S2E43: Ibogaine Inquiries Part V: Before the Forest Is Gone

not legal in the United States, can be dangerous when administered in properly and is not

appropriate for everyone.

“The series is not intended as medical advice or an endorsement of treatment.”

The experience is described by guests reflect their personal accounts, and listeners should conduct extensive research and consult qualified medical professionals before making any decisions related to ibagaine or other psychedelic substances. Hi everyone, this is Kite Dickens and welcome to the ibagaine Inquiries, a miniseries from TT Media, exploring one of the most promising, controversial, and misunderstood substances

in the world of mental health and addiction recovery. This is Part 5, the final episode of ibagaine Inquiries. Last episode, we explored how Iboca, a sacred medicine protected by the people of Gaban for generations, gradually made its way into Western science.

We heard how decades of research, patents, and growing global interest left many in Gaban

feeling that their knowledge had been shared without their voices. We also introduced you to the Nagoya Protocol, an international agreement created to ensure that when indigenous knowledge and biological resources are used, the communities who have stewarded them are included in the process and share in the benefits. But even with these protections in place, people are finding their way around them to expedite

the use of this sacred plant. Today, we turn back to Gaban, where conservationists and traditional breaty practitioners say the consequences are very much happening already. What is happening in Gaban is in 50 years, who estimated that 85% to 90% of the ibagaine from the wide area from the public domain, disappeared, has been poached.

That's Yang-Yang-Yang again.

We heard from him throughout the series, his mission involves protection for the Boca plant

and traditional knowledge that goes along with it. Yang says the amount of poaching they're seeing is largely restricting access to something

“very spiritually essential to local communities, who have traditionally had easy access”

in the wild. I'll let him and our producer Katherine take it from here. So, it's time to be a big business, that the ibagaine has started to disappear into the wide. It's time to become a problem for traditional practitioners.

And now, 80% of Gaban is people are living in the cities where I can't grow ibagaine. So, they depend on the public domain. I mean, the ones are ibagaine, they go into the forest and draw a steepbagaine. But now, it's become very getting to find a ibagaine, Gaban. Today, roughly 80% of Gaban's population lives in cities.

Traditionally, people could harvest the ibagaine they needed from the surrounding forest. But as wild plants disappear, that access is becoming much more difficult. There's a huge traffic around Ibagaine to sail for the west, because for two centuries, the west is looking for Ibagaine.

“Gaban is a very little country, it's two million people.”

And 80% of people are in the cities, the countryside become empty. So there's nobody to check what's going on into the public domain. Additionally, with all the poaching, the quality of the plant is decreasing. The plant takes many years to fully mature, and the younger it is when uprooted, the lower the quality of the medicine will be.

The demand versus Gaban's ability to plant and give the shrub time to mature is not lining up. The quality is decreasing of Ibagaine, because the biggest ancient tree are harvested. You know, in the US, when you talk about Ibagaine, you use to tell that it's a bush, a little tree. It's not true.

If you let Ibagaine grow, I know some places in Gaban where there's some trees that are eight meters high, but all the big tree has been harvested, because it provide more rubah, you know, that contains the medicine. So now the quality become low, and low, because you've got a tree here, lower the quality here, right?

With limited oversight across such a large forested region, professional poachers have been able to harvest Ibagaine from the wild and sell it into an increasingly lucrative international market. And also what's going on is that Ibagaine poachers prefer to sell to listeners that they more expensive the medicine than Gaban is themselves.

The give the priority to the West, the pay more expensive, the price become higher, including for Gabanist people, because the medicine is more hard to find. As wild Ibagaine becomes harder and more expensive to access, more people are relying on medicine sold in city markets. Jan says some sellers mix the root bark with other plants to increase the volume, substitutes

that can sometimes be toxic. So now he creates an accident because it's mixed with all the plants that could be dangerous. Because of this strain, people who have been practicing witty unable to find the shrub are turning to alternative substances to practice the sacred ceremony of initiation, which

and connection, but also their mental and physical health.

“And also because the medicine is not easy to find and expensive now in Gaban, you can go”

to ceremonies where people do not have Ibagaine so much. It's very rare that some ceremonies only enders take some medicine. There are gatherings where only elders receive Ibagaine, or where there is not enough medicine for everyone. In some cases, participants have begun using alcohol or occasionally cannabis to approximate

an altered state. This can change the energy and meaning of the ceremony itself. So it corrupt the traditions because now, but are on the influence of the alcohol during some ceremonies, sometimes more than on the influence of Ibagaine. It totally changed everything, so we love enjoying to do detail, but it's not the same energy

at all, right? So that's the consequences on the Gaban side. But Yans says the damage may extend beyond the forest.

“Traditionally, becoming qualified to serve Ibagaine can require years or even decades of training.”

When younger Gabanese people see outsiders return home after a brief initiation, begin administering this medicine and earn significant money doing it, the traditional path can begin to look unnecessary. In Yans view, commercialization isn't only extracting the plant, it is gradually eroding the value of the knowledge surrounding it.

So now, in this courage, Gabanese, young people to respect the rules of the hellers, because they see the wasteland that do not respect it, and there's no punishment, no penalty. And they make lots of money and then they come back to my Gaban with lots of money and they start to correct the village or some of them to get more knowledge to the man love more profit in their country, so it's reduced the value of the culture in the eyes of the

young people who doesn't want anymore to follow the rules. Simone Pierre, a witty master you heard from in episode 3, shares Yans concern. He agrees that what is at risk goes beyond access to the plant itself. It's a system of knowledge that helps hold communities together as a reminder Simone is speaking in French.

So the voice you'll hear is his translator.

“Simone, what do you feel is at stake here above all else?”

Transportation is the national cohesion, like the solidarity of this knowledge is training the students about fantastic remarkable moral values, for example, the respect of the engines, respect of nature, respect of the community, values that we need for a structured society, restricted. He says this is knowledge that the community has been receiving from the plant for generations.

What will happen in change if they continue to lose access? What do you think gets misunderstood, most often, by the Western media of what's happening right now? It's a very good question. The first thing is that people believe that it's enough to extract the molecule of

people gain, to be the solution, it's not enough, it's a global technology which uses the bogga, but not only.

Iboga has never existed in isolation within WETI.

It is one component of a larger system of teachings, practices, music, preparation, and guidance. Iboga, every once he's bringing a reboot to a reset of the human system, then the rest of the knowledge, which is around the bogga. A software will become, we can be considered the software of the technology.

In Simone's analogy, Iboga performs the reset. The knowledge surrounding it is the software. And then Iboga, the extensively trained healer in ceremonial guide, is the engineer who understands how the system works. In Iboga, who is the WETI priest, will become the engineer who is very specific method to

always, all this, the bogga, the knowledge and everything, in a middle liquid, he will bring the

bogga on the WETI can bring to the people. The Western world, understand, wrongly, is that it thinks that only the bogga in can be useful. Although it's the whole process with the methods, with the knowledge, the rest of the knowledge, which is, it's all. So Iboga, our bogga in is just a piece of the whole knowledge.

So this is the main thing that people don't understand in the West. Simon's point is that Iboga is only one part of a much larger system of knowledge that has traditionally required years of training to understand and practice responsibly. But as interest in the medicine grows and money is to be made, that knowledge is increasingly being separated from the plant, being repackaged and sold.

After the break, we'll hear what can happen when inexperienced practitioners begin and

ministering one of the world's most powerful psychoactive substances and how the commercialization

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Now available in Canada too. That's QU-I-N-C-E.com/tapes for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/tapes. Welcome back. So far we've heard how rapidly growing global demand for a boga is affecting access, quality, and traditional practice in the bond.

But the consequences do not end when the medicine leaves the forest. As a boga becomes more visible and profitable, people with limited experience may begin presenting themselves as qualified to administer it.

And with a substance this powerful, the consequences can be profound.

Our producer Katherine spoke with Nevea Wilder, who spent nearly a decade working around a boga retreat centers and has witnessed both in medicine's healing power and the risk of an industry expanding faster than its safeguards. My name is Nevea Wilder and I found Iboga 10 years ago really from my own personal healing journey. I had lost a sister to a brain tumor in my fourth journey. My sister who had passed

away was able to come to me and answer all my questions about life, which was beyond profound and such a gift to receive from the medicine. After her experiences with Iboga, she was hired by a retreat center, where they were administering the medicine and had some remarkable experiences, but also some that disheartened her about what is happening in the industry as it moves so quickly.

It happens to get on an integration call two years later for the Iboga Wellness Center and I is helping the people on the call so much that they reached out to me afterwards and offered me a job. I got the opportunity to apprentice and learn and have a very slow approach to a lot of beautiful things that I saw in the Iboga space and also a lot of things that were really

really difficult for me to operate within.

“I think they had well-meaning intentions to support and help people, but there was also an”

underlying capitalist, colonialist essence underneath what was happening and many of my previous employers who I knew and loved as family and grew with, I watched them end up in situations that cost them a lot because of the power, the money, the influence that came in with hosting these spaces. I think just growth that wasn't sustainable to the human soul, which is why I repeatedly

stepped back from these group ceremony experiences, it was something that I just didn't really want to be a part of. Nevaia says that on two occasions, she raised concerns about certain practices she believed to be unsafe at the retreat centers and those concerns were disregarded.

Ultimately, lives were lost.

A few weeks later after both of these conversations that I had with them there were actual deaths at both of these centers and real human lives were lost. We were not able to independently determine whether the concerns Nevaia raised were connected to those deaths, but her account reflects a broader fear shared by many people in this space. That the medicine is spreading faster than the training, accountability, and experience

required to administer it safely. Nevaia recently became aware of her practitioner, who she says began offering expensive to the bogus ceremonies after sitting with the medicine and traveling to Gabon, but without receiving training or permission to administer it from the witty community that initiated him. He sat with the bogo once and then went over to Africa to get initiated with the witty

and has no training or experience and actually serving the medicine. I know for a fact having gone over there with him that we receive no training to actually safely administer this medicine or permission even with the witty to serve it at all.

initiation for any commercial enterprise.

“Nevaia says the ceremonies are being advertised for as much as $15,000 per session in Hawaii.”

He actually reached out to our same contact in Africa a few months ago asking for permission to serve this medicine over the phone or the information in the wisdom to serve this medicine over the phone to which the council responded no, of course. And then he asked how much it would be to get this information over the phone, which is again a disrespect of how these indigenous lignages are wanting to relate with the western world altogether. For them it's not about

the money or the profit, it's about relationship and connection to nature and the forest and a plant. But the larger pattern Nevaia describes at those what we heard from witty leaders and Gabon. At the appearance of consultation or lineage can sometimes be used without the depth of relationship, consent, or training those communities believe the work requires.

Here's Bleachy Master Simon Pierre again as a reminder, you're hearing the voice of his translator. It's the eternal problem in the relations that we have with the western world. The big gap with is what he said and what's happening on the field. There is strong dialogue around reciprocity, but in truth the conversations the indigenous

peoples would like to have don't seem to actually be taking place. Despite this, we see videos online where we see people who go and visit local people and it's just to pretend that we've asked these guys what the what it is about, it's not true. It's just to pretend it's not happening. But I'm convinced that we can still take things

over if we start again from the start. The problem is if the western world is into an

economical set of mind, that's a problem. It becomes a business. Plants like Tobacco and Willowbark have been taken from indigenous people transformed into new formulas, allowing them to be legally patented and sold. And the result can be quite damaging. I asked Dr. Dindisi what the ramifications would be if we do turn Ebola into a business too.

“As an academic, as a researcher, I think that without the participation and cooperation”

of the traditional stewards of this medicine that whatever the research results or whatever program comes out of this treatment for people is not going to be sustainable or good in the long run. We're talking generations here into the future that this could have impacts for people. Just like these other medicines that we've talked about tobacco, cocoa, poppy, these are all traditional medicines that are now the world's pharmaceuticals that can harm people

and take lives. Many lives. I think that these pilot programs definitely need to be having this conversation. Even if it slows things down and takes time, I don't believe that creating these eye-began treatment centers to cure veterans of their PTSD is the actual

solution. It is a band-aid. The problem is not being addressed. As long as we continue to

send people to war, we will still have issues. We are looking at the wrong thing here. Like, if we really are talking about the evolution of humanity, then let's move towards peace and not war. You cannot commodify a sacred medicine to fix the war machine. Here's my conversation with Simone again. What would be the ideal situation for the people that govern? The government should take the hand on this field, which is not the case yet.

Second, our friends from the Western world stop thinking into an exchange instead of taking and only taking, you know, and that we don't find this in a station some years ago about the tobacco in the USA. At the beginning, tobacco was a sacred plant, and then it became a business to the detriment of the local knowledge about tobacco. Simone also compares Ebola to tobacco. This is not meant

to suggest that Ebola should never leave God on. It is a warning about the commodification that

can happen when a sacred medicine is separated from the people, knowledge, and responsibilities that once surrounded it. For young, that separation also reveals a contradiction. Ebola is often described in the West as so dangerous that only modern medical systems can learn to administer it safely. But he says that framing overlooks generations of experience already present in Gabon.

Now, it's like that you don't just take the side of what they're going to do with that. It looks

“like Columbus syndrome, like the discovery and the know how to do it in the best way because”

all year, dispensing is very dangerous. So only U.S. knows how to use it without any danger for people, and in Gabon, there are thousands and thousands of people using it very often.

years old, some are fat, some are seat. I've never seen once, someone dying, it's in medicine,

level, liver. Young's experience is anecdotal and it does not mean Ebola is without serious medical risk. As we've discussed throughout this series, Ebola and Ibo gang can be dangerous, particularly for people with certain heart conditions, medications, or underlying health issues. But his larger point is that safety knowledge does not begin and end with Western medicine.

Gabonese practitioners have spent generations developing their own systems of screening, reparation, dosing, observation, ritual, and care. So if it was so dangerous, why? Gabonese people are so healthy using the medicine. It's

“because the know how to manage the medicine, know how to use it. I think that for the”

west, rather than spending billions or millions of dollars into researches and rats and dogs,

and I don't know who its universities, they should find a way to make a studio program in the home, link to US universities and to look at the way things are done in the home. Young is not asking Western clinics to recreate a bleeding ceremony inside a medical facility. He is asking whether modern science could approach Gabonese knowledge as something worth studying, respecting, and learning from, not merely extracting from.

We don't ask American people to make a fire in the clinics and to dance around, right? But to try to find what is valuable and what is very important and the way they can create something that is a mix of traditional and modern medicine and to share the profits, to share

“the benefits, to have those communities, who conserve, is methane and is knowledge through”

information. Despite everything he has witnessed, young has not given up on the possibility

of cooperation. He still believes Eboge can become a bridge between Gabon and the rest of the world, but only if the people who protected it are treated as partners. So there are still very generous people, still very open-minded people, still wish and work also for a better space where there will exist a real fair and sustainable cooperation between the modern science and Gabonese people. So we work on that. We work on that.

Over the course of this series, we set out to understand why IBEGANE, a substance that remains illegal in the United States and largely unknown to the general public, has suddenly captured the attention of scientists, veterans, doctors, politicians, and people desperate for healing. We heard extraordinary accounts from people who say it interrupted years of addiction, relieved the symptoms of trauma, and gave them a renewed desire to live. We heard

researchers describe a molecule unlike almost anything else they have studied, one that appears to act across multiple systems in the brain and body at once, but we also heard experiences that science cannot yet easily explain. Life reviews, encounters with loved ones who have died, shared visions, telepathy, and the persistent feeling described by so many people that they were not simply under the influence of a substance, but interacting

with an intelligence. Those stories invite profound questions about the brain, the nature of healing, and consciousness itself. IBEGANE also asks us to confront some difficult questions. Who gets to decide what happens to a medicine after the rest of the world recognizes its value? Who benefits when sacred

“knowledge becomes intellectual property, a medical treatment, or a commercial industry?”

And what responsibility do we have to the people in places that protected that knowledge long before science had the language to even describe it? The people we spoke with and up on were not asking the rest of the world to turn away from Eboca. They told us that the purpose of Eboca is to heal, and that they want others to experience that healing genuinely. But sharing is not the same as surrendering ownership, and collaboration is not

the same as extraction. The people who practice Buiti are asking to be recognized, not merely as the historical source of this medicine, but as living partners in its future. They're asking the scientific world to consider that Eboca may not be fully understood by isolating a molecule from the forest, the music, the community, the preparation, and the generations of knowledge surrounding it.

Perhaps modern medicine and traditional knowledge do not have to compete. There is opportunity for beautiful collaboration, and a medicine intended to heal trauma should not create new

Throughout our shows, we explore the possibility that consciousness may be primary and

“more interconnected than our current scientific models allow. The story of Eboca raises”

that same possibility, but it also reminds us that connection is not only something to

study or experience. It is something we are responsible for practicing. As interesting

“Eboca continues to grow, the decisions made now will determine much more than how this”

medicine is researched or administered. They will determine whether this next chapter becomes

another story of extraction, or the beginning of a more respectful relationship between

“different systems of knowledge. Yon believes we still have that choice, but he also believes”

the final outcome does not belong entirely to us. I had a clear vision about what would be the world if humanity started to disrespect Eboca. I can tell that Eboca will win. It will win, but Eboca's spirit will just destroy the world before the world destroy Eboca. If you enjoyed this podcast, you'll find even more on the main telepathy tapes feed, where

each week we explore consciousness, human potential, and the mysteries that change are understanding of reality.