A conversation with Jonathan Dickinson (Part 1)

Watch this Episode on YouTube

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New Book: Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind (2026):

• Inner Traditions
• Jonathan Dickinson website

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Ambio Life Sciences

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Terragnosis

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Blessings of the Forests

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Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance

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Jonathan Dickinson Social Platforms: LinkedIn / substack / instagram

Dennis McKenna: It’s my pleasure today to welcome Jonathan Dickinson to the Brainforest Café. He is the CEO and co-founder of Ambio Life Sciences and the founder of Terragnosis.

A leading global expert on ibogaine, he is a Mexico-licensed psychologist, published author and former executive director of the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance.

He led the development of the field’s foundational safety guidelines and has published widely on ibogaine’s therapeutic, cultural and ecological impact, including his 2026 book Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind.

Jonathan completed the first Nagoya-compliant export of iboga from Gabon and holds the only active export license for Tabernanthe iboga root. At Ambio he leads strategy, research and systems innovation.

Jonathan, welcome to the Brainforest Café.

[00:01:25] Jonathan Dickinson: Thanks so much, Dennis. It’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:01:29] Dennis McKenna: Well, it’s a pleasure to be able to talk to you, and as you know, this is the first of two we’re going to have. So today I would like to focus kind of on the personal, your personal story.

You got involved with Students for Sensible Drug Policy in the early 2010s and you got interested in harm reduction. You had some interaction with the addict community in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area we both know well, since I’m also a B.C.
You’re originally from Ontario, right? But you’ve lived in B.C. many years, and you could see the need for harm reduction and something to treat opiate addiction.

How did you find out? Was it that community that brought your attention to ibogaine?

[00:02:29] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, actually I was very interested in psychedelics because of literature and, you know, coming across the body of work.

I read a lot before I took any, and I had the opportunity to go to Mexico and encounter, you know, in Huautla de Jiménez, ceremonial use of mushrooms. And when I came back to Canada I reached out to people from Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, because I was trying to figure out how do I get involved. I was really interested in drugs, but trying to understand how I could work with or around drugs.

And at the time, that’s what Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy was mostly focused on — harm reduction. There was a lot of new research that had come out about the supervised injection site Insite in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.

There was other really interesting research coming out. So that was a primary focus, and I think I was a little bit early trying to bring psychedelics into the conversations. And so people kept telling me about ibogaine, because it sort of brought those worlds together.

[00:03:47] Dennis McKenna: But you knew about ibogaine before you connected with that community. In fact, you’d been to Mexico before then, and you’d taken it out of essentially curiosity about this medicine. You were not seeking therapy for opiate addiction. You didn’t have those problems, right? But you were interested in this medicine, and you spent time at Clare Wilkins’s clinic.

That’s where you really got your feet wet, in a certain sense. And that was before your connection with the Downtown Eastside community, or after that?

[00:04:26] Jonathan Dickinson: It came out of that.

I had traveled to Mexico just on my own, before I heard about ibogaine.

And when I went to Clare’s clinic, Pangea, that was after working with Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy for a while, after spending a few years learning from the harm reduction community alongside trying to bring conversations about psychedelics into the drug policy space in Canada.

And yeah, I just saw this opportunity where these different paths that seemed to be sort of different parallel interests all kind of came together in ibogaine. So I went to Mexico again, specifically to work at the clinics and to sort of learn from the providers who were developing ibogaine treatment, building the protocols that we’re using today. I don’t know if you’d remember this, but within two weeks of arriving in Mexico the first time, I drove up to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the DPA conference. And so the first time that I met you —

[00:05:39] Dennis McKenna: That’s right.

[00:05:40] Jonathan Dickinson: — we were sitting in a coffee shop with Howard Lotsof and Dimitri Mugianis, and I was just kind of in the background, you know, experiencing darshan of all these characters whose work I had been reading, and things like that.

[00:05:55] Dennis McKenna: I don’t even remember that encounter, but that puts a marker in it.

[00:06:00] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah.

[00:06:00] Dennis McKenna: Okay. Okay. That’s where you met, or you already knew Howard and Dimitri at that conference. Okay. And that was the first time we met.

And then I was at — I guess it was the second GITA conference in Tepoztlán in 2016, and you were there. And yeah, we were pushing this idea of producing ibogaine through the hairy root technology, and that’s what we were there to talk about. And potentially that would be a solution.

But we’re not here to talk about that. I couldn’t find the 25 to 50 million dollars that it took to really seriously go at that.

But we did manage to do tissue cultures with Eduardo Jovel at UBC. He had a greenhouse full of iboga shrubs for a long time. So that was interesting, because eventually it reached a point where the greenhouse manager said, you’ve got to get this stuff out of here, we don’t have room for it — not knowing how hard it was to get the material.

But anyway, that’s another story.

So your early experience: you were interested in psychedelics, your early experiences with ibogaine made it clear that ibogaine is a different animal. It’s very different in its effect from the classic psychedelics. So what about that impressed you?

What was different about it? What was similar? What was your takeaway from those early experiences with ibogaine, which I understand at Clare’s clinic, these were fairly low-dose experiences — you weren’t being treated, you didn’t need flood doses.

So what were your takeaways from that?

[00:08:08] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, I think the most impressive thing about it was the transformations that people were going through. So that was maybe the gravity that kept pulling me deeper and kept producing this curiosity — seeing what would happen for people on the other end.

And the interest in the experience itself gradually became, if it’s producing that on the other end, like why is this part of it? You know, maybe it’s doing something physiological, but why are they also going through this in this way and describing this type of experience? Like, how would that be contributing to what they’re seeing on the other end?

And it’s still somewhat mysterious, but it just became this rabbit hole. And I recognized also the first several times that I took ibogaine that the descriptions that people were sharing in the literature, the scientific literature, put some kind of basic language to the most common types of things, like this buzzing sound, or seeing memories from childhood and things like that.

But it wasn’t doing a very good or very comprehensive job of describing what I heard people sharing, or what I felt when I took it. So it kind of became a fascination: how do we put this into language, and what part does this actually play in the overall healing, these early experiences?

[00:09:43] Dennis McKenna: You mentioned this buzzing sound. I think that’s very interesting. I wanted to ask you about it, because whenever I’m falling asleep, I get buzzing.

And I haven’t taken ibogaine, so it’s not about that. Anyway, we can talk about what that might be. I’m curious about it, whether that’s pathological or some just personal trait.

But you mentioned in your book, you know, people have the expectation that ibogaine is like a super psychedelic, like it’s very visual and all that. And it’s not that. In fact, you wrote that you don’t really have visionary experiences, but you do experience long-term benefits. You feel that there’s an effect that’s long-term, and many people are — about 50% of people who take it are in the same boat. They don’t have visionary experiences.

Yet there’s something going on under the hood that leads to long-term adaptations in many ways, and probably reflected on the neurological level in some respect. What do you think is going on, and why — why are the visions not so important?

[00:11:13] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, I think the confounding thing about it is that for some people it is very visual, and they come out with these powerful narratives that had emotional weight and connected and told them a story and gave them an important message about their lives.

It’s just not most people.

And so I actually found it fairly useful as a practitioner that I didn’t have that. So when other people didn’t, I could easily help them make sense out of that. But I think what I found was the most common thing — it might be kind of obvious, but for some reason it doesn’t get discussed so much — was that no matter what, even if people didn’t see a lot, or the things they saw were sparse or faded or chaotic and disconnected and nonsensical, they still — I think the common denominator is that people are going through this really intense experience. It still demands a lot from you physically, emotionally and mentally.

And so the challenge of that and the weight of that and the commitment that it takes to go through that becomes a really important psychological force, whether or not there’s some content that emerges through it. And so I think it helps to anchor changes that people are seeing. And that’s sort of common whether people are seeing things or not. And so I think that’s partly why people can still have big psychological changes, even when the message that they were hoping maybe to hear wasn’t so clear.

[00:13:08] Dennis McKenna: But in other cases the message is quite clear, and not necessarily visionary.

You’ve talked about the bicameral mind, and you’ve talked about people often encountering entities, or they encounter — it’s as though they could step aside from themselves and look at themselves from a different perspective. Almost as though there is a second self that they can examine, that’s normally not accessible to consciousness. Is that what you mean by the bicameral mind?

[00:13:50] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, I think that it can come in different ways, but it’s fairly common for people to describe.

It’s helpful maybe to have a comparator. So I think when people take some of the classic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, it’s really common to see a lot of distortion and movement, and almost like the world around us is breathing and saturated with life and imminence. And so there’s a lot of things that can pull us outwards and make us feel like we’re connecting or being absorbed in the world around us.

And the things that we think and feel internally also feel like they’re saturated with weight and significance.

And with ibogaine it’s almost the opposite, where often people don’t pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in the world around them.

And there’s this gravity that pulls us inward, and then something that sort of appears to us. So even the thoughts and the feelings that we have can be more or less familiar, but then there’s something else as well that also presents itself. And sometimes that’s visual, sometimes that’s auditory.

You know, sometimes it’s actually to the point of being embodied by entities or figures, like you were mentioning. And other times it could just be pictures or items or things like that. But there seems to be a kind of language to it, to the extent that people are saying it showed me this, or it told me this, as if they’re in this kind of dialogue.

And so it’s strangely enough to feel like it’s coming from somewhere outside of us, but also it’s almost like dreams, where there’s something so familiar about it as well, that it’s not so abstract, the idea that it’s also a part of you.

[00:16:08] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:16:08] Jonathan Dickinson: So yeah, the bicameral mind is this idea that — Julian Jaynes tried to describe this. He was an evolutionary psychologist, and I’m sort of borrowing the term from him. But he thought that our ancient ancestors would experience the world like this and reason like this, and that their cognition worked like this, where they would identify with a part of themselves that would sort of carry out actions in the world and be able to move through their life and sense things and navigate through problems with sort of simple solutions that were part of tradition or habits or things like that — but that when they would get into novel situations or stressful situations that they hadn’t had to deal with and didn’t have an obvious answer for, they would almost hear this voice sort of present them with possible solutions.

His suggestion was that’s another part of the mind that, for some reason or another, we don’t consciously relate to, so we almost hear it like it’s coming from somewhere else.

[00:17:27] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:17:27] Jonathan Dickinson: So I thought that was an interesting and compelling enough description that sort of tracks onto the way people describe their ibogaine experiences.

[00:17:37] Dennis McKenna: Well, it’s very interesting, these parallels, because I read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind years ago. I was fascinated by the idea that in ancient civilizations, people lived — there was this other self that they often experienced as emanating from statues or other kinds of things. But there was like an oracular voice that basically told them how to live, that directed their actions. Especially under times of stress, they would rely on this.

And it seems that ibogaine is a way to connect back to this ancient mind state, which has never gone away.

I mean, the bicameral mind is still here. It’s just that we’re cut off from it, and ibogaine can reconnect it to us.

And the Bwiti rituals — you eventually went to Gabon and underwent initiation. And the way the Bwiti, if I’m saying that correctly, Bwiti — the way they structure their initiations really reflects this expectation of an encounter with guides or entities or other intelligences that are not really seen as part of the self, but seen as counselors, guides, sometimes antagonists.

And that’s where the learning takes place. Very different than psychedelics. There’s no ego dissolution. You’re pretty much who you are.

You’re not removed from yourself, but you’re in this dynamic dialogue, perhaps with a part of the self. I mean, in psychology, I guess we’d say this is obviously another part of your mind that’s normally closed, perhaps localized in the right hemisphere, although I don’t think that’s known.

But the Bwiti ceremonies, the way the Bwiti run their sessions with the mirrors and everything, is basically structured to facilitate the connection with this inner wisdom that advises you in a certain way.

[00:20:16] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s sort of — if that is what’s happening, and if we’re going to rely on Jaynes’s theory here, what drove people to experience that was being put into a situation of decision stress.

And so their map of the world wasn’t sufficient to provide a solution. And so it came to the point that this voice arose from inside to try to fill in the gap.

And I think that also tracks. There’s some really — it’s still sparse, we don’t know a lot about how ibogaine works. There’s really compelling and really interesting signals about it. But one of the really nice EEG studies was showing that it affected the retrosplenial cortex, and sort of an area of the brain that helps to provide this sort of spatial map of the world around us. And so if it’s doing this, if it’s sort of making it more difficult for us to rely on the map that we have of the world around us, and then creates this situation — like I was saying, the common denominator is everybody’s going through this demanding, physically, emotionally and mentally demanding experience.

So it sort of can place us in the situation where, for some people, that bicameral aspect can re-emerge. I think obviously there’s other ways that people have done that historically as well — fasting, or sun dances, like really other physically demanding things. But I think it maybe helps to describe what’s happening when people take ibogaine.

[00:22:14] Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Well, it’s very interesting. The pharmacology and the phenomenology is not typical.

We’ll revisit this in our second podcast. We could discuss some of this in more depth, but I want to talk a little bit more about your personal journey with ibogaine. Iboga and ibogaine.

You visited at the GITA conference — I guess it was 2016. You connected with Yann Guignon. Is that how you say it? Who was a French consultant, and he urged you to — he was working on sustainability of ibogaine, and he invited you to visit Gabon. Visit him in Gabon and become initiated into iboga and get acquainted with the Bwiti community.

So when did this take place? You had experience with ibogaine before.

So you were not a virgin to ibogaine, but you were a virgin to the Bwiti approach to it as a plant itself. What year was this, Jonathan?

[00:23:30] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, actually, it was at the first conference that I organized in 2012 that Yann — his last name is Guignon, it’s French — he reached out because he could see that this community was meeting.

Primarily what we were talking about was safety issues related with ibogaine, and also just how to effectively treat people from different substances. And so a lot of it was practitioner-focused.

And he reached out to present work that he’d been doing for the First Lady of Gabon’s foundation, related to sort of just taking stock of the state of knowledge around iboga in the country.

And he’d been reporting, for example, that the price — since the demand had increased in the West, the price locally in Gabon had skyrocketed. And it made it more difficult for — I think in one sense, it made it more difficult for some people to be able to access iboga for traditional use.

And the other just created this economic force. So if you can imagine, Gabon has several main roads that lead deep into the jungle, and a lot of communities end up along those roads because we’ve become dependent on goods and trade that happens along the road, even though a lot of stuff comes from the forest.

So a lot of communities were along the forest, and communities that would practice Bwiti would often have iboga somewhere nearby that they could access for their own use.

What would happen is, as the demand grew, then when people would be traveling back to the main city on the coast along the road, they’d stop everywhere and start to try to buy the iboga that the communities had on hand, to bring to the market in Libreville. And so as the demand increased and people were expecting more and more, these communities would sort of run out of iboga close to their village and would push further into the forest, and then eventually into the purview of the national parks, things like that. So that it became sort of mixed up in poaching and other issues that the National Parks agency and Conservation Justice and other NGOs were having to deal with, and that became a priority.

So Yann was early on involved in sort of tracking this and trying to encourage communities to plant, so that they would continue to have iboga to be able to use in the future, and to prevent this mix-up with other kinds of illicit trade.

So Yann was really influential at that time in 2012, when we presented that there was the availability of alternate sources of ibogaine, which we still use today, that are semi-synthetic, that rely on other plants that don’t come from Gabon, and at least bypass the ecological and the cultural issues that come up with that increase of demand.

So yeah, Yann was very vocal about it and became involved in our conversations. But he wanted me, because I was convening these events, to come to Gabon and to understand what it was like there, what the situation was like. So the first time I went was in 2014.

[00:27:23] Dennis McKenna: Okay.

So Yann was trying to kind of change the mindset of the Bwiti community and people involved in the economics of it, because agriculture is not a big thing with them. The idea of growing supplies is just not part of their mindset, because the jungle is full of edible plants and fruits, and all the resources they need — they don’t need to grow them.

But then these shortages of iboga — this is what Yann was trying to kind of change the mindset. And he founded this group called Blessings of the Forest.

Were you part of that founding, or had he already created that by the time you were in Gabon?

[00:28:17] Jonathan Dickinson: No, I watched Yann go through the process of founding that, and tried to support in whatever way that I could.

When I became more involved, I guess, was at a certain point Blessings of the Forest was granted a mandate by the National Parks agency to implement the Nagoya Protocol, which was an international treaty that Gabon has tried to use to structure how you could have ethical contracts with traditional communities related to access to iboga, but also traditional knowledge about how iboga can be used.

And so Blessings of the Forest was originally contracted to try to implement this treaty in Gabon, and I think quite successfully, because it’s grown and grown. And Gabon’s done quite a lot of, I would say, quite difficult work, because it’s like a robust program that needs to get developed around it. And Yann and Blessings of the Forest have really facilitated that and made it possible.

So as a result, now there’s dozens of communities that have more than subsistence farms available.

There’s also more commercial-type farming going on in Gabon.

So I think there’s still potentially a risk to iboga in the public domain if things aren’t managed properly. But there’s no longer imminent risk to iboga in general in the private domain. There’s lots of iboga growing now in Gabon.

[00:30:09] Dennis McKenna: So as a result of these efforts, his efforts primarily, to foster these agricultural communities or to get them to start to grow iboga — so the immediate supply issue has been more or less solved, but there’s still a lot of illegal export and poaching and all that.

And then, about the same time, you were very concerned to help with this and you founded Terragnosis, which is another NGO. And the mission of Terragnosis, as I understand it from the book, was basically to facilitate the ability to export iboga root under the Nagoya Protocol — that’s compliant with the Nagoya Protocol. So you’ve always approached this very ethically, which speaks well of you, recognizing that this is an important traditional medicine, it’s the center of a religion, but also there are economic aspects.

So you worked with Yann on the founding of Terragnosis. And Terragnosis is the framework under which this export can go on. And Terragnosis — do you supply ibogaine, ethically harvested ibogaine, to other clinics, or only to Ambio, which is the clinic that you founded?

[00:31:49] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah. So, just as a little bit of context about that application — I went to Gabon and was initiated in 2014.

This was before Blessings of the Forest’s mandate to implement Nagoya. This was before many things had happened. And so it was really just kind of exposure to what it’s like culturally, how people think about iboga. And there is a —

I think it’s difficult for Westerners to immediately, without having some exposure to that, understand how something could be both sacred and part of economics. But in the African worldview, even money is used sort of ritually, and exchanged in ceremony, and becomes like a form of energy just like many other things that are part of the ceremony. And so I don’t think it has the — there’s certainly not the same sort of understanding as our worldview about money, but there’s not the overt idea that something that’s sacred shouldn’t be traded for money either.

Right? So there was a kind of openness, at least. But this opportunity to apply didn’t come until years later.

And so Terragnosis — now we have been exporting iboga, and one of the things we’ve been doing is trying to develop a GMP product, so like a pharmaceutical medication that would be appropriate for use in clinical trials, that retains more of the iboga alkaloids than just ibogaine.

[00:33:46] Dennis McKenna: Right. And this was —

So a couple of comments here. For one thing, as you know, the sacred is always commodified. That doesn’t mean it’s not sacred.

Many of the same challenges face ayahuasca sustainability that face iboga, although not quite as much, because ayahuasca can be readily grown and there’s a much longer time to maturity for iboga, as I understand it. So there’s always an economic aspect to the sacred. That doesn’t desacralize it or mean that it’s not sacred, it’s just a reality.

The other thing you mentioned was this alternative source of ibogaine that people were turning to, from Voacanga africana, a closely related plant that contains an alkaloid, voacangine, which I believe can be converted to ibogaine in a couple of steps. And ibogaine is very difficult to synthesize, as we know — it’s like many steps. So you kind of pioneered the use of this alternative plant; you could get the same alkaloid.

The deficiency was — there seems to be a move away from this now, now that there are more abundant supplies of iboga, because it’s only the alkaloid, and a lot of practitioners prefer to use the total alkaloid fraction from iboga, which is a different thing. And they’re not finding that in Voacanga.

So has Voacanga been — does the use of that as a source of ibogaine, is that fading off, or is that continuing, or are you trying to shift back to iboga as the primary source?

[00:35:47] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, what Terragnosis is doing is developing this — we call it like a purified total alkaloid product from iboga. We’re developing this as a GMP product, but it’s not currently being used widely in clinics.

So ideally in the future it can be.

And ideally it benefits from — maybe purified ibogaine takes the lead through the FDA in this, and an iboga-based product can follow behind. I think we have, as far as the scientific work goes, a lot of proving to do about why that would be potentially a superior product.

I think, like you said, a lot of practitioners prefer it. If you have ibogaine experiences and you know about it, there’s something really compelling about the full plant extract. And so it’s sort of the special reserve that we keep in the back room, if it’s not as available.

But yeah, there’s still a lot of work to be able to do to sort of explain to people. Like, a lot of pharmacologists and preclinical researchers, and I think even regulators, prefer things that are a little bit more straightforward and easy to standardize.

So that’s the problem. But as far as the clinics today, most of them are still using ibogaine that’s produced from voacangine. At scale, that’s still the primary medication that’s being administered to people in most clinics.

[00:37:35] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.

So you’ve taken pure ibogaine, you’ve taken iboga, obviously. Are there important differences?

Is something missing when you take the pure alkaloid that you can find in the total alkaloid extract? Is that a preferred form, based on your own experience? Which is better? I’m thinking of what they call the entourage effect. That’s a buzzword with a lot of these natural products, but there’s some truth to it. There’s not usually one compound, there’s a family of related compounds. In your experience, how different is pure ibogaine from, say, total alkaloid extract? Is it important enough to be concerned about, or —

[00:38:29] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, as far as the similarity between ibogaine and iboga, I think there’s a core familiarity. If you take one or the other, the differences would be rather nuanced, I think.

I think if you go all the way to the raw plant, then some of the differences are probably related to just how you metabolize plant material. It takes longer for the peak to happen, and so it builds up in a different way. And so that’s one of the things. And I would even go as far as to say that — earlier we talked about this buzzing sound, and maybe — I think there’s almost this sense that I have of, like, pure ibogaine tends to, if that’s like a frequency, it has a higher frequency or a higher pitch, and iboga has maybe a lower frequency and a lower pitch, if that makes sense. But it maybe is somehow related to how you metabolize it more slowly.

[00:39:42] Dennis McKenna: And the buzzing is part of both experiences.

[00:39:47] Jonathan Dickinson: It’d be part of both, yeah.

[00:39:49] Dennis McKenna: Interesting.

[00:39:50] Jonathan Dickinson: And I think the visions are also very similar.

But if you take something that has some of the other iboga alkaloids, my sense of it is that it can have somehow more texture or more depth, whereas pure ibogaine is sometimes a little more ghostly, if that makes sense. Like how dreams don’t have a lot of substance to them — but with iboga, they can appear a little bit more like natural fibers, or things that appear a little bit more real in a way.

At the end of the day, we’ve seen deep spiritual experiences and very magical and profound things happen with both. And we’ve seen people be disappointed by root bark.

It doesn’t pan out perfectly, but there’s some sort of nuanced differences between them for sure.

[00:40:51] Dennis McKenna: Right, right.

Has anybody ever put — they must have applied things like quantitative EEG and measures like that to people under ibogaine? I’m thinking about this buzzing phenomenon.

Has anybody ever looked at iboga from that perspective? I mean, what’s going on at the neurological level when you’re having that buzzing experience?

Maybe that’s not a fair question.

[00:41:28] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, I don’t know if there’s an easy way to tease out the buzzing on its own.

And I think the only EEG work during the ibogaine experience that I’m aware of was done on small animals.

I think we’ve tried since then to have somebody wear a full-head EEG while they’re taking ibogaine, but they only last a short time, because ibogaine makes you want to lie down, and it’s very uncomfortable. And those headsets are not very easy to use in that position.

[00:42:01] Dennis McKenna: Right. It’s not very comfortable. Well, that’s something we could talk about offline, but I have some suggestions, some ideas.

[00:42:09] Jonathan Dickinson: Oh, that’s great. Okay.

[00:42:10] Dennis McKenna: We will not go down that rabbit hole right now.

Okay, so ibogaine’s — well, let me ask you one question. How long have people known in Gabon? When did iboga come to the attention of humans in Gabon? I mean, the Bwiti emerged in the 19th century, but presumably it was known long before that. What do you know about that pre-Bwiti use of iboga? Is there anything known about it?

[00:42:46] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, I think it’s fairly unanimous that the use of iboga originated with pygmy groups in Gabon.

And Bwiti was really developed by Bantu groups who were part of, like, the first big migration of people southward along the coasts in Africa, and I guess originating more or less from the north, like Egypt and stuff, and moving down the coast.

And prior to the arrival of Europeans, Bantu populations were really advanced in metalwork and fishing. And so they mostly stayed along the coast, and they had sort of traditions that were carried over and maybe related to Yoruba and other kinds of descendants of that kind of Egyptian ritual imagination.

[00:43:51] Dennis McKenna: Mm.

[00:43:52] Jonathan Dickinson: And then once there became this pressure for some groups to move inland because of the missionaries and the colonists who arrived from outside, they came in contact with the pygmies who were using iboga, and some of them were initiated and started to develop sort of a hybrid of this pygmy knowledge with the ritual imagination that was already deeply woven into the Bantu community.

So as to how far back iboga use goes amongst the pygmy groups — it’s really difficult to track, because there’s not good histories, and it’s difficult to do archaeology in the jungle.

[00:44:43] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:44:44] Jonathan Dickinson: So there’s — I think, you know, I wrote about it in the book, there was one sample that was, like, several thousand years old found in a cave in the Ogooué region in Gabon. That’s like a piece of charcoal from iboga. So it sort of potentially signaled this human interest in iboga that was thousands of years old.

But you can also imagine — I know with ayahuasca, one of the most fascinating things about ayahuasca is, how did people come to learn how to mix these two plants in the proper proportions to produce this experience that neither could achieve on their own? With iboga, it’s not so mysterious. You just eat the root, and animals pay a lot of attention to it. So if you’re living in the forest and you’re hunting and you’re paying attention to animals, it’s not so hard to imagine that people knew about this for a very long time. And people have been in the region for hundreds of thousands of years.

[00:45:45] Dennis McKenna: I think so. I mean, potentially — I think somewhere in your book you say pygmies are thought to have been in Gabon maybe as long as 800,000 years ago.

And if they were in the jungle as they were, and if they’re seeing animals eat iboga root, most likely they’re going to try it, because we’re curious people. That’s how we find out a lot of times, watching animals. Ayahuasca is a whole other story, because of the fact that it is a combinatorial preparation, but iboga is not, and people must have noticed.

Well, coming back to the 20th century — in fact, at the beginning of the 20th century, ibogaine was isolated and characterized in 1901.

So there’s nothing new about ibogaine. It’s been known for a long time. Why did it take so long for people to recognize what a remarkable compound this is? Did we just not have the tools, neurologically, pharmacologically, to kind of characterize it?

Isn’t it odd that it’s been known for so long, and yet only now we’re beginning to understand how it really works and what it’s good for?

[00:47:13] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, it’s so interesting. And I think there was a recent paper that came out that found some old articles, like 1910, 1914, like early, early papers that were essentially little case studies from Mexico and Brazil of doctors who had given ibogaine to patients. And I know the one in Mexico was a woman who was an alcoholic and was drinking too much, and he administered some ibogaine, and it helped. So that’s really old.

And from, like, the 1930s to the mid to late 1960s, it was a prescription medication in France in low doses. And then we’ve seen also other products in France that we didn’t know about, that were available, that had ibogaine in them.

So it’s been used for a while. People have known that there’s something interesting about it.

But I think it didn’t explode into the zeitgeist the same way, probably for a bunch of different reasons. Probably because it’s difficult to take and really long. So it doesn’t really lend itself to a party drug.

It wasn’t as euphoric. So maybe people like Timothy Leary, who had a very specific kind of interest in the qualities of LSD, were not as interested in it.

So it was around in the ’60s and ’70s, but I also talked to William Leonard Pickard recently and he was saying, no, people knew about it. It was just really hard to get, because it was just coming from Gabon, so it was inaccessible.

[00:49:07] Dennis McKenna: And this prescription use of ibogaine in the ’20s and ’30s — what was the name of that prescription product that was used in France?

[00:49:18] Jonathan Dickinson: Lambarène.

[00:49:20] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, but these were low doses. These were not anywhere near the flood doses. These were at most a few milligrams.

And it’s interesting that ibogaine does seem to be a compound that has effects at every dose level, from a few tens of milligrams.

Naranjo wrote about it, and he was not giving patients high doses of ibogaine, but they were having interesting experiences. And then later, ibogaine became famous through Howard Lotsof’s work, basically, or his observation.

So it’s become identified with the treatment of opiate addiction primarily, but other kinds of addiction. And that’s kind of where it’s been pegged: this is a treatment for opiate addiction.

And now we’re finding out it’s so much more than that. It has such a wide spectrum of activities. It’s far more than addiction. So now we’re finding out what this might be.

Now that some of the sustainability issues are being solved, there’s a chance to look into this, to develop.

And in the latter part of your book, you talk very intelligently about developing appropriate therapeutic protocols that really work for ibogaine. And in that sense, it has the potential to change the approach to this kind of therapy — because, as you well know, the biomedical industrial complex, the FDA, all these regulatory agencies, they’re not comfortable with the very idea of natural products, even though that was the precursor of modern pharmacology. They want a nice crystalline pure compound, and they sacrifice a lot.

Iboga cannot really be — I mean, it can be used that way, but if there’s an effort made, from a psychotherapy point of view, to look at some of the rituals and other practices that surround it traditionally, you can develop a more effective therapy. This is definitely not one of those where it’s take two and call me in the morning.

It does not work that way.

[00:52:09] Jonathan Dickinson: No, that’s right. And I think it’s almost like part of being a practitioner is being able to help facilitate people going through something really uncomfortable. It doesn’t immediately reduce symptoms. That’s definitely not what’s happening.

It really becomes a situation where you’re having to care for people who are becoming unable to walk, going through something that’s often really uncomfortable and chaotic, and trying to make sense of it. And it isn’t until afterwards that, you know, if these symptoms are going down, that we’re seeing that. Right? So that’s not how we normally expect a medication to work. It sort of reverses some of the ways that we think about medicine. A lot of times what I think we want of pharmaceuticals is that they produce objective results.

[00:53:08] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:53:08] Jonathan Dickinson: The point of trying to have randomized placebo-controlled trials is to make sure that there’s no voodoo stuff that is maybe participating in, affecting the results in any way.

And with ibogaine — I think more broadly with psychedelics, but — you’re really placing people into a situation where their subjective world is coming so alive and so much online. Like, this is the domain in which we’re constituted as subjects. These experiences become part of our story about how we become who we are.

[00:53:52] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:53:52] Jonathan Dickinson: And that is something that I think we’ve missed about how we would help people through difficult points in their lives.

[00:54:01] Dennis McKenna: Right. So the approach is very different.

In the usual approach, all the emphasis is on the drug. The drug is doing the work. Give the drug and it’ll fix you.

That’s not ibogaine. In fact, your writing here makes clear that in the therapeutic picture of ibogaine, what it appears to do is open a doorway to further change. And there are all these long-term changes.

The therapeutic process does not end with the ibogaine session. It only starts with the ibogaine session, and it opens the door.

And then that’s something that may work itself out over weeks or months or even years. So this doesn’t fit the usual paradigm, but this is in fact how it works. It’s a doorway.

And the patient, the person who takes it, they have to do a lot of the work. It’s not that take this pill and it’s going to fix you. No — take this pill, take this extract or whatever it is, and it will create an opportunity for you to go to work and change yourself and bring about these changes.

Which is why it’s probably problematic, because how do you measure outcomes in that case? It seems like every individual is an individual, which of course is obvious, but there is no standard outcome. Many of the people that you describe in the clinical studies, their work continues for many years, and they may have to take ibogaine several times. But it’s the beginning of a self-transformation process, a self-evolution process in a certain way, that ibogaine facilitates but does not cause. And a person has an option: are you on board or not?

That’s a decision. And it seems that that’s clear, particularly in the treatment of opiate addiction. That’s pretty clear, that it opens up the possibility for people — that, like Howard and other people, they just say, wait a minute, I don’t feel like taking heroin anymore. I just don’t feel a compulsion to do it. So ibogaine’s offered that gift to a person. But as we know, many people who are on opiates, they go back to them after ibogaine. It’s not a cure.

It can be a cure if you choose to let it be. Is that an accurate way to represent this?

[00:56:57] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, I think my feeling of it is that after working with people who have been coming off of really strong drugs for a long time, and then all of a sudden working with combat veterans who are coming down — the sort of jarring moment, trying to figure out, what is the commonality between these groups? What is actually happening underneath?

And I think what we’re sort of becoming more confident about saying is that it helps to increase the sense of personal agency.

So for people who are using drugs, it places the choice within reach. Like, it’s still a choice — you can or cannot. But all of a sudden, something that you had an almost impossible time choosing is now something that’s at least an option.

And it’s similar, I think, with guys who were trained to go overseas and to perform some of the most difficult and challenging and harrowing things in these group-bonded environments, and are having a really difficult time coming home from that and trying to understand their place in the world — all of a sudden are able to relearn and build meaning out of a completely different situation. And so in both cases, they’re sort of recovering the sense of agency that gets lost, or harder to maintain as we age.

So I think, yeah, it’s not something that’s necessarily going to be providing perfectly objective results.

[00:58:50] Dennis McKenna: Right.

[00:58:52] Jonathan Dickinson: Other than giving people that sense of agency back. But if we learn that it’s not necessarily treating the mind — and treating the behavior is not like treating a broken leg. There’s a subject involved here. And if we’re able to have a field in which we can honor that subject and cultivate that subject and allow that person, that individual, to become closer to who they would make themselves as, I think that’s where we see the improvement. So yeah, hopefully the professional sphere is able to adapt around that.

[00:59:37] Dennis McKenna: In order to take advantage of what ibogaine offers effectively, you have to revolutionize therapeutic paradigms.

What ibogaine does does not sit comfortably in the accepted therapeutic paradigm. So you really have to change the approach to it. But maybe it’s the catalyst that will do this, because I don’t think you, or probably me, or anyone who might listen to this podcast would disagree that mental health therapy is broken. We need new paradigms, we need new approaches, and ibogaine may be pointing the way in that direction. So we hope so.

Jonathan, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it. We’re going to go at it again tomorrow and we’ll focus a little more on some of the pharmacology and so on. But we got a good start here, so we could land this plane if you’re ready.

[01:00:47] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah.

[01:00:47] Dennis McKenna: Anything we didn’t say that you want to say before we shut this down?

[01:00:52] Jonathan Dickinson: No, just — I do think that if we learn how to pay attention to what ibogaine is doing and how it’s working, that we’ll learn a lot, as you said. I think it’ll be a good guide for how we treat people.

[01:01:08] Dennis McKenna: Indeed, indeed. Learning a lot about people, not so much pharmacology, and how you fit something like this into that context.

So thank you so much for your time, and I look forward to continuing the conversation tomorrow, and we’ll dive back into the rabbit hole.

[01:01:30] Jonathan Dickinson: Looking forward to it. Thanks, Dennis.

[01:01:32] Dennis McKenna: Thank you so much, Jonathan.