Anybody know about ibogaine?

It was mentioned on drudge the other day. Some kind of hallucinogen from an African plant that's been found effective in treating drug addiction. A "hair of the dog" sort of cure, apparently.

I remember reading about it...Basically you have a spiritual enema, and it can leave you totally emotionally wasted.

Sounds like russian roulette to me...

Aren't most drug addicts emotionally wasted already?

emotionally wasted compared to who -- normal folk?
and where are they to be found?

My father always said 'we do not care what others think' and my husband said ' we only care what others think' You figure it out.

I don't. I would think a serious addiction would make a person an emotional wreck, necessarily.
:shrug:

It screwed me up, big time. The effects can be permanent.

http://www.ibogaine.desk.nl/

Its efficacy, as claimed, is in large part due to inducing 'onoreitic' states of consciousness. Some hard drug users find that that breaks the psychological addiction, and for some that's reportedly enough to get them to where they'll go through the physical withdrawal and never look back.

It doesn't work for everybody, that much seems certain from clinical trials, and there is apparently a small group of ibogaine activists who form something of a cult who use it in private drug addiction treatment clinics.

I'd be careful about it. The physical effects seem serious; the cultural prohibition against women using it in West Africa may very well be due to it being an abortifacient or very powerful teratogen (causing malformations to the fetus). (Related, and in general, psychoactive drugs are pretty uniformly teratogenic.)

Same site, looks good. I couldn't find anything useful on drudge link or googling after that. I know an awful lot of people who'd try anything short of a freight train to kick their habits.

It's a drug with great potential in treating addiction and for facilitating psychotherapy.

The current thinking is that it has an anti-addictive effect. The psychotherapeutic effect might come from "neuroses" being low-level endogenous addictive processes. The idea that people can get "addicted" to their misery is not new, but recently, it has picked up some support from brain function studies.

Ibogaine is a Schedule I drug (as are LSD, marijuana, and ecstasy) in the USA but it's not controlled in most countries. Since a fairly large base of literature (that is, reports of medical studies) now exists lending evidence to the beneficial use of Ibogaine, several scientists are petitioning the FDA to reclassify it for clinical psychiatric use. There are several molecular variants of Ibogaine which are unscheduled; if used by licensed physicians, they wouldn't fall under the Analogues Act.

It's an interesting development, worth keeping one's eye on.

--bkl

This tired old world could use an anti-addictive effect.

You don't hear about Ibogaine much, these days.