On a crisp November day in Aspen, Colorado, Rick Perry is stumping for iboga, a psychedelic shrub native to the Congo Basin rainforest in Central Africa known for producing powerful waking dreams. It is the heart of Bwiti, a centuries-old spiritual discipline primarily practiced in Gabon, and recently, the darling of the American psychedelic right. “Take on the mantle of being the Johnny Appleseed of iboga, every one of you,” the former governor of Texas tells the audience while a delegation from Gabon watches impassively. “The medicine clearly showed me things that I’d never seen before,” Perry later tells me. “In the presence of God, I knew it — he loves me with great intensity. Pure white light.”
How iboga made its way from the jungles of Gabon to the lips of Rick Perry is a story that often feels like a waking dream itself. Just a few years ago, “the psychedelic right” would have sounded like a record-needle scratch, but as more and more veterans find healing from psychedelics, and return to tell the tale in masculine and religious terms, a new demographic of Americans is getting hip to the fact that psychedelics are plants of divine providence. Iboga is “from God, from eternity,” one Bwiti elder in Aspen tells me. Meanwhile, Perry says iboga may be the biblical tree of life. “The leaves of the tree will heal the nations,” he predicts, quoting Revelations 22:2.
Perry and his wingman, Bryan Hubbard, an eloquent lawyer, are the main evangelists behind Americans for Ibogaine, a lobbying group that hosted the conference in Aspen. They were there to build on their recent success in Texas; last summer, after a landslide vote in the legislature, Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 2308 into law, placing $50 million of longhorn taxpayer money toward studying ibogaine, the main active molecule in iboga, with hopes of developing a new drug that can curb opioid addiction. This means that Texas, a place where weed is still illegal, is now the top state investor in psychedelic research.
The Search for a ‘Negative-Pattern Interrupter’
In Aspen, everyone kept referring to ibogaine as a dark horse. “It was really a niche within a niche,” says Dalibor Sames, a chemistry professor at Columbia University who thinks ibogaine could be the next “antibiotic” in terms of its impact on humanity. “It was even a niche within psychedelic-underground culture.”
Now, Americans for Ibogaine wants to take it mainstream. While initial research suggests it could be an effective treatment for a wide range of conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, Americans for Ibogaine focuses on opioid addiction, which kills nearly 10 times as many people today as in 1999. Small studies suggest it can dramatically reduce opioid dependence — often with just one dose.
“There’s nothing that comes close to being as powerful a negative-pattern interrupter,” says Trevor Millar, co-founder of Ambio Life Sciences, an ibogaine clinic in Mexico, where the drug is unregulated. Other psychedelics might help someone psychologically get past addiction, “but nothing’s going to cut through those withdrawals that come from opiates. Ibogaine is the only thing we know that can do that.”
Cultural Reciprocity and the Future of Iboga
Before iboga came to the West — before, even, it was the sacrament of Bwiti — it was stewarded by the Babongo people. According to Me Moubeyi Bouale, grand master of the Missoko branch of Bwiti, an initiate would be asked, “Who is your mother? The mother of your mother — who is she?” The goal is to go back as many generations as possible. The point is to show “there are no fences between the world of the dead and the world of the living,” he says.
As the West races to capitalize on this “living entity,” questions of cultural and economic reciprocity remain. Bryan Hubbard, CEO of Americans for Ibogaine, emphasizes that the traumas imposed on Indigenous peoples must not be replicated. “The Gabonese were doing it for centuries. If we do whatever we want, we’re gonna fail,” he notes. Whether Texas and other states will adopt frameworks like the Nagoya Protocol to ensure fair benefit-sharing remains to be seen, as the current push for medicalization moves at a rapid, and often extractive, pace.