybin.
01:12:35 ►
And, you know, come 2020, 21, there’s going to be some really interesting openings.
01:12:42 ►
there’s going to be some really interesting openings.
01:12:48 ►
The work that particularly the protocols at MAPS has come up with, with the MDMA therapy, relies,
01:12:52 ►
it’s more heavily involved with the therapist,
01:12:57 ►
the man-woman team therapist,
01:13:01 ►
and the medicine is really a catalyst for the therapy itself whereas it seems like with
01:13:07 ►
with ibogaine that it’s the plant is doing the work right it’s a very passive oriented facilitation
01:13:14 ►
it’s a very one-on-one in a way arduous facilitation because it goes on for three to
01:13:20 ►
four days but it’s very passive you can some ask me, should I take a tape recorder with me?
01:13:26 ►
I said, well, as long as it’s voice activated,
01:13:29 ►
because you may say two words and then 12 hours later,
01:13:33 ►
you’ll say another six words.
01:13:36 ►
But that’s the kind of experience.
01:13:38 ►
It is very, very, very quiet.
01:13:41 ►
Well, listen, does anybody else want to jump in here
01:13:44 ►
before we wrap it up tonight
01:13:45 ►
just got a quick question sure uh we hear a lot about if it’s the effectiveness for heroin
01:13:51 ►
addiction uh up in canada now we’re so deep into the fentanyl especially in bc here yeah uh is the
01:13:58 ►
efficacy is as good with the stronger things like fentanyl as it has been with heroin? We usually tend to see if it’s possible for people to get off of the fentanyl before they do Ibogaine.
01:14:14 ►
Even if it takes like doing more of another opiate of choice.
01:14:20 ►
The problem these days is that the fentanyl is mixed with the heroin.
01:14:25 ►
And so, you know, that’s what we do.
01:14:27 ►
We just work with what we have.
01:14:30 ►
But when a person, you know, like five, ten years ago, before the fentanyl crisis happened,
01:14:38 ►
people would be doing fentanyl as a pain management medication.
01:14:43 ►
fentanyl as a pain management medication.
01:14:50 ►
So if they were doing like 200 milligrams of OxyContin along with fentanyl patch, we would ask them to get off of the patch, even if it meant increasing the amount of OxyContin
01:14:55 ►
they were doing, and then the Ibogaine would take care of the OxyContin.
01:15:01 ►
The same goes for methadone and Suboxone.
01:15:05 ►
the Oxycontin. The same goes for methadone and Suboxone. There’s a couple of steps that need to be taken before a person can do Ibogaine coming off of methadone and Suboxone. They need
01:15:13 ►
to transfer to a short-acting opiate, maybe in combination with Kratom, but they need to spend some weeks getting off of that long half-life.
01:15:27 ►
Good, thanks.
01:15:28 ►
Sure.
01:15:29 ►
Yeah, and I got a question, Richie.
01:15:32 ►
So what do you think the future of iboga or ibogaine is?
01:15:38 ►
Is it going to become less underground?
01:15:41 ►
Do you think that it’ll ever be used in like mainstream hospitals or like you know
01:15:45 ►
yeah i mean you know could be someday it’s there’ll be an ibogaine room and in every va hospital in
01:15:52 ►
the country you know city um but it’s hard you know it’s hard to know when that will happen
01:15:59 ►
sometimes you know how movements take place sometimes they’re incremental and incremental
01:16:06 ►
and then there’s this overnight
01:16:08 ►
shift that happens
01:16:10 ►
and
01:16:12 ►
I really
01:16:14 ►
don’t know where we’re going to
01:16:16 ►
land with Ibogaine but
01:16:17 ►
there certainly is more and more
01:16:20 ►
interest
01:16:21 ►
it hasn’t waned at all
01:16:24 ►
during the years that I’ve been involved.
01:16:29 ►
Why is Ibogaine such an unpleasant experience for many people,
01:16:34 ►
or at least an experience that people don’t want to repeat very often?
01:16:38 ►
Well, it’s like giving birth.
01:16:40 ►
It’s not unpleasant necessarily.
01:16:41 ►
It’s just so life-transforming that you really don’t have a sense that you need to do it very often.
01:16:49 ►
And it’s literally like, how can you describe what it is to give birth?
01:16:55 ►
Okay, so like more like a DMT experience, like, you know, something that’s very pleasant, but you know, something that you don’t necessarily or sometimes very, but something that you wouldn’t necessarily want to repeat in an hour from then.
01:17:07 ►
Absolutely. Right. Right. It’s something that also, also goes on for weeks and months in terms
01:17:16 ►
of a transformative process. And so people are still in process for weeks and months. And so
01:17:23 ►
they’re not even considering doing it again
01:17:26 ►
until they’re finished and feel a sense of integration,
01:17:30 ►
and then they may want to do it again six months, three years down the road.
01:17:35 ►
Also, it’s been very expensive.
01:17:37 ►
It costs thousands of dollars, and that’s something that I want to bring.
01:17:41 ►
I want to bring something new to the situation
01:17:44 ►
and have it available for much less.
01:17:49 ►
And so that’s what I’m doing now.
01:17:51 ►
I’m coming back into the Ibogaine fold,
01:17:53 ►
but I want to make it available for people for much, much less
01:17:57 ►
than it’s been being made available.
01:18:00 ►
And I’m also interested in staying with a person
01:18:02 ►
for as long as they want me to stay with them.
01:18:07 ►
So there’s not going to be any time reference or really learning condition.
01:18:14 ►
That’s what I’m looking to experiment with now.
01:18:18 ►
It seems like something that would be very effective for someone who may be dealing with an
01:18:25 ►
addiction to like compulsive behavior,
01:18:28 ►
not so much to a particular substance.
01:18:32 ►
Yeah.
01:18:32 ►
Like yeah.
01:18:33 ►
Code from codependency to,
01:18:35 ►
to bulimia to gambling,
01:18:40 ►
you know,
01:18:40 ►
food disorders.
01:18:42 ►
And then there’s the person that just wants to go deeper into their process
01:18:47 ►
and their sense of self and, you know, their definition of God,
01:18:55 ►
whatever that might be for them.
01:18:57 ►
And so the dose range varies accordingly as well.
01:19:03 ►
varies accordingly as well.
01:19:10 ►
In the native traditions, do they have a dose range for various experiences or just one range that they use?
01:19:12 ►
They have one range.
01:19:14 ►
Just as much iboga as you possibly can without throwing up.
01:19:18 ►
That was what I kind of thought.
01:19:20 ►
So these lower dose for use in therapy, that’s a more modern use of Iboga.
01:19:29 ►
Yeah.
01:19:30 ►
Okay.
01:19:30 ►
Very much so.
01:19:32 ►
And was this sort of like trial and error stumbled on more or less?
01:19:37 ►
Yeah.
01:19:37 ►
It was just that, you know, from that chapter, therapists, friends of mine had something to work with when I, that day, when I came back
01:19:47 ►
with Ibogaine. So, you know, it’s, it’s so amazing how these, these medicines are reaching out. For
01:19:55 ►
example, you know, I understand probably like that one of the worst things can happen to a human is
01:20:00 ►
these cluster headaches. And it was stumbled upon that that lsd actually is is a cure
01:20:07 ►
for cluster headaches this all became you know people started sharing it on the internet and uh
01:20:12 ►
uh it wasn’t like it was a research project or something and the same with what you’ve discovered
01:20:17 ►
with uh iboga uh as far as a treatment for uh all kinds of disorders. Yeah, good.
01:20:26 ►
I have a question.
01:20:27 ►
You talk about Africans connecting to their ancestors through Iboga,
01:20:33 ►
and I’m wondering if that ever happens with Westerners, non-Africans, non-Widi.
01:20:40 ►
Yes, it does.
01:20:41 ►
Other life experiences, multidimensional experiences, unleashing of childhood, you know, repressed memories.
01:20:52 ►
But the thing is, given that Ibogaine is an organic, it’s not going to force the person to take a look at things that they’re not willing to look at.
01:21:02 ►
That’s the nature of the symbiotic relationship that organics allow with the
01:21:08 ►
individual.
01:21:10 ►
Whereas synthetics will sometimes plow through consciousness and basically say,
01:21:15 ►
you’re going to look at this, whether you like it or not,
01:21:18 ►
whether you’re ready for it or not, because you know,
01:21:20 ►
they don’t really have a soul.
01:21:22 ►
Listen, all of you people, i really appreciate you all joining in
01:21:26 ►
tonight uh now next monday night i won’t be here uh it’s christmas eve and and there’s all kinds
01:21:32 ►
of family dinners and stuff like that that’d be a real jerk for not going to but uh i will be here
01:21:38 ►
on new year’s eve and i hope none of you show up unless you’re on your way out and you can tell us
01:21:43 ►
about where you’re going because i hope your new Year’s Eve are more exciting than that but this will be mine so I’ll
01:21:49 ►
be back here for that and I appreciate you all being here tonight and being part of this little
01:21:55 ►
family that’s growing and you know until New Year’s Eve keep the old faith and stay high.
01:22:02 ►
Nice meeting you all. Thank you very much.
01:22:04 ►
Year’s Eve. Keep the old faith and stay high. Nice meeting you all. Thank you very much.
01:22:13 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time. Although I’m not normally a betting man, I’d be willing to bet that during this conversation
01:22:21 ►
that we had last week with Richie, that there were a couple of times that you thought of a question
01:22:25 ►
that you’d like to have asked him.
01:22:27 ►
Well, don’t forget that question, because sometime next year,
01:22:30 ►
Richie’s going to be back with us for another one of our live weekly salons.
01:22:35 ►
And if you go to the program notes at psychedelicsalon.com,
01:22:38 ►
you’ll find a link to Richie’s website, where you can find his phone number as well.
01:22:42 ►
And as I said, the address to his site is easy to remember.
01:22:46 ►
It is ibogawithrichie.com.
01:22:49 ►
That’s I-B-O-G-A-W-I-T-H-R-I-C-H-I-E, ibogawithrichie.com.
01:22:57 ►
And as you know now, I host these live conversations with any of my supporters on Patreon who’d like to join me each week.
01:23:06 ►
It only costs $1 a month to join the conversation or to just simply listen in.
01:23:12 ►
And on nights where we don’t have a featured guest, well, our conversations cover a really wide range of topics.
01:23:18 ►
And I’m sure that you’d find one or two of them quite interesting.
01:23:21 ►
And while I do open the salon for my Patreon supporters on
01:23:25 ►
zoom.us every Monday night, well, since tomorrow is Christmas Eve and there are so many of us
01:23:30 ►
having family get-togethers, there won’t be a live salon tomorrow night. However, I will open
01:23:36 ►
the salon again on New Year’s Eve at 6 30 p.m pacific time. So if you live outside of the
01:23:42 ►
states, well, maybe you can join us as you come home from your parties. And if you live outside of the states well maybe you can join us as you come home from your parties
01:23:45 ►
and if you live here in the U.S. why don’t you drop by on your way out personally though I’ve
01:23:51 ►
always thought of New Year’s Eve as too dangerous a time to be out in the highway with all of the
01:23:55 ►
drunks driving around so I’ll be here in the salon having a New Year’s Eve toke with some of
01:24:01 ►
our fellow salonners and I hope to see you there. For now, this is Lorenzo
01:24:05 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:24:08 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.