[00:00:11] Dennis McKenna: Good morning and welcome to the second half of my podcast, Brainforest Café podcast with Jonathan Dickinson, who is, I think indisputably the world’s leading advocate and researcher for ibogaine. 

And he has devoted his life to this mission of bringing ibogaine as a medicine to the world. 

And he’s the author of this book, Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind, which will release on September 8th. 

And I believe that the podcasts are going to drop on the 7th and the 8th. There’s a two part podcast. 

I just want to say, Jonathan, thank you again for joining us. I just want to say this book is very impressive to me. 

It is comprehensive, it’s dense, it’s technical, and yet it’s so well written. 

It was quite easy to read and in fact, I couldn’t put it down, which is saying something for a book of this density. But you just explained so clearly the multiple issues facing ibogaine to its use as a medicine and its properties and its effectiveness as a medicine, and then the challenges that you face that everyone in this community faces with getting this incredible molecule accepted into therapeutic practice. And we can talk about, as well as ensuring sustainable supply for Tabernanthe Boga, the source of Abigail. 

So we’re going to get into all that and I’ll stop sharing and I will say again, Jonathan, welcome back to the Braid Forest Cafe. 

[00:02:13] Jonathan Dickinson: Thank you, Dennis. I’ve been a reader of yours and a fan for a long time, so it means a lot to hear you say that. 

[00:02:22] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, there’s a great deal in this book. I urge everyone with an interest in this to read it. 

Your writing is so good and so clear. Makes it actually an easy read for some people. At least I found it. So. So I want to talk about a bit. 

I want to return to this for today’s session. I want to return to the Bwiti initiation. And they, in their initiatory practice, they view ibogaine as a kind of spiritual rebirth. 

And I thought it was interesting that the therapist Clare Wilkins also characterized it as a kind of neurological second childhood during which neurogenesis is stimulated and experiences as an accelerated phase of learning and identity development, much as we experience in childhood. Is

that a useful framework for understanding this? This is a return to our childhood un undeveloped or totally open state of mind. Is that what ibogaine does? 

[00:03:42] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, I don’t, I don’t think that it is a regression into childish behavior or anything like that, but it certainly has this quality of bringing us into the sensual encounter with the world. And like the moment that we’re in, in a way that sometimes we lose to, you know, habits and patterns that we let sort of drive our life. 

And so it puts us in this state where we can learn and adapt and go through changes that would be really difficult. And I think, like, when. When Claire was using that term, um, she would have been a, you know, a. 

A friend of. Of Gül Dölen, for example, who. Who did this wonderful research on ibogaine and neuroplasticity and showed that ibogaine is so powerful at producing neuroplasticity for a very extended period of time, like even exceeding other kinds of psychedelics, just the duration of this window that it opens up. 

And I think what, you know, she was referring to was we don’t go through a period in our lives as adults where the brain becomes that plastic and that malleable to change. 

And the best reference is just when we’re more children. 

So I think, you know, it’s very metaphorical, and I think in. In Bwiti, it’s metaphorical as well. But I think the way they interpret it as, you know, in some sense, there’s people who talk about, like Bwiti as a. As a rebirth, because you go through this into the realm of the dead and come back. But in other, you know, viewpoints, it’s a birth. It’s the first birth. It’s the birth of the spiritual being 

into the world. So they almost treat you like you won’t understand what we’re talking about until after, you know, after you’re born. Like, they. They kind of almost anticipate that, like, what they’re saying would just be like, mumblings. Like, you don’t really understand until you have this reference point to go through. So they really do see it like almost a first birth. Like the initiation is becoming a spiritual being in the body. 

[00:06:20] Dennis McKenna: Very interesting. So kind of not really a rebirth, but a second birth, a birth of the spiritual self in a certain way. 

That’s extremely interesting. I think many people feel, I think these days, a state of spiritual bereftness. We feel that life has no meaning for them. So ibogaine and to a certain extent, other psychedelics, people report similar things, that it brings meaning back into their life effectively. 

It reintroduces the idea of spirit into their life. And in the case of ibogaine, sometimes it’s very overt about that. You actually encounter spirits or you encounter a teacher, a counselor, which may be this bicameral self.

So could you talk about this model of the bicameral mind again, a little bit clarify what this means in the experiential sense. 

And I guess another question is, what are the. 

What are the neurological or underpinnings of this experience of the bicameral mind and the second self? 

I mean, on some levels that might sound pathological, but it’s not at all. It’s quite the opposite, right? 

[00:07:53] Jonathan Dickinson: Yes. 

So it’s a theoretical model for sure, but I think it does provide a useful language to talk about this phenomenology that comes up. And where I was was grappling with it was I had experiences with ibogaine that weren’t extremely visual. I didn’t see the same kind of big story unfold before me the way that I’d heard lots of people describe in the past. 

I also wasn’t going through an opiate detox or that kind of transition point in my life. So I don’t know if that pressure of change drives, you know, the intensity of the experience to some degree. 

But I was around so many people listening to them describe these stories and realizing that what they were describing wasn’t being written about in the scientific literature. 

So some examples were, you know, people encountering voices that they could ask questions to, and those, you know, those voices would provide answers back to them. 

Sometimes they were tricky conversations to have. You know, sometimes they were really helpful. Sometimes they were kind of antagonistic. 

Sometimes they were a little bit cheeky. 

But, you know, in one form or another, they were having this dialogue that seemed really important. 

And it related with interviews that I did with people in Gabon, but also with just the sort of general philosophy of this connection to genies in Gabon. That’s the term for these, you know, in a sense, entities. But it’s more just a sense of knowing where’s the right place to be or knowing when that’s not the right person to talk to or something like that. Like, it was almost like having the second sense or this deep intuition about choices to make in the life. And that was called a genie. And actually the root of the word genie because, I mean, it makes it sound like.

I mean, it comes to mind like, you know, Robin Williams voice in Aladdin or something like that to me. But. But the. The root of the word is related to the. 

The. The Latin word that essentially means like a genius. 

[00:10:42] Dennis McKenna: Genius. 

[00:10:43] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, you know, it kind of relates to the same idea. And people used to think that a genius was somebody who had this kind of a extra spirit sense that would sort of help to guide them. And that’s what they’re referring to, or if there’s a spirit to it, it’s embodying that sense. 

So the bicameral mind, I think, is a way of trying to describe this voice or this interaction that we have. 

And, you know, the. The term itself comes from Julian Jaynes. 

And what he was suggesting was that our ancient ancestors actually weren’t conscious. Like, the distinction is an invitation to maybe be more specific about what we mean when we say consciousness. 

He wasn’t. He was trying to separate that term from the idea of, like, general awareness. [00:11:51] Dennis McKenna: Right. 

[00:11:52] Jonathan Dickinson: And so consciousness, for him was actually a technical platform for, like, solving problems where you’re able to have a map of the world and sort of project situations and play them out and see how things unfold. 

And so depending on how good of a map you have about the physics and dynamics of the world around you, you’d be able to project ideas or develop sort of technologies that would, you know, survive in the. In the real world. 

So he was saying consciousness is. Is that. But that’s actually something that we’ve developed because of priorities that we’ve, you know, assumed. And that ancient ancestors of ours reasoned and had a kind of different form of cognition that was quite a lot more driven by this kind of instinctual or dialogic mode where, you know, even within the mind, people would sort of hear something, providing them with answers or solutions to problems. And I think he even. He imagined it quite literally that people would go around hearing on a, 

[00:13:09] Dennis McKenna: if 

[00:13:09] Jonathan Dickinson: not constant, but like regular basis, hearing voices that would sort of guide them through the world and suggest the decision path. Yeah.

[00:13:20] Dennis McKenna: Effectively hallucinations that they experience, the audio hallucinations. 

So that is. 

Well, one. One thing I wanted to say. Wanted to mention before getting a little bit into the mechanism that might be behind this. But you say sometimes these entities, these voices, they appear. 

Sometimes they’re counselors, they’re kind. 

Other times they’re antagonistic. Other times they’re sort of neutral. 

When they’re antagonistic, how does that look? I mean, are they scolding a person? 

Is that antagonism in that sense? Are they saying things like, well, how come you got addicted to opiates, for example? That was a really bad idea, or that sort of thing. How does that. 

I mean, I’m fond of saying about ayahuasca, which is what I’m most familiar with, that usually ayahuasca appears to be kind and compassionate. Once in a while, it’ll slap you upside the head if it thinks you need it. 

It’s a similar Thing maybe with this iboga entity, they brook no bullshit. They actually have expectations that you’ll respond and deal with it appropriately. Is that what’s going on? 

[00:14:50] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah. I actually tried to distinguish between say, a voice that was just really challenging but was still upholding a sort of moral standard. 

You know, like, that’s still a guide or, you know, a helpful kind of entity, even though it’s, you know, again, not pulling any punches. Like, it’s. 

It’s not necessarily an easy experience, but it’s still moving in the direction of wholeness or like what we would imagine as like a high moral standard. 

And so there was one example in the book about a gentleman who found himself at the gates of heaven and confronted with God, but was just thrown from that height and would like tumbling down. And Jesus picked him up and pulled him back, and again, God threw him back down. And he kind of realized maybe it was in like a. Like a purgatory where he was. He was having to confront the fact that he had. 

He wasn’t proud of everything that he’d done in his life.

You know, and there was something where he even didn’t feel like he belonged in heaven. Right. 

So that was. 

I still think that of that as a guide, that even that rather cruel or unforgiving face of God, I guess, in that sense was. Was still a God. Where I. Where I was calling things antagonistic was literally where these voices would sort of barter and lies or manipulation. Like, they didn’t. There was no real endpoint of self improvements. They were really just grinding people. 

And so there was examp of, you know, one gentleman who had spirits surrounding him and telling him, oh, you really done it now. You took the ibogaine, but you messed it up. You. Or you puked, and it all came up. So you’re not going to get the medicine or whatever, just any kind of doubt that he could latch onto. He kind of projected it outward like that. 

And then there was others who, you know, they would be going through a rather peaceful experience and, you know, thinking about situations in their life. And the voice would come and say, it’s not like that at all. It’s like this, you know, you should have. But really they knew that that wasn’t the case. So, you know, I didn’t think it necessarily mattered so much almost what the voice was saying or doing. But it was a signal about kind of entering into a different state of awareness and an interaction with the subconscious and how we, you know, even, you know, maybe it is that our ancient ancestors did reason in this way. But if so, I, I almost wonder if subconsciously we still reason in this way as well. 

And so just bringing that to light, bringing that to the surface of our awareness. 

[00:18:14] Dennis McKenna: Not many things cause this sort of splitting of the self into two parts. 

This bicameral mind model really fascinates me. And I’m wondering what’s going on on the neurological level. 

Is there a part of the brain, maybe the right hemisphere, where this bicameral self resides or originates? And it’s there, but you can’t access it normally, or perhaps you access it in dreams. But ibogaine seems to open the door to dialogue with this bicameral entity. 

How do you think this is reflected on the neurological level? What is going on? Or do you have any idea at all? Does anybody have any idea? 

Well, 

[00:19:11] Jonathan Dickinson: Julian Jaynes, who developed the concept of the bicameral mind, he did have a theory about how it worked. And his, his notion was that it related with the, the temporal lobes and that, you know, he thought sort of the seat of the self was on the left

temporal lobe and that this bicameral voice or this more creative problem solving aspect was on the right temporal lobe. And that whenever it needed to be accessed and there was a transmission of information from the right to the left, it would have to pass through the, the audio cortex that is part of what, you know, in between the two lobes there. And so that would sort of condense the information into langu and we would hear it in the left temporal lobe. That was sort of like a simplified version of what he suggested. 

And he pointed to evidence of people who were schizophrenic and showed heightened activity in the right temporal lobe. People who had electrical stimulation of the right temporal lobe and would hear voices and things like that. But it’s certainly the most contentious aspect of his theory. 

And there’s other people who have come by and have said he had it reversed or you know, different things. So I think it’s, it would be a lot to just speculate that that’s actually what’s going on. But especially now that neuroscientists are getting a little bit less interested in just the geography of the brain, like as if certain types of processing is happening in certain patches of material and more like systemic views of, you know, how patterns are happening interlocking different systems when we’re having certain kinds of experiences. 

In short, I think we don’t really know how the brain works. We get some cool pictures and tools to look at it, but, well, you’re 

[00:21:38] Dennis McKenna: always Looking at it from the outside. You know, we have these windows, neural imaging that we can open on the brain, but you’re still peering in from the outside. 

And, and, and that’s the problem. Well, James is. I mean, I’ve, I, when I read James’s books, I was flabbergasted that he was able to write this book about effectively built in hallucinations that was intrinsic to the structure of human neurology. He never once mentioned psychedelics, which seems to be a huge blind spot. I mean, he must have been aware of it. Maybe he just decided that’s a bridge too far. My theories are wild enough, I don’t want to be stigmatized. But, but in terms of understanding this, I mean, there are probably approaches to this if it’s important. Maybe it’s not even important, but there are probably ways that you could dissect this out that you could. 

I’m not neuroscientist enough to know, but there probably are ways that you could effectively anesthetize the right side of the brain without anesthetizing the left and give somebody ibogaine under those circumstances. I mean, disregarding for the moment that no IRB in the world is probably going to prove that kind of work. But if you could do that and then person who regularly experiences the bicameral encounter through ibogaine, then if you disable that side of the brain and it disappears, that’s pretty definitive evidence that that’s where it is.

And of course, you know, nothing’s ever simple in this, but that might be one approach to it and maybe it doesn’t even matter. I mean, I do think you mentioned schizophrenia, and one of the main characteristics of schizophrenia is people hear voices. 

And so, you know, there’s a lot. And ibogaine could be a tool there for understanding that dynamic. 

Well, we probably never will really understand it, but I wanted to return one of the questions I had. The ibogaine experience is uncomfortable. It pushes your boundaries. It pushes you into a state of joycence. I don’t know if that’s the pronunciation, a French word meaning roughly enjoyment, but it’s not enjoyment. It is more akin to a physical or intellectual ecstasy arising from the interactions between these three realms. You postulate the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. 

And this is based on the concepts of Jacques Lacan, a French psychologist. And this is a model that works for you as far as understanding these complex psychodynamics. So tell us a little bit about that. 

Why do you find this useful and what does it clarify for you? As far as understanding, if not its neuropharmacology, at least its experiential pharmacology. 

[00:25:12] Jonathan Dickinson: Sure. So I think, you know, a lot of the American psychologists have moved away from psychoanalysis, and there’s good reasons for it. But I also think that when we start to look at subjective experience, psychoanalysis actually can provide us a lot of really interesting language to be able to clarify or specify what we’re talking about. And so Lacan is a famous psychoanalyst. If you’re in Europe, or if you study in Spanish, or even if you study film or different kinds of arts, Lacan is canon. He’s just not known very widely in American psychotherapy circles. 

But what originally drew me to his work was the way that he talked about mirrors. 

And I was immediately reminded of being in the aboga initiation and being seated in front of a mirror. And I always thought that was such an interesting tool in the ritual, and it provided such a powerful anchor points in the initiation process. 

You know, I kind of remembered back to times when I was taking other psychedelics, mushrooms or lsd, and look in the mirror. And it was a sort of intense feedback loop, and I wouldn’t want to stay there for a long time. But with. With ibogaine, it almost emphasized this feeling of you’re just an observer and you’re kind of confronting this other that appears like we’re talking about with the bicameral mind that we kind are in dialogue with. And so it sort of was a moment, I remember in the ceremony of just sitting and sort of reflecting and thinking again about why I was there. And it was actually a really rich moment in the ceremony.

So when I read Lacan’s work, you know, he talks about this mirror phase that actually brings us back to the conversation about adolescence and. 

Or even like childhood. So he said that when we’re born, when we’re very young, we’re in this state that he calls the real. Like, we’re connected with this real. And we don’t have categories for a lot of our experiences. We just have this very direct, sensual experience of the world. 

[00:28:00] Dennis McKenna: Effectively direct experience without judgment, without categorization. Okay. 

[00:28:06] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah. 

And then there’s a point, he says, between six months and about a year and a half, characterized by her recognition of her own reflection in the mirror. 

And it’s when, you know, I, you know, I just. I have a two year old now, so I just watched this happen after reading a lot of Lacan. But it just starts to become more interested in this image in the mirror. And to recognize that, you know, that’s. That’s her. 

And what he says is it sort of parallels the period when, you know, as a. As an infant, we start to realize that there’s others around us. It’s not just us. It’s not. We don’t just cry out and then things are solved. Somebody has to come and take care of that. So in the mirror, we recognize that’s me, actually. I. You know, and there’s other people out here. And I need to actually use this image of myself. I need to understand how people see me, you know, so we really latch on to that image because it becomes very useful. 

And we start to learn how to try to communicate with these other people around us, how to ask for what we need. 

And we’re very clumsy about it at first. 

And, you know, this. This process really shapes our. 

Our mind and our identity. But what he says happens during this mirror phase is that we enter into the symbolic world. 

And this is. 

Now we don’t even have a direct experience of our own needs. We start to think about them in terms of symbols. 

And we start to have to try to communicate about what our needs are in words or as well as we can manage.

And so our whole world becomes organized by symbols. 

And we almost lose contact with the real. Because the real is the stuff that doesn’t fit into categories. It can’t be symbolized. And we only become so aware and so fixated on this symbolic world. 

[00:30:30] Dennis McKenna: At what stage does this symbolic reality assert itself? I mean, I think it must be later in development, right? 

Does that. I mean, you start out immersed in the real, which is direct experience, and then you connect with this symbolic world. But can you do that without the cognitive tools, Without a certain amount of. 

I don’t know what the word would be. A certain awareness of cognitive structures, you know, suppositions. Effectively, we go through the world making suppositions of where we’re at and as we transit through the world. 

So effectively, you’re in the real world, but you create a symbolic world, or you create or discover a symbolic world, and that expands your worldview accordingly. 

Where does the imaginary fit into this? That’s the third category that Lacan talked about. Where does that fit into this triad? And how does that interact with these other two realms of the symbolic and the imaginary? 

[00:31:55] Jonathan Dickinson: The imaginary is sort of our best attempt to see ourselves in the symbolic world. Like, it’s how we project ourselves into it. It’s like where we would like to arrive in the. 

In the symbolic order of things. 

So it’s, you know, he talks about, for example, again in infancy, looking in front of the mirror. Like we maybe have this idea about ourself and our perfection. And all of a sudden in the mirror we recogn. Actually I’m rather clumsy. 

Like I don’t have great control over my motility, my mobility, my, you know, my. 

My motor impulses. And so I don’t actually look the way that I feel inside. And so. But the, the imaginary is this drive to try to make the symbolic like as close to how we would like ourselves to. 

It’s like how we would like to see ourselves reflected in the world.

So anyways, he talks about these orders of the psyche and that obviously we’re still connected with this imaginary, like this impulse, these like drives to whatever self improvement or achievement or whatever that are part of the imaginary world, the symbolic order that sort of tells us where we are and how to interact with the others around us, but that we sort of lose contact with the real. Which things are not fitting into symbolic categories. 

However, he says there’s things that can push the real back into our awareness. 

When they happen, it’s because something is not able to be neatly categorized. And so we react like my symbolic order doesn’t fit the whole world. And so it’s actually like a rather traumatic experience to go through. 

It reshapes us and our identity. And ultimately like, you know, we hopefully are able to expand our kind of understanding of the. The symbolic world. 

But he says that the real. It’s not necessarily something that we’re like it would be better if we were just connected to the real. No, it’s the things that aren’t categorized and they’re actually. It’s actually really difficult to confront that. 

So some examples he gives are like a woman giving birth. 

You know, there’s obviously, you know, as we mature, we develop an identity and who we are. But there’s something so deep about childbirth that, you know, brings this awareness of the physical body and mortality and something that’s no matter what, beyond our symbolic order of things. And women come out of that changed, like even to the point where other people have different expectations of them. They have different expectations and impulses and instincts themselves because there’s something else has reshaped this identity. And it’s that kind of change that happens when the real emerges into conscious psyche or come. Or we come near to it. 

And so, you know, I think what the term joy sens is something that he says. He sort of describes it like it rests at the center of all of these orders of things. So it’s like. It’s actually a drive to this fullness of experience. And he. 

He distinguishes it from what Freud called the drive for pleasure or the pleasure principle, which is that, you know, we order. Our motivations are ordered by trying to experience pleasure. 

And pleasure in that case would be. 

There’s this tension that we feel. And pleasure would be a release of that tension. 

There was pain, and now we feel the relief of pain. And Lacan says that’s not actually the only drive that orders our motivations.

That joy sens is actually something that. 

Because it’s related to the real and because there’s this drive to experience as much as possible, that jouissance actually takes us beyond the realm of pleasure, even to the point where sometimes it’s painful. 

Right. 

[00:37:10] Dennis McKenna: So, okay, that, I think, clarifies something. 

So as you talk, it seems. 

I don’t know if this is accurate, but what I’m taking away from this is the real is kind of the given. It’s the raw experience. It’s what you have when you’re first born. You open your eyes, and it’s the way you experience. And then the imaginary is this process of constructing the symbolic. It’s a way to get from raw data, raw experience, to this symbolic construct, what I sometimes call the reality hallucination that we live inside. 

And the imagination is the process that lets us evolve raw experience and put a structure of categories on that. And then that becomes the symbolic world, which most of us who are not infants, who are more mature than that, that’s the world we inhabit most of the time. We live in a world of symbols, and symbols and ideas are every bit as real as any physical stimuli or any physical experience. 

Is that pretty accurate way to describe this, you think? 

[00:38:42] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah. And I think at the end, he also says that the symbolic world is something that exists whether we do or not. It’s like if the tree falls in the forest, you know, like the symbolic world is there even if we’re never born. 

It’s not just something that we invent. 

[00:39:03] Dennis McKenna: Right. We have to discover it. We. We discover it. We don’t invent it. Yes. 

[00:39:08] Jonathan Dickinson: So the imaginary is, like, projecting ourselves into it and learning how to relate with it and where do we fit inside of it and that kind of thing. But the. This actually. This, like, backdrop of this language and the. The network of symbols that’s out there and how they fit together. He calls this the big other. 

And so it’s. It’s like within this language that we become constituted as individuals. Like, that’s where we ultimately find our shape as, like, as. As people and how we fit in the. In the world.

And so, you know, I think it’s. It’s interesting. It was interesting to me because, you know, a lot of times I think, like, it’s really hard to differentiate between, you know, this very interior experience that people are having where sometimes they’re going through these. These questions or there’s, you know, seeing pictures of their childhood and a very spiritual experience. And so it’s, you know, people who, like, from the Christian faith are coming and hoping and expecting to have this experience of God. 

And I think it really almost brings us into this realm of talking about, like, you know, the mentions in the biblical literature or whatever of God is the word. And there’s something sort of deeply linguistic about this energy that, like, connects the entire world. 

It’s sort of this, you know, for Lacan, I mean, he was. He was an atheist, but you can be rather agnostic about it and say, you know, when we get to this point where we’re talking about this language and the symbolism around us is really different at all from what people are talking about in a theological sense of God. 

[00:41:11] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. 

Well, all of this raises a lot of philosophical questions about all kinds of things, you know, consciousness, reality, you name it. 

And we’re not going to sort it out in this podcast. 

I want to go on. I want to talk a little bit about. 

Get more specific and talk a bit about ibogaine and its pharmacology. 

Classical psychedelics interact primarily with serotonin. Ibogaine pharmacology is much more complex. 

The structure of the molecule is so complex, it seems to. I thought of it last night. It’s like the Swiss army knife of neurology. 

It has pharmacophores built into the molecule that interact with these different receptor systems. I mean, serotonin. Yes, but serotonin is only a small part of the picture, interacts with neurotrophic factors and intracellular signaling processes. 

So it’s a very complex pharmacology. 

How would you characterize what makes the iboga molecule? I mean, how did nature manage to invest, invent, or create or evolve this compound that has multiple effects on multiple systems? I mean, it’s almost as though in Bwiti, people sometimes encounter the spirit of ibogaine. It is almost that this is an intelligent entity and the molecule itself seems to be a reflection of that.

Does that add to an understanding of how this stuff works and where it works in the brain. And is it entirely within the brain? Apparently there’s a lot of peripheral activity too that it affects. So how do you sort this out? 

[00:43:24] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, I am not well enough versed in chemistry to be able to imagine how the molecule binds to different receptors. But that’s everything that I know from conversations with chemists like Dalabor Samez and others who have thought a lot about ibogaine is just that it is like you say something that we. 

It’s so efficient, like it’s, it’s a very compact molecule that just does so many. Fits in so many different places. So it’s, it’s a really complicated key. 

And I know Dr. Nolan Williams, the late Dr. Nolan Williams, who did this wonderful research at Stanford University looking at brain scans of people who were coming through our clinic Ambio. 

He described it like in pharmacology, it’s like we’ve been using these 14th century keys that kind of like one or two teeth on them to turn the mechanisms of the lock and that all of a sudden we’re being presented with this very modern key that has so many different interactions with the mechanism and trying to now reverse engineer. 

Like how does, how does that even work? 

I think it’s something that is going to probably teach us a little bit more about how neurology works and how, you know, the fact, it’s not only the fact that it touches so many things, but that it seems to be doing so many things that are beneficial at the same time. So Nolan’s research was showing that it’s almost like every measurement that they took of the brain. 

Things that should be going up or going up, things that should be going down are going down. Like it’s this very adaptive way of interacting with the body not, not without risks. 

Because there was, you know, if you, if you have something that has such a systemic effect, you know, you’re bound to have, have risks in some cases. But even in that sense of it accomplishes so much with relatively little risk 

[00:45:51] Dennis McKenna: overall, the changes seem to be most mostly beneficial. You know, in herbal medicine they have a term called adaptogen. 

Sometimes some herbs are adaptog. It seems like ibogaine might be an adaptogen for the mind, for the brain. In some ways you’ve said it’s not a verbal, a neural reset, a global reset, but it resets and ameliorates a lot of processes. 

So there’s a lot to understand. And yes, Dr. Williams work is certainly ground making groundbreaking and it’s a real loss to the research community. His death is a Real loss.

It’s regrettable. 

I want to focus, I want to ask you specifically. 

Ibogaine originally sort of caught the attention of the west as a treatment for addictions. And specifically for opiate addictions, would you say? But it’s clear that it’s not as simple. I mean, no therapeutic treatment is that simple. 

Would you say that ibogaine is the best therapeutic answer, the most promising therapeutic treatment for opioid addiction specifically? And what are some of the challenges with that? It’s not just that you take it and you’re not addicted. Nothing is that simple. Right. 

So in your protocols, how do you approach that? What do you see? 

[00:47:34] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, I think one thing that is just very fundamental to the way that our clinics operate is it’s a choice that people have to go a little bit out of their way to find it, and they have to come to some understanding about how that would benefit them. 

And I think that in the process, they’re surrounded by stories of people who’ve been through it and what they had to go through in order to achieve success, that kind of thing. 

So I think that the decision to go and to go to those lengths to be able to find it is actually really a feature of the ibogaine treatment process that you would lose, for example, if a judge in a drug court was prescribing ibogaine and, you know, take it or. Or else you’ll go to the prison time or have to sit in AA meetings or something like that. So I think if it’s a little bit hard, one of the challenges is how do you. 

How do you fit this. 

This deep, subjective quality that, you know, the person going through this is almost encountering a rite of passage. Like, how do you time that for somebody in the right way in their life? Like, without. 

Without being prescriptive? 

And I don’t think that in medicine, we normally think about medicines operating in that way. 

I know one of the really helpful, you know, language that we got from, like, earlier psycholog research was about set and setting, you know, and, you know, how do you create the right environment for somebody to have this kind of experience? 

And in the book, at one point, I also tried to suggest that it wasn’t just that, like, there was the right kind of music and pillows and the right kind of, you know, vibe amongst the other

participants or whatever. It was also understanding that people’s lives were going on a certain trajectory. 

And, you know, for example, with. 

With the veterans who he treated, it wasn’t just that they were in combat. They had been to combat. And now they were home in a peaceful setting. 

And so they’d all of them been through a very specific sort of vector in their life. Like they went out to combat, had these experiences. Now they’re home, trying to adapt, and we’re treating them right here at this point. So that’s. That’s a feature of the experience for people in opiate addiction. What it ended up being, when people would seek it out naturally on their own, was often in late 20s, early 30s, maybe a little older than that. Once the fun parts of using opioids had certainly worn off, they’d probably tried out a lot of other things already to try to. 

To stop. So they knew how difficult it was. Normally they maybe had some understanding about what were gonna be the pitfalls for them, like the triggers once they weren’t using anymore and potentially how to avoid them. So the fact that people had been exposed to other forms of recovery, and that was also a benefit. The fact that they tried so many times was a benefit. But when they had this experience and it provided this relief, it was something that they knew the value of maintaining in contrast. 

And so these kinds of specific things, I think that’s what’s happened organically because of the way that it’s been available and people having to come and choose it. So it would be trying to understand sort of as a, I guess, a professional sphere and as a culture, trying to understand how do we talk about these things and when is it that they’re appropriate for people to take and how to maximize the benefit that they offer. 

[00:52:21] Dennis McKenna: So people come to the clinic, and the fact that they’ve come to the clinic means is an indication they are ready to make these choices. And nothing else has worked. 

So they are very invested in ibogaine working. It’s kind of a last resort for many people. 

And so again, it goes back to this sort of unique character of the ibogaine experience, that this is not simply you have an experience, you partner with the spirit, you partner with the entity, and you become very invested, not only in the experience, but then maintaining whatever you’ve learned after the outcome. I mean, the outcome works out over months, sometimes years after the experience. 

So that’s a very different approach to the 1, take 2 and call me in the morning approach. I mean, this is like you’re choosing to make a relationship, to have a relationship with this plant or this molecule that you’re going to live with for basically the rest of your life. It’s going to affect the trajectory of the rest of your Life.

So that’s amazing. 

I wanted to ask too. 

So ibogaine has all these multiple effects on different systems, not just opiate addiction, but now there’s research and apparently it can be used to treat ptsd. 

And you discuss PTSD and the sort of, the. 

Some of the unjustified assumptions about what that syndrome is. It’s a DSM 4 defined, and it doesn’t really fit a lot of cases. 

It also could be used for traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s, neuropathic pain, and even multiple sclerosis. So there’s obviously a broad spectrum of disorders that it can treat. 

And this is probably a function of this Swiss army knife character of ibogaine. It can interact with, with all of these different receptor systems, signaling systems, usually moving it in the direction of benefit. 

I mean, that’s rather amazing. And how has neurology and pharmacology overlooked this property? 

Because there are medicines that to treat things like, to actually correct syndromes such as multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s. I mean, this is huge. If it can be used to treat those kinds of diseases. 

Far more people suffer those kinds of problems than suffer from opiate addiction. And that’s what I mean. And I say this might revolutionize neurological medicine if it’s allowed to, if it can be brought into the regulated context in a way that’s true to the nature of the medicine. So it’s a huge challenge. 

[00:55:57] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah. I think some of the interesting research that piqued my curiosity early on was Roman Paškulin from Slovenia. 

And he was looking at how ibogaine, he was sort of looking beyond just the receptor effects because I think we often think of just like the proteins on the outside of the molecule and try to think about what binding to that in a certain way would do. But there’s so many other ways that drugs can have effects or even like, you know, downstream. 

What does this mix of receptor effects and other kinds of effects achieve? And he was really fascinated by ibogaine’s ability to affect cellular metabolism.

And, you know, what that means is, you know, cells themselves have to use oxygen and glucose to create energy and the chemical forms of energy that are available inside of the cell for different kinds of functions. 

And so that, you know, obviously the ability to be able to do that well is going to support cellular function and the ability for the cells to structure themselves properly and protect themselves properly. But it’s a very fundamental kind of function of the cell to produce this energy. 

It’s not sort of Higher order stuff. This is like very, very fundamental. 

So he was really fascinated by ibogaine because what he saw was that when you first expose ibogaine to the cell, there’s this dramatic drop up in ATP, which is like a chemical energy that’s stored in the cell. And it’s almost like this, this energy gets used up really, really quickly, but it’s used somehow in a way to be able to then support the function and the structure of the cell. And 

it makes the cell more efficient afterwards, once the energy sort of reaccumulates, to be able to produce and maintain that kind of energy. 

And so I think we were seeing that in, you know, Dr. Williams brain scans, for example, people who had areas of the brain where there was damage and so cells weren’t getting the, you know, oxygen and blood flow that they would normally need to be able to supply that energy to those cells. That’s what you see on a functional MRI is the, the blood flow, you know, moving through the brain and the, the electrical activity. So what he showed was even areas where there was dampened or deadened effect after ibogaine were lit up and functioning more like normal. So, so this is so fundamental that Roman Paškulin, and he was showing that this was happening in yeast cells, like it wasn’t even necessarily just in neurons. Like it was something that was very fundamental to cells. 

So I think, yeah, when you’re talking about really fundamental effects like that, what you can imagine is that if the, the body already has this organizing and healing intelligence and you just feed it and get, you know, problems out of the way, then it’s able to repair itself. So if you’re doing that, you’re able to potentially see change in a lot of different conditions. 

And that’s what Gül Dölen and others who have been studying neuroplasticity have been kind of suggesting is if we can find things that increase neuroplasticity, then we should be able to see benefit in many areas at the same time. So I do think you’re right. I think if we can understand how ibogaine is achieving that, it’s going to be revolutionary for neurology, I think, too, and help with many things. 

[01:00:30] Dennis McKenna: Yeah. 

So this is where the real promise, I mean, ibogaine is promising on many levels, but this is where its real process promise may be effectively as a neurological rebalancer. In some ways it rebalances these systems. Just like your hard drive gets glitched up if you don’t reset it once in

a while. I think it’s a similar thing. Ibogaine on many levels may rebalance some of these metabolic processes. 

And a lot of them take place, as you mentioned, it could happen in yeast cells. A lot of them happen independently of any psychological effects, any perceivable neurological effects. Which explains in part why you can take ibogaine and have basically very little experience and yet you feel better over time. 

Certain systems just seem to be more efficient, work together. 

There’s overall a holistic process of healing that goes on that works itself out over months and years. 

Ibogaine is the trigger to this metabolic rebalancing. I mean, that’s the incredible thing. 

There are not many molecules that do that. Do you know of anything else that does this kind of thing? 

[01:02:08] Jonathan Dickinson: No, I think that’s not a fair question about it. I also am a, a specialist. So like, I can talk this way about ibogaine, but I, you know, the next molecule over, I won’t, I won’t know much about it. But I think what’s become fascinating to me is just people like Dr. Williams or other researchers who are now who do understand about, you know, the array of pharmacology in their area of interest and recognizing that ibogaine actually is really unique and special in that regard. 

I think it’s also gonna make it rather difficult to improve upon. Like, I know there’s different efforts to invent, you know, novel iboga type alkaloids. 

And I think the complexity of that is that we really don’t fully understand how it’s working. 

So it’s hard to tweak, like removing one aspect of it and changing it for another, because it’s really something quite compact. Like there’s a lot built into that that we don’t, we haven’t fully understood 

[01:03:20] Dennis McKenna: well, that that’s what medicinal chemists do. You know, they muck about with the structure. 

But the fact is, probably ibogaine in its natural form is about as close to perfect as it could be. Maybe you could make incremental differences. I mean, it certainly is a molecule that invites people to those medicinal chemists to mess around with it. But ibogaine itself is fine in its natural form. 

The big, the sort of elephant in the room here.

How is this going to be integrated into biomedicine? The regulatory challenges, it seems, are daunting. How is it going to find its way into medicine in a way that the therapeutic approaches are effective and realistic with respect to what it is and how are you going to find it? How are people going to be, how is it going to be accepted to a point where clinics can use it, insurance will pay for it, all of these things. I mean, you are able to do all of this at Ambio because you have a clinic, it’s in Mexico, and you can pretty much dictate the protocols. Then you come to the States or other countries, you have to deal with all these regulatory bodies. 

What do you think? I know even from Trump on down, they’re now trying to facilitate development of ibogaine as a result of the Joe Rogan interview and so on. 

Are you hopeful? Are you fearful? Do you dread it? Are you optimistic? Is this going to happen in the next five to 10 years? 

Where maybe in five years one could go to your neurologist and get ibogaine therapy under FDA protocols and get insurance to pay for it? That would be an ideal world. 

[01:05:37] Jonathan Dickinson: Yeah, honestly, I think, I think so. I think before I would have imagined it was impossible because there’s a whole bunch of technical challenges even beyond just the complexity of how you deliver it and you know, you know, guide people through the experience. 

You know, the, the cardiac effects are almost like just enough to raise alarm bells for the fda. Like the doses that we give 

[01:06:18] Dennis McKenna: wouldn’t 

[01:06:19] Jonathan Dickinson: fall within the FDA guidelines around QT prolongation, which is the, like a part of the heart rhythm. Right. So there’s, there’s like several guidelines that they give. Like it shouldn’t go higher than 500 milliseconds, it shouldn’t increase more than 20% from baseline. It shouldn’t increase more than 60 milliseconds from baseline. That context. So we can’t really, you can’t do a single dose opioid detox and maintain the FDA guidelines around QT prolongation. 

The other problems are, you know, in the United States, you can’t prescribe short acting opiates to people in order to manage opioid withdrawal. They’re not allowed to do that because prescribing short acting opiates is what led to the opioid crisis that, you know, has, is now well known. 

But you actually, at the clinic, we need to be able to prescribe people short acting opiates. We put people on morphine prior to the treatment in order to stabilize them off fentanyl or whatever else they’re getting right now. There’s even to be able to run a clinical study about treating people the way that we treat them would be very difficult and would require a regulator to make concessions that would fall outside of their normal guidance.

So like, especially with opioid detox you’d have to change some rule somewhere in order to make it work. 

So I, I would have always thought there’s too many technical challenges. It’s going to be impossible until recently. And I realize, you know, I guess laws and structures of power are really just the subject of human will and imagination. And I would have never guessed that it, we would have be at this point now where the President of the United States is celebrating, you know, every advancement that, you know, they make towards getting Ibocaine approved by the fda. 

[01:08:38] Dennis McKenna: Like connection is to veterans, right? It’s all about it. But if that’s the political side of it. But protocols can be changed and you know, new protocols, you, there are ways to mitigate this QT interval. I understand sometimes you give infused magnesium and that. See, there are approaches to this. It can be made to work. 

What has to happen is you have to have an FDA approval panel that actually understands what is going on. 

Given what they’ve done to the FDA in the last couple years, I, I have low confidence. 

But things change and the proper protocols can be. This can also be approached in other countries first, as you’re doing in Mexico and maybe in Europe. 

It’s easier to get this kind of work done. I mean, the United States is not the end all of this. There are other places where these therapies could be used. 

Conceivably, even Canada might be a country where this kind of work could go on. You’re Canadian, I’m Canadian. And there are good neurologists in Canada that might be willing to take on, I guess the agency would be Health Canada. 

It might be easier to get these protocols through there, but that’s a huge regulatory challenge. But it’s one that can be addressed and fixed, and I think it will. 

Because what we know now is there’s a rising demand for access to this treatment and it’s being recognized for what it is. 

And it will find its way into medicine sooner or later or not. You know, and if it’s not, then there are other options. There are organizations like Ambo, which is probably the top one at the moment, doing this kind of therapies. But there are others. 

You people are happy to share your knowledge and you’re persistent. You’re nothing if not persistent. You’ve been at this for a couple of decades. So I think this is a good place to bring it down, to end it there. Is there anything we didn’t say that you’d like to say?

[01:11:21] Jonathan Dickinson: Just to add a closing thought on that. I think what one thing that’s really interesting is like if ibogaine had have shown up in a toxicology screen at a drug developer, it would have been slashed, like right away. 

But the way that it’s now appearing, like Ambio and some of the other clinics, we’re talking with ARPA-H, who’s funding and basically negotiating with the FDA about trying to get researchers into advanced stages of trials, even at the starting point. And what they’re looking to is like, what’s happening currently at the clinics. 

So the fact that we’re here doing this and able to demonstrate that, you know, even though the QT prolongs past this point, even though we have to get more, we’re able to do it with this kind of record of safety that is what’s being presented right now to the fda. So we’re deeply involved in that, in that dialogue. And so I. 

I have become really hopeful that people are willing and they’re understanding it better and that there is a way to bring that forward. 

[01:12:38] Dennis McKenna: Well, I wish you all success. I agree. I think if it can be evaluated by people that really understand the issues and the challenges, from the neurological to the psychological, it will eventually be accepted. And until it is, then there is Ambio life, which is your organization, and others that are doing this work. But you guys are at the cutting edge, clearly. So thank you so much for sharing all this. In a few months, I’ll invite you back and ask you to discuss the current status of the regulatory challenges that you’re facing. 

So thank you very much, Jonathan. I really appreciate this. I’m going to share the copy, the picture of your book Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind, going to be released September 8th, and this podcast will drop about the same time. 

Thank you so much. I really appreciate your making time. I know you’re a busy guy and you’re a man on a mission, so all my best wishes to you. 

[01:13:56] Jonathan Dickinson: Well, thank you for the support. I appreciate you, Dennis.