S2E39: Ibogaine Inquiries Part I: Remember the Name

This series is not intended as medical advice or an endorsement of treatment. The experiences described by guests reflect their personal accounts and listeners should conduct extensive research and consult qualified medical professionals before making any decisions related to IBegain or other psychedelic substances. [Music] Hi everyone, this is Kai Dickens, and welcome to the IBegain Increase, a mini series from TT Media, exploring one of the most promising, controversial, and misunderstood substances in the world of mental health and addiction recovery.

This episode is the beginning of a special five-part series that will be released every other weekday to this feed, concluding on July 31st. IBegain is a naturally occurring psychoactive compound derived from the root bark of a shrub native to Africa, where it has been used for centuries in spiritual healing and ceremonies. Over the last several decades, it has gained widespread attention due to reports that a single treatment can cure addiction, heal severe PTSD, and address core psychological trauma.

To start, we're going back to the day that many of you heard about IBegain for the first time.

“It's called IBegain, treatment, IBegain. Remember the name?”

President Trump now opening the door to more research, signing an executive order over the weekend to fast track studies for IBegain. Well, last year we learned how psilocybin can help treat some mental health conditions, and now we're learning that IBegain could, as well, a powerful psychedelic that advocacy has shown promising results.

There's one that five million people that are addicted to opioids right now in this country, with one dose of IBegain more than 80% of people are free of that addiction.

But the hope and the story of IBegain is far from simple, and to say it is a one-stop shop cure is to ignore issues that widespread access could cause. In the West, IBegain has been considered a psychedelic drug that many people haven't heard of until recently, but has been getting a lot of attention due to Trump's recent executive order, directing federal health agencies to fast track research. The order allocates 50 million in federal funding to match state investments in psychedelic programs. Many are hopeful that IBegain can be used for treating things like PTSD, addiction, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson's, MS, depression, and more, some even call it a miracle.

Those who have struggled with addiction for decades report losing their cravings after a single treatment, but there's other elements to the experience as well. If you take it report having a life review, reliving core memories and vivid detail, some report communicating with deceased loved ones, or being able to see through a blindfold, or even have a telepathic experience, many say the medicine seems to be conscious, and they're able to receive very clear information from intelligence says that they cannot explain.

“It feels like a truly exciting time for this area of study, but how did IBegain find its way into the mainstream?”

Many of us have heard of mushrooms or ayahuasca, but why are we just hearing about IBegain now?

Well, to answer that, I think we first need to back up. IBegain is derived from a plant called IBoga,

and utilizing it as a sacred medicine goes back centuries, far outside the realm of Western medicine and the oval office. Communities within Gabon Africa have used it for thousands of years. In Africa, IBoga is not seen as a drug, but as a teacher, a healer, a conscious living presence, and some researchers have begun asking the radical question, does this plant possess a kind of intelligence of its own? In this series, we'll explore the promise, the risks, and the history of IBegain, we'll trace its history from its indigenous roots to modern clinics, and pause to consider the very heavy repercussions to indigenous communities.

If we fast-track the sacred plant to the west too soon, without thoughtful conversation and engagement with the native people, we'll speak with physicians, politicians, indigenous leaders, and veterans, whose lives have been forever changed by their experience with IBegain.

“But to start, how did a sacred plant medicine from the forest of West Africa end up on the desk of President Trump, and supported by mainstream Republicans?”

To figure that out, we first spoke with former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who by many standards has done a complete 180, when it comes to advocating for something that can be seen as a psychedelic. I was just a big no, I mean, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just not talking to me about these drugs, they're bad, I don't want anything to do with that. Governor Perry is a seemingly unlikely figure to be the forefront of a psychedelic push,

but he's someone who personally underwent IBegain treatment at a facility, and saw firsthand its healing power.

But he certainly didn't always share this enthusiasm for drugs.

I grew up in a very, very conservative rural part of Texas.

and I was very, averse to all that.

“I mean, I was, you know, I would have nothing to do with that philosophical position.”

I went off to college to Texas A&M in 1968, very conservative, Texas A&M developed more officers for World War II than the military academies combined. So the idea that you would have anything to do with any drugs, illicit drugs, was just off the table. It was a non-star. This sentiment was backed up when the war on drugs was introduced in 1971.

Deming drugs public enemy number one in the U.S. And then again, in the '80s, under the Reagan administration. Fast forward, for another 15 years, and you go into the Reagan administration, and Mrs. Reagan, who I'd dearly love Nancy Reagan. But her message was, just say, no, to drugs.

Here's your brain on drugs. There was another ad campaign. We were taught that anything to had to do with illicit illegal drugs was a bad, bad, bad, bad. I carried that into my political years. If someone would have come to me and said, hey, let's have a conversation about legalization. It's like, you know, get behind me, Satan.

What are you talking about? Rick's stance on the use of drugs has softened over the years, especially when it pertained to healing. During his time as Texas Governor, he actually signed an order to legalize medical marijuana after meeting the mother of a child with epilepsy. The mother came to see me with a child.

I want to say this child was probably 12 or 13, and they had tried everything for his epilepsy.

“The only thing that they had found that was functional to address his epilepsy was medical marijuana.”

And I became curious, and I became compassionate, and Texas passed a medical marijuana bill in 2013 that I signed. And that was a pretty big step for her. When it came to Governor Perry hearing about eye-vagan, he was more open than before to a drug being a salve in a medical setting. In 2017, Governor Perry meets Navy SEAL Marcus Latrell, author of the book, Loan Survivor. We quickly want to acknowledge that the Latrell brothers can be considered complicated figures.

Marcus's Loan Survivor story has been publicly disputed, and his brother Morgan's politics have been called extreme and even hurtful.

But we bring them up here because their relationship to Rick was critical to his transformation around eye-vagan.

And that transformation has played a significant role in bringing this medicine to a much larger public conversation. When Governor Perry first met Marcus, he half-heartedly told him that if he was ever in Texas to swing by the governor's mansion and say, "Hi." He showed up in the detail columns that, "Hey, there's young man here who said you told him if he was ever through Austin to come by and see you." And I chuckled, and I said, "What's his name?" And they told me, and I said, "I did tell like you that last year."

I said, "Sanyman will give him dinner." That was in May of '07, my wife's a nurse. Of course, she recognized his condition. He was addicted to opioids, masking it without a haul. He was PTSD, he was a really sick young man, traumatic brain injury.

And he leveled us for the next two and a half years until August of 2009. He lived with you? Wow. We had an extra room in the house we were living in. He really became like our son.

I remember the first time I ever heard the word "I've had."

He was through Marcus's twin brother Morgan. He was up working on a nascent program with the University of California San Francisco. They were using Department of Energy supercomputers to map the brain of people who had had multiple concussions. And in a kind of a passing conversation one day, we were talking about something. And I heard him talking to someone about sending some of his friends, special operators, maybe stills, in this case.

Down to Mexico, it would be treated for traumatic brain injury, PTSD with this plant medicine called "I Begany." I never heard the word. Still feeling skeptical on the matter. I don't want him about his involvement.

“I said, "You need to be really careful with that."”

I mean, I still had this aversion to anything that had the word psychedelic in it. But it flips my curiosity switch again. I started talking to some of the veteran who had been down and been treated. I started talking to some people at the Stanford University who were doing some early days studies on this. I started talking to some of the veterans who had been in the hospital to both Marcus.

Actually, Morgan went down and was treated first for his PTSD.

And Marcus will tell you that it saved his life.

“Morgan will tell you it saved his parents.”

Morgan and Marcus' lives were completely transformed by their experiences with "I Began." But so many lives have been transformed by "I Began." The director to our producer, Katherine Ellis, who's talked to numerous Indigenous leaders and physicians and veterans about their experience with this medicine. An estimated 3,000 veterans of Undergone Treatment and I Began facilities in the West, primarily in Mexico. And what's interesting is that so many of the veterans explain that the real-solve wasn't necessarily processing the trauma that happened on the battlefield.

Rather, the drug took them through a life review back to childhood, where core wounds needed healing in order to really get to the root of their issues. I spoke with Admiral Jim Hancock, who actually underwent two treatments following a long career in the service.

I always comment that people were running firm or two something when they ended up in the military.

“You were never the guy that circled that absolutely had everything together.”

Otherwise you'd have gone to college or even got betrayed and started your life in four ways. Jim started his career in the Navy at age 17, and 40 years later retired as an admiral. In his time, he took on many different roles, even earning his medical degree. I started out in '89 through a power, got an engineering degree, got into medicine, did a family medicine residency. Actually, it got to go through fight school and fly at 14s for five years, at which was my first pill exposure to combat.

During the Kosovo War in 1999, in which the U.S. deployed aircrafts in the Balkans, Jim was sent overseas and experienced active combat for the first time, which changed him. It was my first time really seeing, you know, what man should do to man. Understanding the horrific aspects of that. But it was on a deployment in Afghanistan, following 9/11, that Jim encountered an incredibly life-altering event, while working as a doctor caring for injured service members.

I was in a city called Sangin, or a city called Nauzad. They called Nauzad the city of death. It was literally every day combat scenario, whether it was rockets, whether it was sniper fire or whether it was all loud objectives. It was a tough no. We had several hundred that were hurt, but we had 17 that died of their wounds, despite my best efforts. All of the wounded went through my hands. You pay a price for that to begin with as well as my other deployments.

While caring for patients, Jim had to face man-to-man combat in a very rare scenario. I was attacked, of course, in person, and had to defend myself from when I defended myself and then I had to take somebody else's life in order to defend my patients. Really unusual, not something that happens, but didn't break any rules or any ethics. But as a physician, I did take an oath to do no harm, and so it puts you in an extraordinary position of having to make those decisions. On the same deployment, Jim suffered a traumatic brain injury.

It was a daunting deployment, and that changed my life forever.

My PTSD PTSD, PTSD, I will call it because I always say it's not a disorder because my reaction to what I was subjected to is what I feel like is the normal human reaction.

And he's right. Countless veterans face horribly difficult feelings following deployment. Post-traumatic stress can affect individuals in a multitude of ways that can last the rest of their lives. Upon returning home, many will turn to substances to self-medicate, becoming dependent on them to function. Jim turned to work as his escape.

“My drug was work. It was 20 hours a day, seven days a week, how hard can I go, how much can I accomplish my volunteer for every deployment?”

But my family was paying a price. I was paying a price. My weight ballooned. I didn't take care of myself. I wasn't sleeping. My wife would tell you which quite frankly is where the real story is and the wives and the children of folks.

There are roughly 15 million spouses and dependence of veterans whose day-to-day lives are heavily impacted by trauma, relocation, and caregiver responsibilities of their loved ones.

"This came to a head in 2011 when my wife basically said, "Hey, listen, something's got to change." The military to the best of its ability attempted to help Jim. Medicine, psychiatrists, experts, many of these people provided temporary relief, but as Jim puts it, "The growing one still can't call on every night." But then, by a good friend, Jim was introduced to a group doing research on schedule one drugs like psychedelics to treat PTSD.

"And you drugs. I didn't roll up in drugs. I mean, I've been in the military since I was 17." "I watched and ate Nancy writing commercials. You know, you're brain and not being fried in the saucepan. I not kept up with any literature and how to deal with these drugs being used for PTSD or what they were." However, Jim's desperation for relief opened his mind to this form of treatment, despite his concern about the consequences of how this might look.

"I was hunting with friends in South Dakota and unfortunately got shot in the face in a hunting accident.

“It put me into a really, really, really, really dark space.”

None of the medicines were working. I went back and tried all of the different modalities to try to get there. My world just kept getting darker and darker and darker with evil thoughts breaking in about, you know, "Hey, maybe this is easier not to live this way." "I went back to nightly nightmares and I went back to no crowds. I had a little cancer scare. All kinds of things were, you know, it was like the wheels were coming off."

Luckily, Jim reached out for help.

"I went back to the guy that initially had introduced him with MDMA and said, "Hey, listen, really, really struggling."

"And he said, "Well, I don't have anything here at all for you. I can offer you to introduction to mission within and my team down in Mexico." "And I said, "Okay, well, what's that about?" He said, "Well, it's IBD. [Music] We talk about supporting our sleep, digestion, and energy.

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The first time I talk to the worker down the fishing with him, they said, well, the medicine knows what you need.

Okay, no. I'm a physician. I know pathophysiologically what a medicine does when I go to give it. I give it for a reason I'm looking for an effect, and they're talking about this. The medicine knows what you need. I talked in a vocabulary that I fully did not understand.

Well, the environment, you know, we're going to cleanse you with sage. And we're going to set up the environment, your intentions.

“And we're going to do all of these other, oh, my god, we're a null of things, right?”

I don't have those bones in my body. That was not something I was prepared for. But in the MA had taught me that the environment was important. I didn't think it was as important as it was, but it truly is important. That the medicine's given an environment that makes sense. And the first time I did the I've again, I really did not have the preparation

that now I would recommend, right? I was just like, okay, let's just go do this. And most of the seals I've talked to the first time they did it, they said the exact same thing. Dude, I walked in, I'm like, I'll do whatever. Take the medicine and take the ride, right?

And sure enough, that's what I did. And the marketing and his folks were fantastic. I was monitored the whole time.

It was seeing my life through a lens that I had never seen.

It was absolutely scary. I didn't fully understand. And they talk about you see these visions. You see little tidbits of your life. And they did.

I mean, it's like a, you know, it's like the old reels from the 60s when you're watching a film. And for Jim, the visions were not what you'd expect. It wasn't really about his time in the service.

“The interesting thing, Katherine, they should be getting rid of their combat, right?”

When they go to the medicine and they visualize and they're in the third life space. And they're doing this. You would think it would be about that God awful combat. They saw it's all about life experiences. It's all about childhood.

It is all about your marriage, your kids, your, your everything. And now I know that I should pay attention to each one of those. Are my lived experience that are causing me issues? And then put that together initially, right? That there was a reason I'm seeing that particular thing.

Even though it may be six months before I realized why I stole that. And here's Kai again, the founder of the mission within where Jim, under what I've again therapy, came to our studio to explain what these visions could be. My name is Martin Polanko. I am a physician from Mexico. And I have been working with Ivy Game for 26 years.

I'm here to chat about this amazing molecule that has so many benefits and helps calling it to question some of the assumptions we have about reality and how these compounds were.

“So when Jim talks about having these visions, what are they and does everyone experience them?”

So every time we're getting experiences different and up to 30% of people don't have visions at all. And we call them visions are not their visual hallucinations, but they're autobiographical. So it's generally not just random fractals and material. It's contents of your memory being displayed in visual format. So for most people, the experience has three separate segments.

So the first one starts about 45 minutes up to two hours after you ingest the medicine. It starts with, you know, a visual experience. The people that have this visual experience reported as almost like a movie screen opening up in the back of their eyelids and the contents of their memory being displayed. And these are like 30 second clips sometimes of events that were formative and were traumatic for the individual. And most of the time it's childhood stuff that is displayed.

This goes on anywhere from six to eight hours and then the visual experience stopped. And people go into this introspective phase where they're thinking about what they saw, their processing. They're still feeling the effects of the medicine like they're still in a bit of an altar state, but they're not like in this very intense visual experience. And then afterwards there's a period of residual stimulation.

And where people sometimes have trouble sleeping, but they don't feel tired. And they just feel at peace. Their mind is quiet. They feel very calm. A lot of the weight has been lifted off their shoulders, like literally people tell us like they feel they put a rucksack full of rocks down. And they have a deeper understanding of their own psyche and the things that affected them and also how they're affecting other people. How does it do that?

It seems to occasion waking dream state where it surfaces memories, like repressed memories and unconscious information.

It's almost like an AI system that is like diagnosing its own code.

“You can see the different voices you have in your head and the different patterns and how you're replaying, you know, relationship dynamics.”

So in a way, it's almost like floating in the room observing yourself from a distance in a very objective way, and without being retraumatized by the experience. Also, I begin is an experience that occurs with eyes closed when you're open your eyes, you're back in the room. But when you close your eyes, this is like this fully from 3D world that is a content of your memory. Much like a dream and a dream that feels real and I begin experience it also feels real. And with Katherine again on how it felt coming out of this experience.

I woke up the next day and I kind of seen the world through all of everything that I've ever done, but not through my eyes through the eyes of the person that I've done it to.

“So when I yelled at my son, I got to see it through his eyes, I got to see how he felt, I got to feel how he felt.”

And you know, when they said that you wake up the next day and the grade day and your ego is crushed, I'm like, man, they have mentioned handcraft. This feeling of being totally stripped of one's ego and identity is reported across the board. And I woke up the next day with absolutely zero ego.

I mean, I've never felt so wiped out physically.

And I've done some hard things in my life, but I was wiped out physically more importantly, my space and my feeling of, oh my God, what a who and what am I. Now today the way I would explain that to you is if you're a good candidate for every game, your lived experience is a white board, if you'll picture a white board. And it is so full of life experiences, bad and good, but so full that there's nowhere you can write anything. The red ink is filled up, it almost looks like a solid thing. And you do the eye began and when you wake up the next morning, it's a white board.

And then you choose what you put back on that board.

This malleable window, or what's known as the critical learning period for the brain, following an eye-began experience, is what Martin refers to as an integration phase.

Afterwards, there's a very intense integration phase, which if you do that right, you can maintain the benefits indefinitely. And what proper integration looks like in entails meditation, physical exercise, eating healthy, getting your sleep under control. And then for the veterans, and I think for most people in general, I think there's a lot of metabolic dysfunction nowadays where our diet is causing us health issues, so addressing from a functional medicine standpoint, some of these imbalances can be really beneficial.

When Jim first experienced eye-began, he felt he hadn't taken the necessary preparation. He decided to return to mission within for a second experience, and he came much more prepared this time.

He mentions that if the first time was getting everything out into the open, the second time was really dealing with it.

He approached the experience with way more intention and care. And I went back for eye-began, round two, what a very different experience. Absolutely correct. Jim says he was able to enter into what he refers to as a third eye space, where he was aligned with his intuition and able to clearly ask the medicine what he needed to do in order to heal. I got into the third eye space, and now I recognize it for what it was.

Now, this is where I can actually do the, you know, when you talk to mental health people, they talk about doing the work. I got into the space to be able to do the work. And what does that look like? It's hard to explain to folks that have not been there, but what I will tell you is, in the medicine, in your mind, what you can do is ask questions, and you getting answers. Well, dive deeper into this concept later in the series, but many people report that under the influence of eye-began or e-boga, they're able to ask the plant questions and receive a very clear, true and intentional answer.

The researcher's agree is unexplainable by our current measures of science.

“What has happened in terms of your feelings of suicide and feelings of anxiety and public? How was that feeling now at this point?”

90. 90. Yeah, no, there's, there's no feelings of the whole way, there's no, it's not even a thought. Doesn't even enter my mind now. You look at me thinking, how the hell did you get there? Now, I will tell you that you have to be careful when you put back on the whiteboard.

It doesn't cure the public health part of it, right? If you still don't have a job, if you still, you know, have a horrible marriage, you still have all kinds of medical issues.

“I'm not going to erase that, so if you know, if people have those things and they go right back and they put it on their whiteboard, they're going to end up at a bad place. So when we do this, we have to be all in.”

That doesn't mean we're going to fix everything for everybody, but when we do it, just realize it's not going to cure those things, what it's going to cure is going to give them a chance.

It's going to reset and say, here's a second chance at life.

Martina, I wonder if you can just talk about, you know, the second chance at life that this molecule is giving people, what are the rates of recidivism and how often are people suffering from addiction truly, you know, relieved of their situation. So with opioid addiction, the benefits of ivy gain are not just that it reduces cravings and helps with depression, but that it eliminates withdrawal. So we would take people that were actively using and over the course of three days, 90% of the withdrawal was gone, which again is unheard of, there's nothing in the West that does that, the best medications that we have are substitution.

So we can take someone that's using heroin, give them a suboxone or methadone, but then they're addicted to that.

“Whereas I begin, the withdrawal goes away and doesn't come back. So what that's telling us is changing something in the brain, it's resetting the neurotransmitter systems to the way they weren't before the person started using.”

So in a sense, the person is no longer addicted.

Obviously, the, you know, bio-psychosocial aspects of addiction have somebody going back home again and the boyfriend using, you know, needles laying around, they're having no job, all of these things play a role. So you do see relapses, but at that moment, they're no longer addicted. Because of these incredibly promising rates of addiction relief and recovery from things like PTSD and traumatic brain injury, Governor Perry believes it's time for ivy gain to be reclassified. I began, although, and I began to actually not a psychedelic in the piercens, the word, it's an ownerageant that puts people in a dreamlike state.

It should not be on schedule one, shouldn't have never been on schedule one, but, you know, Nixon to swap up everything for political purposes, dumped it into schedule one.

“And it happened to be one of those compounds that was swept up.”

The schedule one says, there is no medical use for a compound and it is highly addictive. I began as neither of those. It is not addictive and there is clear medical use for this. I'd actually not actually see it get rescheduled towards a little easier for these states to be able to do the clinical trials. The good news is, if you have PTSD, if you have traumatic brain injury, if you have some of these conditions that are just, you know, making your life not worth living.

That there are places you can go to get treatment. The bad news is they're not in the United States. The clinic Martín runs, for example, is just south of the border into Iwana and require special transportation from San Diego to the clinic and back. And my goal is to educate the public to the point where they're comfortable that not only do these compounds work particularly eye-vegan, but they can be safely used. Governor Perry himself, underwent treatment in Mexico, prior to the experience he had his brain scan by a neurosurgeon who was very skeptical about the treatment.

But agreed to analyze Rick's before and after brain scans. I was treated, I went through the protocol one week after treatment scan saw a 27% increase in the prefrontal cortex. That's your focus, that's your concentration, that's where your emotions lie. He looked at my scan when my six months scan came off the machine and we're driving back to the airport and he said, Governor, your brain looks like a 40-year-old brain. The atrophy is... Governor Perry is currently 76 years old.

So listen, I get it. One person does not a clinical trauma, but for me, not only is my mild insomnia and my mild anxiety gone that I managed for 40-plus years of being a political world. That scan that showed that my brain has been healed from the atrium, and I don't have a better word for it. And that's again, that's why I'm so passionate about these clinical trials going forward is let's find out more.

We have been a failure in this country of dealing with our veterans for 20-plus years, as we've sent them into combat.

“They have come back with post-traumatic stress, with traumatic brain injury.”

We've seen them mass that with alcohol. We've given them massive amounts of opioids. And then set back and said, "Why are there this many kids killing themselves?"

And as critical as it is to help our veterans and help other suffering from addiction and trauma,

our show also took an interest in eye-vigain due to what it can reveal about consciousness and the themes that we've explored across our TTT media shows. And next week, we'll meet Talia, who runs beyond another clinic that administers eye-vigain in Mexico. And she says that people have visions way beyond the life review. Roughly 25% over the last few months are able to see the room with a blindfold on, and some of these people report that they can feel the nurse or somebody coming into the room before they come into the room.

The first vision, the first person, sat up and told us, was the same exact vision I had just had.

“How does it do all the things that we're seeing, and it goes beyond just pharmacology?”

Doctors, hardcore military skeptics, politicians, and everyone in between are trying to understand both the promise and the mystery of this medicine. And this is where the story of eye-vigain begins to get more interesting. Because there's one version of the story that can be told through policy and clinical trials, veterans, addiction and public health, but there's another story running underneath it, a stranger one. It's not just that people say eye-vigain help them.

They say it showed them something, it felt personal, it felt autobiographical, it directly speaks with them, and provides clear directions.

“So the question becomes, is eye-vigain only a molecule, or is this plant, as many indigenous traditions have long understood, something more like a teacher?”

A living being and a healer with a mind of its own.

Next week, we go into the first hand accounts that make those questions impossible to ignore, and we'll talk to the scientist on the front edge of understanding.

Because if eye-vigain can heal trauma and addiction, that's already profound. But if it can also open a door into the nature of consciousness itself, then we may be looking at something far bigger than a promising treatment. We may be looking at a medicine that's not only changing minds, but changing what the mind even is. That's next time on the eye-vigain inquiries, a mini-series from TTT Media.