The pounding drums overwhelm the young, eager Babongo boy, crumpling him to his knees in front of the turbulent flames. Red-and-white-paint smeared faces flicker behind the flames, as the fire-illuminated forms of their dancing relaxes the boy, their incantations filling the emptiness of the night. The wise N’ganga steadily approaches, and forces into the boy’s mouth a chewy, acidic-tasting compound: ibogaine. A mirror is placed at the base of the flames and the boy looks at his wavering, distorted image, his senses mixing synergistically to reveal an underlying, convoluted image that speaks to him in a calming tone: the spirit of the iboga. Suddenly, convulsions overtake his body as he follows the spirit through an introspective hallucination
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With iboga, you live God.” For the Bwiti tribes of Gabon and Cameroon, iboga is the sacred essence of their religion. In the religion’s initiation ritual described above, tribe members consume massive amounts of ibogaine from a powdered iboga root bark indigenous to West Africa in order to trigger acute visions of the “other world.” Ibogaine and its intense visions, often described as “ten years of psychoanalysis in one night,” are due to its psychedelic nature, a result of it being an indole alkaloid (formula C20H26N2O) that has the capacity to affect countless neurotransmitters. It is this very behavior of ibogaine that signals its potential as an anti-addictive compound. Dr. Carl Anderson from Mclean Hospital in 1998 noted this in an essay where he contended that a disrupted relationship between the brain’s hemispheres leads to addiction and that ibogaine can positively act as a “bihemispheric reintegrator.” The unique manner in which ibogaine acts as a molecular key to addiction receptors ultimately resets patterns and hampers the feedback loops that augment dependency. Ibogaine may be entheogenic, but modern science has allowed us to evolve one of the most hallucinogenic drugs to interrupt the addictive effects of some of the world’s most dangerous
With iboga, you live God.” For the Bwiti tribes of Gabon and Cameroon, iboga is the sacred essence of their religion. In the religion’s initiation ritual described above, tribe members consume massive amounts of ibogaine from a powdered iboga root bark indigenous to West Africa in order to trigger acute visions of the “other world.” Ibogaine and its intense visions, often described as “ten years of psychoanalysis in one night,” are due to its psychedelic nature, a result of it being an indole alkaloid (formula C20H26N2O) that has the capacity to affect countless neurotransmitters. It is this very behavior of ibogaine that signals its potential as an anti-addictive compound. Dr. Carl Anderson from Mclean Hospital in 1998 noted this in an essay where he contended that a disrupted relationship between the brain’s hemispheres leads to addiction and that ibogaine can positively act as a “bihemispheric reintegrator.” The unique manner in which ibogaine acts as a molecular key to addiction receptors ultimately resets patterns and hampers the feedback loops that augment dependency. Ibogaine may be entheogenic, but modern science has allowed us to evolve one of the most hallucinogenic drugs to interrupt the addictive effects of some of the world’s most dangerous