 This is the fifth international conference that we've organized, and so Gita was actually formed at a really early conference in Mexico, and all the other events that we've done have all been sort of focused on discussions that were really important for providers in particular, sharing information about practice, and really crucial things that were being learned, and so now that that network has developed and that information has been encoded and that it's been really interesting, this conference we've been able to expand the discussion to include experts from other fields that are really related. So we've got people here from that practice with Iboga traditionally in Gabon. We've got people here that are experts in addiction and addiction treatment and harm reduction and drug user rights and generally in drug policy. So the importance of this conference is that it's an opportunity for the discussion to be able to grow a lot, and for us to be able to do a lot of education about Ibogaine and what's been happening all these years. This conference has brought in all kinds of folks from many, many disciplines and I think it represents a maturity that Ibogaine is reaching a maturity that Ibogaine came up in the harm reduction movement with Niko Adrian and the Junkie Boon. It came up as during the war on drugs and it has matured into its adulthood, if you will, and that's what it represents, you know, academics, activists, religious people from all over the world coming for this plan. This conference is very important for all of us as community. Well, you see it, you feel it, bringing so many people, so many hearts together, so many minds together with different aspects of this movement. I think some important things that have come up in this conference is around the sustainability of Ibogaine and finding other solutions and respectful communication and collaboration between West and Western science and Western treatment modalities and African traditions and the wisdom and the needs of the traditional practitioners in Govan. My focus is really on Ibogaine, it's kind of its own animal, especially in working with substance use disorder treatment and I'm also one of the people who kind of says Ibogaine is not like mushrooms and LSD and peyote, it's really an onogenic which is like a dream producing drug because what's really happening to people when they take Ibogaine is they're having waking dreams, you know, with classical psychedelics your visual perception is distorted when you open your eyes and in the case of Ibogaine you're still dizzy but the visions go away, that's what you tell people, if the visions get too intense to handle, open your eyes and the visions go away. If you want to be considered a true psychedelic, I sometimes say, it's got to have a 5-HT 2A agonist effect, I mean that's sort of by definition, if it doesn't have that effect, it's not a true psychedelic. Ibogaine is not a psychedelic in that respect, in that very narrow pharmacological way but clearly the experiences that it has that people have are similar to other psychedelics and its pharmacology is much more complex than Ibogaine is serious medicine, it's not recreational and I think one of the best things people could do is get affiliated with organizations like GITA, you know, if you don't just know about it, join if possible, I mean I certainly intend to. Ibogaine works for something called glia-derived neurotrophic factor or GDNF and when this first finding, first came out in 2005, I instantly realized this is the mechanism we have been looking for to explain a persistent effect that you cannot get with an agonist like a methadone or an antagonist like Naloxone or Narcanin because those wear off in a few days and you're back to square one but if you could find something that will cause the nerve cells to resprout, that new growth will persist. Ibogaine is one of the only medications that orally stimulates the production of glial cell-derived neurotrophic factor which is GDNF for short and what that is is a hormone that helps to stimulate the growth of new neurons in the brain and so this is really helpful in the treatment of Parkinson's disease and other neurological disorders which are caused by a degeneration of dopamine neurons in certain areas of the brain so Ibogaine is able to go in and be able to do some of that repair. I would not be present at this conference and I would not be interested in Ibogaine if it were not effective in opioid detoxification because that's a very robust biological effect it's not explained by placebo and it's not explained by a main mechanism that we know so that has always been my major interest is explaining that. Ibogaine is the only substance on the planet that will alleviate opiate withdrawal symptoms if you take any other of these psychedelic drugs and you are addicted to heroin or oxycodone you will be deathly sick the next day after Ibogaine there is a blunting almost a 90% blunting of opiate withdrawal symptoms when done properly in a medical model this makes this the only substance we know of on the planet right now that will do that and that is the focus of my attention and the focus of my research so yes I would love to see entheogenic drugs find their way into proper use into the psychotherapeutic model I think we can get much more sustainable results of proper behavior with their proper use but Ibogaine as an addiction interrupter makes it extremely unique from all those other drugs Psychedelics and Iboga I believe show us that which the ego does not want to see the constructs of life have developed around us so that we think we know what we know and psychedelics deconstruct that knowledge to make us question do we know what we know and Ibogaine does that very much oh is that true and inquiry in general cognitive behavioral therapy is this sentence so true is the opposite true it's not just psychedelics that allow us to look at things in another way looking at anything from a different perspective psychedelics are just very powerful and immediate way to do so and to inquire about our solid constructs our solid beliefs that keep us limited and for many of us the majority what is it 25% of women in the United States are on antidepressants can you imagine the people who aren't even reporting that they're not then that's one country and so many many people are unhappy and how can we find our happiness and we're realizing now that if you can take a psychedelic and deal with 6 to 12 to 18 hours of intensity you could actually have many many days and months of inner peace so psychedelics are like a sword that cuts through that which we think protects us these are medicines of the spirit and if you have diseases of the spirit disorders of the spirit depression anxiety PTSD the whole psychiatric spectrum of disorders they are applied the right way they're much more effective than any of the accepted approved psychopharmaceutical medications which largely just put a bandaid over the symptoms they numb you to the symptoms and they don't really let you get to the root of your problems find out why are you depressed why are you traumatized how can you integrate that and really heal from it really recover psychedelics open the possibility of being able to do that so that if they could be accepted into medicine that would completely revolutionize medicine and psychiatry that's why it's going to be very difficult because medicines are very rigid institution and it doesn't like to change and there's a lot of fear that we're a threat to the medical establishment we who advocate psychedelics because they say we don't want to overturn the paradigm we've got too much invested one of the main problems is that the pharmaceutical industry cannot patent ibogaine because it comes from nature and pharmaceutical companies like to own the products that they're spending money to develop and to sell because it is very expensive with all the advertising and the research etc etc they cannot own the molecule they can't make the same kind of money the international climate around Ibogaine is very interesting because it's in a real grey area in the United States it's one of only a few countries where it's completely prohibited and then New Zealand and Sao Paulo have recently created medical regulation system for it in other countries where it's not regulated I think it's important that research is done to evaluate what systems work better than others but I think ultimately there needs to be some form of legal regulation in the US so that I mean many people in the US don't have the resources to travel down to Mexico to go to a clinic here it's interesting because drug policy reform right now is changing so quickly there seems to be a consensus especially in the US but in some other countries as well that harm reduction and decriminalization of drugs is the politically smart thing to do but Ibogaine hasn't come up much in those discussions and I think it's really important for advocates for Ibogaine to connect with the political dialogue that's going on around heroin addiction around overdose overdose deaths have quadrupled in the United States over the past 20 years and that's become a big political issue so I hope that Ibogaine becomes thought of as one of the solutions to the overdose crisis and to the addiction crisis in the US and in other countries we're moving towards a medical model for Ibogaine and I think that's a very good idea and very important I understand detoxification of drugs is a medical intervention there's a risk and even without Ibogaine it's a very complex thing so I think that's where we have to go to the possibility of having Ibogaine become a prescription medication in New Zealand and for people to have access to it in a non-private way, in a public way but that doesn't mean that the side of that Ibogaine also should be available to those who wanted in other contexts so first of all we need decriminalization of course in the countries where Ibogaine is illegal but also for other types of uses it's important to establish certain ethical and safety boundaries and kind of come to a place where services can be offered within the framework more maybe of personal development or these workshops where people go and have a burnout or they're stuck in life and do certain techniques where Ibogaine can be integrated as one tool in these type of programs as well I think it's something you have to be very careful with in terms of people ordering it online people mixing root bark with pure Ibogaine because as hopefully your audience knows Ibogaine is a risky drug physiologically that's another difference between Ibogaine and classical psychedelics is that David Nutt and other people have done studies of toxicity of psychedelics and it's at the bottom of the charts it's even below cannabis in terms of physical toxicity that's not true for Ibogaine. Ibogaine has serious cardiac effects and really needs to be worked with with responsible practitioners who have experience with the medicine and the safety protocols that are needed to keep people safe The main risks are cardiac I think as we discussed extensively in this meeting we had an ACLS course the C in ACLS stands for cardiac you know so that is seems to be the vulnerable point the vulnerability you know the chances of a undesirable or catastrophic outcome I think the risks for that are coexisting medical illnesses I think that it's possible for lay people to be able to do safe treatments but I do think that there's a certain amount of knowledge that people need to have to be able to ensure the safety of somebody that's going through the treatment I also think that just beyond making sure that there's not going to be any adverse reactions there's a whole lot of training and preparation that is really crucial for somebody to be able to have and I think that's something that really will come with time like how to develop those kinds of programs I think that's something that gets developed by a whole community and by culture that knowledge really will come out of like this sort of mass use and this kind of sharing of information that we're doing here Me, I want to build a place in Gabon where we'll be a meeting between traditionalists and researchers because you know all the research done for me are fake the research done on Iboga, you know why? they don't know what plants they use if you use Tabernante Mani, it's not the same if you use Tabernante Iboga Bayon or Tabernante Montana, it's different spaces the proportion of Hakeloid is not the same so you know, they make tests and sometimes all the dogs died, it happens it's, was it really Iboga? or Wakanga Africana? or why did you know? because there is cousin they also Iboga on internet oh it's Iboga there's a lot of Apocinaceae same taste, same look, same leaves but not the same Hakeloids they mix it so we can help the researchers research to make properly clinic tests using the same spaces sustainable, fair, sanitary certificate, traceability so there is a lot of you know, unethical and unsustainable Iboga out there for sure and so the you know, the challenge is to work in a way to prevent that to come with other solutions that you know, respond to the demand of Iboga and make sure that people who want to use Iboga have access to it and on the other hand you know, protect the traditional cultures make sure they can practice Buiti without any problems of you know, having access to Iboga so that's the challenge that needs to be addressed and it's one of the pillars of this conference The sacred wood it's not just the sacred wood all the sacred plants they are sick they are mistreated as I said, by modernization that's why I'm talking about respect if we respect the sacred plants the sacred plants will agree why do they use them? they are here for us we are here for them they are sick that's why the world is sick Ibogaine saves lives Ibogaine is unlike anything I think we have out there right now with regard to addiction and healing addiction people need to have access to this we need to strive towards making this available also, Ibogaine is dwindling there's this global explosion of Ibogaine use and need for Ibogaine the Ibogaine supplies in Gabon where the people who are the caretakers of it who brought us this beautiful medicine is dwindling we need to protect Ibogaine we need to find solutions we need to find a way to protect Ibogaine we need to find a way to protect the force that Ibogaine comes from we need to find a way to protect the traditions that brought us Ibogaine psychedelics can be a catalyst for a far, far bigger change this could be either a reform movement meaning that it'll just be sort of sucked up into the wider culture which by anyone who's awake we're in some trouble or it could be an evolutionary revolutionary movement and so when I first did Ibogaine and I came out and I was clean I thought we have a bomb and I want to drop this bomb in society then when I got started working I saw that it was just a fucking detox in many people's eyes and I still see Ibogaine as a bomb a bomb, a love bomb a love bomb that is coming at the right time but we need to act with it and think far outside of these boxes