Ibogaine Experiences

Eyewitness account of Benny Alberts:

What I saw and experienced meeting recovering hard drug addicts who had taken Ibogaine and taking Ibogaine myself.

I approached Simon Loxton while I was trying to put together a freelance magazine feature on Ibogaine and Ibogaine treatment. I am not a full time journalist and have no formal training in social work, psychology or any other medical field. At present I work full time as an electrician.

My interest in substance abuse issues stem mainly from the simple fact that I have, unfortunately, had a large number of friends and acquaintances that have been, or are, addicted to drugs in some form. The friends in question and I come from perfectly “respectable” middle-middle class backgrounds, mainly the southern suburbs and the deep south of the peninsula.

Growing up, I have been in the position of a young guy in his late teens and early twenties who watches helplessly as close childhood friends lose themselves to heroin, alcohol, and crack. I watched as they struggled through various forms of rehab, spend time in jail, commit crimes, poison themselves and in an extreme example, live rough on the streets while commiting burglary to support their habit.

By blind luck, some element in my upbringing or simply due to all the fantastic bad examples on offer I managed to avoid falling into the drug trap myself. I have yet to compare the prevalence of drug abuse in my peer group to some official benchmark but, plainly 40-50% of white teens in Cape Town do not have a hard drug problem. It should be safe to assume my experience in this regard is a statistical anomaly.

Unfortunate as the situation has been I have had an excellent opportunity to intimately know many drug addicts, witness the effects of their illness and the various means by which they managed to get themselves on a path to recovery.

Recently I started writing commercial features for the Cape Times and as I found that enjoyable, I was looking around for a story I could use to break into full time investigative journalism. One of my recovering addict friends mentioned Ibogaine and its reported effects and I was intrigued. When my friend mentioned that the principal Ibogaine practitioner in Cape Town was Simon Loxton whom we both knew from our early teens growing up in Simon’s Town, I took that as a sign and contacted him to arrange an interview.

I had never known Simon very well and couldn’t remember much about him from 10-15 years previously, but it was immediately obvious to me that Simon was no longer a heroin addict. If you get to know enough people with drug problems you start to recognise certain things like poor complexion, lethargic thinking, poor personal grooming, and untidy living spaces littered with drug paraphernalia and so on. Simon was completely the opposite.

With Simon I arranged an interview with two of his former clients. I met the three of them in the couple’s Claremont flat. Again, there were not even the slightest indication that either of them had any kind substance abuse problem besides tobacco. Superficially they seemed like any young, average couple working office jobs and leading normal lives. They were tidy, neat, clear headed and pleasantly charming.

What struck me most however was their pragmatic approach to life and a refreshing outlook on society and spirituality.

I have fortunately never become physically addicted to drugs myself so I have never had to experience the mental processes and struggles that the addict has to in order to break free of substance addiction. Recovery does seem to require fundamental shifts in thinking and the learning of mental habits that are not normally required to function in society.

By talking to them over a number of years however, I noticed that the addicts in recovery that tend to fare the best, are the ones that have come to accept themselves and the decisions that led themselves to that situation in the first place. Acceptance of oneself and others, “self-forgiveness” and honesty with oneself are pillars in any lasting recovery. Most importantly, there seems to be an acceptance of personal responsibility for oneself and all of ones actions. The concept is expressed in various ways by various people, but without it relapse is usually just a matter of time.

I mention these because these are a few of the traits exhibited by those addicts I know that seem to have fared the best in their recovery efforts. The best examples known to me personally have been clients of intensive rehab processes lasting six months or more. Those treatments involved military style discipline, continuous group therapy and intense religious study and orientation (mainly Christian). Some of these rehab options would easily fit the classification of voluntary brainwashing. So, to see the same attitudes expressed sincerely, with conviction and without any leading questions on my part, after a 36 hour treatment and outpatient counselling was quite remarkable to me.

Afterwards, Simon gave me what he called a “booster” dose of Iboga root bark (about a teaspoon), a small dose normally administered a few times after or before the therapeutic dose just to give me an idea of what it felt like. His advice was to wait until I had eight hours or so to be by myself uninterrupted. I ignored it.

I arrived home after the interview at about 11pm. I knew I had plenty of work to do the next day and that it would be best to postpone the whole thing till the next weekend. Instead I swallowed it immediately and lay down on my bed with the lights dimmed. It was an impulsive and wasteful thing to do as I would discover later.

It had been more than a decade since I had emerged from the drug taking circles that had seen my friends become addicts and I had steadfastly avoided hard drugs and hallucinogenic substances of any kind. Despite the assurances that the tiny dose should be quite safe I felt a little nervous. Of course, I had read extensively about Ibogaine as part of my research for the article and was familiar with the reported pattern of subjective experiences the compound seemed to produce in users. There can admittedly then be some chance of “pre-suggestion” but the specifics seem too consistent to me to be the product of a random “filling in the blanks” by some unconscious mental process.

In the first phase I experienced little of the visual distortions reported by users and only a mild stimulant effect and unmistakable symptoms of photosensitivity. I did also, very distinctly and clearly, hear the often reported “buzzing” or “static” sound effects that seem to be found in any detailed account of the experience.

A few hours after first taking the dose, I entered what is referred to as the “waking REM” state. If I closed my eyes I had the impression I was wandering through a series of endless corridors amid vague humanoid shapes who failed to respond to anything I did. The “vision” in this case was very indistinct and after an hour or so I was feeling quite bored actually and wished I could sleep it off, but the Ibogaine simply wouldn’t let me.

As time past, the visuals gradually grew more detailed and gained depth. There were packs of black dogs or wolves that circled me, geometric shapes, strange topographies that swirled around me like the relief lines of a computer generated map. These were all vaguely pleasant to experience but I hadn’t taken the Ibogaine to watch pretty lights inside my eyelids.

Again I started to grow impatient, at which point I was confronted by what seemed to be an enormous black dog. It’s a bit hard to convey the unsettling feeling I was experiencing but the animal seemed to look directly into me. It felt as if the dog was presenting me with a mind image of how others perceive me in a vision of extreme clarity. There were some personal details but in essence the dog showed me that I was a nerd, a reasonably nice guy who masked his social inadequacies behind various forms of pop culture fandom like comics and sci-fi.

I realise the above might seem somewhat trivial but to me it was startling. I had never actually thought of myself in such a way and the vision had the weight of intense authenticity about it and simply couldn’t be argued away by any means. It was like looking in a mirror.

Shortly after that I had a crystal clear vision of what I “knew” to be a strand of DNA in my lung tissue. The helix was looking ragged and worn and I watched as it started to unravel. I have a twenty cigarette a day nicotine habit, so this was unpleasant to watch.

The dog then went on to reprimand me for my irresponsible behaviour in taking the Ibogaine in the circumstances I had. Over and over again it made me realise that I had acted impulsively and foolishly, occasionally pointing out some other fine examples from other areas in my life. Thankfully, this lesson slowly reduced in intensity.

The mild stimulant effect persisted for some time as did some even milder visuals but the dog and the DNA were obviously the peak of the experience and shortly after that I fell asleep.

Apart from the predicted disruption of my sleep pattern there is very little change in my life that I can attribute with certainty to the Ibogaine. I did immediately discontinue taking a course of SSRI type anti-depressants I had started some two weeks before. Though doctors always recommend a tapering reduction in these kinds of medication I experienced no ill-effects and no return of depression symptoms. I still smoke around a pack day.

I stress again, I am not involved in substance abuse treatment or organisations in any formal way. I am merely a person who happens to know a lot of addicts and have developed an interest in the issues affecting the people around me.

In my non-expert opinion, the individuals I met are effectively more drug free than the bulk of the population who mask their own drug use under various guises such as “social drinking”. The Ibogaine experience itself followed the general pattern as described in many other accounts. I can easily accept claims of profoundly life changing subjective effects at therapeutic doses.

In the absence of any objective measure of treatment failure and success rates