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235. Is Ibogaine a Miracle Treatment for PTSD and Addiction? · Radically Genuine

• Dr. Roger McFillin (00:02.612) Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. Something is happening in this country that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In April 2026, the president of the United States sat in the Oval Office and signed an executive order to fast track psychedelic drugs as medicine. Not to ban them, to accelerate them. He put 50 million federal dollars behind it. He directed the FDA to clear the runway. And of all the psychedelics in the world, the order named one specifically by name, Ibogene. Joe Rogan was standing in the room. So was Bobby Kennedy. At one point, the president looked at the crowd and joked, Can I have some, please? Psychedelics have gone from the counterculture to the president's desk. Texas just committed $50 million of its own, the largest sum of any. Government on earth has ever spent on a psychedelic. Colorado is about to allow this. Mississippi, Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana are right behind. This is a surge and it's moving faster than almost anyone expected. Now, you could be cynical about that, but I want you to understand why this is happening because it's not a fad. It's actually desperation. We are losing tens of thousands of Americans a year. To overdoses, most of them opioids. More than 6,000 veterans take their own lives every year. These are deaths by despair. We have an epidemic of PTSD, of treatment-resistant depression, of trauma, that the entire apparatus of modern psychiatry and the mental health industrial complex has thrown everything at and failed, failed to fix. The pills are Are not working for these people, the range of adverse side effects. They've tried them all in all kinds of combinations. They're getting sick, they're getting worse. And so a generation of suffering Americans, which includes the most elite war fighters this country has produced, special forces operators, have started doing something extraordinary. They leave because the medicine is illegal here. A Schedule One drug banned off limits. Our own veterans get on planes and fly to clinics. Dr. Roger McFillin (02:23.477) They go to Mexico, they get treatment their own country will not let them have here. And here's why I am interested in this entire movement, because what they come back with sounds miraculous. In January 2024, Stanford published a study in Nature Medicine. 30 US Special Forces veterans with traumatic brain injuries, one treatment, a single dose. One month later, 88% had less PTSD. Suicidal thinking dropped from nearly half of them to almost none. Their disability scores went from impaired to essentially normal. The lead researcher, a Stanford psychiatrist, called the results dramatic. People are walking away from heroin in a single sitting. Now let's slow down and ask some honest questions. You know, what are these drugs actually? They're not magic. They're powerful molecules. And the honest answer is that they appear to do real good in places conventional medicine. Can't reach addiction, trauma, brain injury. But also real harm can potentially be done, especially when you take a naturally occurring substance that's involved in sacred ceremony, you medicalize it, you commodify it. The specific psychedelics we're going to discuss today, as I mentioned earlier, are Ibogaine. The medicine comes from a plant. Picture the west coast of Africa down the equator, on the Atlantic, a small country called Gabon, about the size of Colorado. Nearly all of it is rainforest, and in that forest grows a root. Called a boga. And for thousands of years, the people there have not called it a drug. They've called it a teacher, sacrament, held by community, taken in the dark to meet their ancestors, to be reborn. And this is where I need to get some questions answered, because you cannot patent a plant. Nature got there first. So we're watching in real time an attempt to take what has been sacred, and we've westernized it. And the pharmaceutical company's industry is part of this. So I have concerns. So how do we tell what is true here from what's trying to be sold to us? And for that, you need someone who's kind of stood on both sides of this, someone who has sat on the floor of a temple in Gabon, initiated into the, I think it's called buiti tradition. He'll probably ex explore more about that. who also runs one of the leading Ibu Gang clinics in the world, someone who Dr. Roger McFillin (04:48.938) built the only, from what I understand, the only legal ethical supply line out of there when no one else would, and who helped write safety guidelines for the field to depend on, and who also was part of that Stanford study, from what I understand. And this year, he has poured 15 years of it into a book. It's called I Bagain and by Cam by Cameron Mind. And in it, he makes a claim that should interest everyone who's been following my work. That this medicine opens a doorway that the modern mind in a lot of ways has just been trained or conditioned to keep shut. a state he calls bicameral, where the older voices come back, the ancestors, the archetypes, the inner guidance buried under all the perpetual noise, and where a person can finally be reorganized from the inside. It is out this year, and I certainly want him to talk about it. There may be no one better position on earth right now to help us understand and separate what is real from the fake. His name is Jonathan Dickinson. Jonathan, welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. Jonathan Dickinson (06:00.216) Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. And I was honored by the intro. Dr. Roger McFillin (06:07.018) Well, I'm I'm interested in a little bit about the background here. So take me to a bondo and if I butcher some of these words, please forgive me. this is the there's a history here for you, and if you can share with my audience just you know, how we got to this place, what what your background is with this. Jonathan Dickinson (06:25.39) Sure, so my background really started in high school and was diagnosed with depression after filling out a short questionnaire in a GP's office and had Zoloft logo up in the top of this little cardstock and lo and behold when I was finished that I walked out with a Zoloft prescription. So I was on SSRIs for several years and I had a very difficult time coming off of them. So I had a bunch of different reasons why I was interested in psychedelics from like literature and art and things, but you know, by the time that I took them for the first time, I'd I'd been years in to this really rough withdrawal from SSRIs. And you know, my first experience was was was with psilocybin mushrooms and it really helped me to come alive again and sort of feel hope about my future and about the world and So that's that's what put me on this track. At the time when I was in Canada, this was 17 years ago, there was a whole bunch of advocacy work around drugs, but it was mostly focused on drug user rights and harm reduction. There was, you know, the opioid crisis is not very new. there was all kinds of push to be able to make harm reduction services available to people. There was a supervised injection. Site that had opened up recently in the downtown east side of Vancouver where there was a lot of open drug use. And so these were sort of the big issues at the time, and what I became engrossed and involved in, even while I was trying to get people to talk about psychedelics because of what had happened to me. So that's how I kind of came to Ibegain and Aboga was it it sort of became this crucible where it started to bring together all these disparate strands of interest and Jonathan Dickinson (08:33.946) And things that produced meaning in my own life and kind of made a single clear concrete path for me. I think it's it's done the same for others. I went down to Mexico because this was late 2009. There was already several clinics that had started to work with Ibogaine in a medical way. And so I went down to apprentice and learn. And some of the community organizing that I'd done in the past in Canada became useful because there was there was problems that this c small community of clinicians was trying to grapple with. there was cardiac risks that had resulted in a number of fatalities. There was more information about certain drug interactions that had been part of some of the adverse events. And there was a little bit more clarity about what was what was causing these rare but obviously very significant adversities. So there was a need to have discussions in the community about how we would deal with that and how we would mitigate that. So I started convening conferences. And when I did that at the beginning, the first one that I ever organized, I got a message from Yann Guillon, who is has been a for a long time working in Gabon on the ground. He's he's French, but he's a naturalized Gabonese citizen. He's He's been deeply connected with buiti and with traditional communities and he reached out to advocate around some of the sustainability issues that were coming up because there was a increasing demand for a boga. And so he wanted me to go and learn about buiti, experience the traditions to try to understand. Jonathan Dickinson (10:28.664) from this other perspective what was going on in the West. And so that was my introduction to Ibando was the the place that I went to in Gabon, the community association that I that I visited the first time I went. And the name in Titsogo term that means the beginning. So it's is sort of served for a lot of travelers as a entry point into Gabon into the tradition. And that's what it was for me. That's really what opened up that that connection there. That was kind of the the backstory. Dr. Roger McFillin (11:00.321) Can you tell us a little bit Yeah, can you tell us a little bit more about a boga and how it is used in that in that culture? Jonathan Dickinson (11:08.11) Sure, so yeah, to clarify, when we're talking about ibogaine, we're talking about a single molecule, which is the main active alkaloid. but iboga refers to it's it's actually sort of a group of different species. they're shrubs mostly, but if you let them grow, they can turn into sort of small trees. And so you know, eboga is a term that refers to this group of species. It also usually means like if you say you're eating eboga, you're talking about the second layer of the root bark. So there's like the hard root stalk in the middle that's mostly like structural, it's a dense material. And then there's sort of this layer that we call the sapwood, where a lot of the nutrients and minerals are transported. They're like the veins of the the tree. And so that's where a lot of the interesting molecules end up, because they're sort of the chemical signals that the plant generates. So when we're talking about eating a boga, we're talking about like people will take that second layer of bark and peel it off of the root stem, dry it and powder it up. And that's what people are are eating. So in the buiti tradition This is a sacrament, as you as you mentioned. It's often called the bois sacre, which in French means the the sacred wood or the holy wood. And it's really taken as I mean there there's some use of it in what people call treatments, but a a huge component of buiti is centered around initiatic rites. And so in a Jonathan Dickinson (13:05.466) In a way, yaboga is one sacrament, but initiation into this tradition is also kind of a sacrament on its own. So where you can do treatment with just the sacrament, the initiation itself is something else, and it's sort of entering into a kind of knowledge and a reference point about the world that is used to transmit a lot of the community spiritual values. helps to sort of structure the spiritual and ethical life of the village and the relationship with the forest and with the cosmos. And so it's a very sacred and and holy practice that's been happening in different forms for a very long time. Dr. Roger McFillin (13:55.651) Thank you. I think the the larger question that I have, and I know my audience does as well, is what is lost w from that, from taking a boga in its purest form, which and then isolating a molecule from it into i ibogaine and taking the ceremony out of it. Is is there what would you say could be potentially lost from that process? Jonathan Dickinson (14:21.102) I would say initiation really is its own sacrament. So when we're talking about the work that we do clinically in the West, I think it's rightly called a a treatment. Like we don't do initiation into a spiritual practice the way that happens in Gabon. And I think it's it's complicated to try to understand what's what's lost in that process because I think It's it's difficult for us even as outsiders participating in the tradition to really understand the full depth of what it means for somebody who's in the village interacting day to day with the forest beside them because a lot of the the symbols that are used are actually very sort of practical. they they come from the forest and they speak to the relationship between the community and the forest. So even things like the torches that people make if you look up pictures of buiti serum You'll see torches and fire thing like mo the ceremonies go through the night, they're purely torchlit. and so the you know, the resins that are used in the torches are from a plant that often grows beside a boga. I mean, there's all these things that really are symbolizing of the relationship with the flora. So In some ways I can see where there's something lost because there's like this depth that we can not easily reproduce. Similarly, I don't think that you could easily extract the tradition and the symbols and take them outside of Gabon and have them mean the same thing because you're just not in proximity to that natural environment the same way. You don't have that same relationship to enrich the the symbolism. Jonathan Dickinson (16:29.454) So I think it's a I think it's a complicated answer. I think what I've seen around the clinical use of Iboga where it hasn't been institutionalized is that people develop a language and they develop communities around it, that they develop ritual very quickly just because of the emotional gravity of what it means for somebody to take that. So even, you know, when I first came to Mexico, it was, I call like the the second generation of Western ibogaine providers. So these were folks who had largely been on heroin or methamphetamine or other drugs and had taken ibogaine under the care of somebody else and had an inspiration to improve upon the care that they received and to extend that to the kinds of people that they knew from that previous life that they left. So it was in that context that communities sort of formed around the medicine and around providing it. And so I think I think that's what I mean that this sort of there was this emergent sense of ritual that people would develop just because of the the weight of what it was and and trying to understand how to carry that like the the sacredness was sort of obvious tangible etc so I think I think that that comes along with it but how and to what extent the the tradition itself can be can be moved I don't know I think I think at best we can take inspiration and try to understand it and and see it as a you say like a a request or an invitation to explore more deeply what it means and to understand it the language that it that iboga speaks to us through Dr. Roger McFillin (18:36.716) Yeah, there's a reverence for the plant, and there seems to be an understanding of the plant has a consciousness that is the interconnectedness of all things, and there's a reverence for the forest and spirit, of their ancestors. And so there's so much around what this is for people who whose culture revolves around it. So now I want us to understand its evolution to Ibogaine, a little bit of a history here, if you can share that with us. Jonathan Dickinson (19:12.238) Sure, so there's a l quite a long history actually. I think Aboga's been making its way out of Gabon since the early nineteenth century, when you know, travelers were passing by on ships and would obviously be interested in this stuff that people were talking about. And it I begin itself was isolated from Eboga in nineteen hundred by French chemists. And so there was a little bit of work that was done in the first few years that followed just on IBogaine and trying to understand its mechanisms as best as they could at the time. There is a couple of interesting case studies of that people have uncovered of like Mexican and Brazilian doctors even publishing in sort of medical journals or flyers at the time, just mentioning like for example in Mexico there was a woman who was drinking a lot of alcohol and took ibogaine and reduced her alcohol consumption. And that goes back to like nineteen ten. So there's there's always been this kind of interest And you know, between like 19, can't remember exactly the year that it began, but I think it was in the 1930s or so, France approved a pharmaceutical compound that included a small amount of ibogaine. This essentially amounts to like a microdose. similar kind of microdosing that we would use today. It's almost like they honed in on the on the same kind of dose. So not psychoactive amounts, but certainly effective. And so they were using that for general malaise and you know what we would call depression and anxiety and sort of a host of general complaints. And that went on for several decades that that was available. It was eventually banned in in France as well. Jonathan Dickinson (21:19.712) And so all of this happened early on. But what happened in the West really came because of a gentleman named Howard Lotsoff, who was nineteen years old in nineteen sixty-two and was involved in the drug scene in New York and was habituated to heroin and found some ibogaine through a contact and took it and realized that he did not feel any craving or desire to use heroin anymore and had no withdrawals from it. Which was remarkable, and he recognized that. So it took him quite a while, but he eventually you know, actually got it to the point where NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the States, was funding early stage clinical trials. And so the FDA was looking at it in the early 1990s. And what we see now as the clinics that developed in Mexico were people who Had experiences with it, like the you know, the second generation of IBM providers, like I talked about. And when the the clinical trials fell apart, there was this momentum that had already formed in the underground. I think for quite a while, most of the treatments that were going on were being done underground in the United States or were being done in Europe. There was quite a lot going on in the Netherlands at the time. But when the clinical trials stopped and that kind of that pressure built up and some of the practitioners who devo like developed ibegaine into a lifestyle ended up in Mexico because they had the freedom to be able to work with it. And so I think we've actually Jonathan Dickinson (23:10.21) benefited quite a lot from the fact that it developed organically in a very bottom-up way through a community of people who didn't have a lot of you know like top-down regulation. It was, you know self help, it was communal help, it was, you know, in a sort of harm reduction ethos. And it was sort of wild experimentation at the time, but that's where all of the protocols that we that we have developed from. And it's where the the clinical language and our understanding of how to sort of translate the the sacred container into a clinical model kind of come from. So I think I think that's been like an asset actually in the in the development of what we what we see today. Dr. Roger McFillin (24:07.385) Yeah, let's transition to the science of this. I'm interested to know the evidence right now for its support. Like who do you really recommend would take this drug? and then we'll get into the conditions on how to do so. But based based on the the body of evidence right now, where are you really optimistic? Jonathan Dickinson (24:29.538) Well, I think one one component of this, you know, l libertarian kind of open communal atmosphere that I just described is that it's not prescribed for any specific condition. It's it's something where it's almost more like how you would approach a wellness experience where you're not coming because you received a certain diagnosis and you've been triaged into this program. You're there or at least not not completely, like you're there because something about it has spoken to you in another way. And so it's something that people self select for. And I think that's been how clinics have operated is sort of around if we can provide this to you safely. We can't necessarily say what the result will be, but you know, we can say, you know, we we understand the risks well enough to mitigate them for you so you can you can have this experience. So we've sort of had this freedom from having to be able to say that we're treating any specific condition. But obviously, there's been certain things that we've been able to see now and generate enough evidence for that. I think it goes well beyond like conjecture or anecdote. And we're we're into the realm of like there's now real-world evidence that Ibogaine helps, for example, to dramatically mitigate withdrawal from opiates like no other substance that we know about does. And so for people who are very motivated to stop using opiates and who find withdrawal to be a a significant barrier, ibogaine can be a massive asset. You know, it it's not only the acute withdrawal that it helps to reduce, but you even after that first Jonathan Dickinson (26:35.372) week or so of acute intense symptoms. There can be, you know, months or a year of post acute withdrawal and craving and I think it's fair to say that Ibogaine sort of puts people like six or nine months up the road into recovery, at least in a in a physical sense. So they're really able to sort of choose if they're gonna use or not again. Dr. Roger McFillin (27:01.114) curious to know what is the mechanism of action there, what is happening physiologically to provide that type of result. Jonathan Dickinson (27:08.78) Yeah, so that's really interesting. We don't fully know exactly what Ibogaine is doing, and it's probably doing a bunch of things at the same time. Like Ibogaine has low affinity for a whole range of different receptors. So we know, for example, that it some you know it agonizes mu kappa and delta opioid receptors, but it doesn't really act like you know a mu opioid agonist, like morphine or whatever. It doesn't produce that kind of euphoria or something. So it's a direct action on opioid receptors. Don't know if that if that plays into it. It sort of modulates. Jonathan Dickinson (27:52.395) is different from SSRIs, but you know, also increases levels of serotonin. It has effects on dopamine transporters as well. You know, it's also an antagonist at NMDA and it has actions at like sigma one and two. So maybe it's this kind of neuroplasticity that it helps to produce that I think what you could say at the end of the day is that it's upregulating the Opioid system. And so it's like when you take opioids for a long time, kind of dull the the sensation of opioid receptors, like you downregulate them, so there's fewer of them, they don't respond quite as much to the neurotransmitter stimulus. So when you start upregulating them again, it becomes a little bit easier to just be at homeostasis without having to take an outside stimuli. So that's that's Really, what it's doing is it's sort of decreasing the tolerance that people accumulate to opioids to the point where they just feel basis homeostasis without needing to take anything. To the point where, you know, we have to tell people like if you go back and use an opioid afterwards, you have to kind of use like your opioid naive, like your tolerance is reset. so I you know it's hard to say exactly what the mechanism is, but that's the result that we see is it's the resetting, the the tolerance to opioid medications. Dr. Roger McFillin (29:29.506) And how lasting is this effect? Jonathan Dickinson (29:33.251) Yeah, so that effect is lasting. I mean that it does it's not like it's it's not like it's just because it's present in the bloodstream that it's causing this. It's doing something. It's it's helping the body to transition from one conditioned state of using opioids to no longer being conditioned to using opioids. Where I think it's a little bit harder to pinpoint is like how long does that mean that somebody's gonna behave abstinently from opioids? That's a different problem because you know we can make the like by the in the course of the treatment we can say like you're no longer physically habituated to opioids anymore. Like you actually have a choice whether you're gonna use or not, but we can't predetermine that that choice will be not to use. Dr. Roger McFillin (30:31.973) Thank you. so let me jump to PTSD right now. I'm like interested in to knowing what is happening with a person's state of understanding of their place in this world, in this universe, the spiritual aspects. What about taking a psychedelic drug leads someone to no longer experience the trauma that they endured in the same way? Jonathan Dickinson (30:48.515) Mm-hmm. Jonathan Dickinson (31:01.548) Yeah, so It's still it's another point where like we have some some clues and we can have an interesting discussion about it, but there's still so much to learn. I think one thing that's helpful maybe to clarify, because you were asking before about what are some of the conditions that we know that Ibegain can treat. And so one of those that we've also got to the point where there's now we're beyond the realm of anecdote is around mild traumatic brain injury. And so that's common to the to the Navy SEALs that we've treated. And also now we're starting to see more and more athletes who have had really intense careers where they're getting their head knocked around a lot. And the interesting thing is that the symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury overlap quite a lot with the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. you know, I think it's like you know, eighty percent of the symptoms overlap. So what we're seeing, it's a little bit harder to tease out: are we treating PTSD or is it treating the mild traumatic brain injury? Because what we saw with Stanford was a drop in PTSD symptoms. But then, since that first paper that just showed the symptomatic reductions, there's also been some of additional follow-up papers on the brain scans that they did. And so what they're showing is actually physiological repair of damaged tissue. And that's occurring not only in like the softer water absorbing gray matter, but also in the denser white matter in the middle of the brain that normally doesn't change from Jonathan Dickinson (32:53.954) like single exposure to a drug. And so we've seen that like with patients who have multiple sclerosis. Both there's early early signals and evidence of like that it's helping to achieve like remyelination in rat models as well as you know we've seen that in certain human cases as well before and after brain scans. So we're looking at potentially you know I began to do something physiological in the cell and there's other interesting things that it does that affect sort of cellular metabolism. So Cells store chemical energy that they use to maintain themselves and just to perform their function. and so Ibogaine sort of when you take it at first burns up that store of chemical energy. And so it's almost like exhausting the energy resources of of our cells. But then afterwards, whatever it does is putting that energy to use, sort of making energy metabolism more efficient going forward so that cells are more efficient at converting glucose and oxygen into energy in the future. So the sort of Doing something very fundamental to the housekeeping of cells. And some of the research did, you know, showed this in neurons, but some of it showed it in yeasts. So it's not even necessarily specific to any kind of cell. Like this is something that's potentially happening just to living cells. And so there's a whole bunch that we don't know about what that's doing. But the point being it's potentially doing something physiological to the structure of cells associated. Jonathan Dickinson (34:45.36) especially where there's been cellular damage that have occurred. So I think we have to do some work to sort of tease out what's psychiatric and what is just neurological. And maybe they're not always so different from each other. You know, even like in the case of opioid addiction, you know, when people have multiple overdoses, which is becoming more common since fentanyl has entered the drug supply, you know, after an overdose, sometimes people can actually lose consciousness for a while or become hypoxic, so you can actually potentially cause cellular damage that accumulates and then creates a sort of negative reinforcing cycle because again those neurological damage are harder or you know hard to live with. And so they sort of reinforce addiction. So maybe if we're doing something on a physiological level to repair damaged neuron or tissue, then you know, maybe that's also part of the benefit that people have in recovery. So there's a lot of lot of questions that we still have to ask. So I I I say that just to lay the foundation for as we talk about maybe like the the psychological work that's happening in the spiritual work that it's it's hard to tease out like where that starts and where the body ends. Dr. Roger McFillin (36:16.56) Well, it's kind of an age old question. And and first of all, I do, you know, appreciate the way that you're describing this because you you're clearly stating what we don't know yet. And that's where we are in this evolution. I mean, it these really are sacred molecules that are working in ways that we don't fundamentally understand it. And from any person who's had a psychedelic experience, mine as well. is that you're now you're opening yourself up to an experience in the way that you understand reality that's much different than when you walked into that experience. Now we're talking about Ibugainum almost like it's like it's a medicine, but a medicine that's not necessarily just working on the soul that is having this like amazing neurological effect that you know, people who have these conditions that are traditionally very difficult to treat. People are just responding very quickly to them and they're feeling a lot better. And now I know there's work with MS patients and Parkinson's and stroke recovery. It's almost like in some regards that this is a miracle molecule. Jonathan Dickinson (37:26.796) Yeah, I mean I think that we still have a long way to go before we understand who's gonna benefit the most from this. you know, Ambio About a year and a half ago, launched a neuro regenerative program that was really set up to accommodate people who had Parkinson's and MS and more advanced neurodegenerative conditions because there was more and more interest in being able to take ibogaine. And we've seen improvements in symptoms, but they're not always the kind of miracle that you would hope for or that might grab the headline. even still the prognosis of those conditions a lot of times is that they're not going to improve. Like there's no s medicine out there that's regenerative in that way. Most of them are there to manage symptoms. And in the case of stroke recovery, it's mostly to prevent a future stroke. So there's something really compelling just about that. The fact that it's doing anything at all, and that sometimes it's doing quite a lot is really compelling. And I think it'll I think it will drive how we understand the body. But when we're seeing people go through those experiences, it's very clear to us and to a lot of the patients that we treat that. illness and especially that kind of chronic illness that is surfacing our awareness of mortality in our physicality, there's a major spiritual component to navigating that illness. And so having something that contributes this experience, I think one of the things that it's doing in addition to maybe doing something reparative and restorative or protective on the physiological Jonathan Dickinson (39:27.256) level is that it's also helping people to wrestle at times with their relationship to the illness and that that can also be beneficial. Dr. Roger McFillin (39:37.052) Hmm. I was listening to Rick Doblin yesterday on a podcast. He's founder of MAPS for those of you who follow that work. And I don't think he has a a a great amount of experience with ibogaine. So he is himself still in interested in in the possibilities. But one of things he supports is this integration model that anytime you use a psychedelic drug, that there is this supportive network that you know, includes some form of therapy or integration. I'm wondering about your thoughts on that and is that integrated in your program? Jonathan Dickinson (40:12.632) Yeah, so one of the ways that we incorporate that is that most of our programs are designed around cohorts. So people are coming through as groups. And that really started when we s were getting more interest from the Navy SEAL community and started to just take groups of SEALs through together. And so we tried to continue to keep those kind of affinity groups together. Like we have women's groups, those originally started when we started to receive inquiries from like the the wives and sisters and mothers of this the military guys who we were treating. You know, that's why we have the neurorregenerative program set up apart because for one the protocol is different, but also it is really helpful to be able to have a a community because I think it helps to I think it helps us to understand like some of sometimes the changes that occur after I begin are actually quite subtle. One of the things that it does for heroin addiction, I mean, in addition to reducing the withdrawal, which is major, is that it can give just a moment of pause when there's a decision that comes up. And so I think one of the qualities of an addiction is that we sort of lose the ability to choose. By the time that a thought enters our mind, we're already doing the behavior. Like we're already doing the thing. There's no way to stop the momentum of that. The train has left the station already. So Jonathan Dickinson (42:06.786) I think being able to get back to the point where there's just a decision that comes up and there's not the same momentum behind it, and we actually are able to choose is actually quite significant, but it's something it's something quite subtle actually. And it's over time, like if you have the ability to make the right choice or make the wrong choice and then learn from it. The next time you kind of you can kind of regain that ability as well. But if you're able to sort of accumulate for like build one choice upon the next choice and on the next choice and on the next choice, you know, over time you can end up in like quite a different place than you were. So it's helpful to have community around because it can surface the value of the kind of subtleties and the nuance that happens, and being able to hear other people sort of reflecting. on their experience and how they're incorporating it or something that they noticed helps you become more attentive to what's surfacing in your own life and in your own mind. And so being able to be with other people who are on that journey and becoming sensitive to things in a new way, I think is actually really critical, really helpful. Dr. Roger McFillin (43:26.685) So help me understand maybe the difference here. my baseline understanding of psychedelics is going through a psilocybin journey. How is Ibogaine different than going through a psilocybin journey? Jonathan Dickinson (43:41.391) Yeah, well, the way I remember psilocybin and L S D and things like that was it can kind of feel like And I think this is common too if if somebody that's listening hasn't taken a psychedelic. I I believe this is closer to how maybe from art or movies like we imagine a psychedelic experience is like. But when you take one of these substances, it can kind of feel like the environment around is sort of saturated with movement or breath or significance, and surfaces can be moving and melting together. together. There there's sort of this bigness and sense of connection with the world around us. And the things that sort of emerge internally as well, like our thoughts and our feelings also feel imminent, like there's something really substantial to them, and we feel connected to them in a way that's sort of fresh as well. And so that boundary between us and the outside world can kind of feel like new, like it's something that we have to re-explore and renegotiate because you know it's different than we had previously felt. and with Ibegain I almost feel like it's the opposite because people are not very interested in the world around them when they take IBegain. Jonathan Dickinson (45:10.782) you can be aware of it, like you you can hear what's going on, but there's a a kind of gravity when you take hybrid and it really pulls you to lay down and to close your eyes and to turn inward. It's it's really quite unavoidable. Like it's it's it physically sort of asks you to do that. And then the things that emerge internally too, like the things that we think and feel, like the There's a familiarity, like we kind of know who we are, where we are, we know where our body is, we even can have our normal sense of thought. But there's something else that's also sort of being presented to us. Sometimes people talk about that like it's a a screen or like they're watching a movie or something. And so that's quite distinct because there's this duality. And so that's where you know I tried to use the term bicameral in an effort to capture what that meant. Bicameral means that there's two chambers. So it's often, I think, used in political conversations to talk about the way that the the House and the Senate interact as sort of two distinct components that have to, you know, pass information back and forth but that there can be that sensation with Ibegain like there's you know the mind that you're familiar with and then there's something else that's sort of speaking back to us to the point where it can feel like a conversation like there's a dialogue we we coach people to go in with questions that they can ask and to sort of stimulate or to deepen the the experience so I think even Even in you know rather banal ways, like if things are going too fast, you can kind of try to ask it to slow down. If you know things feel like they're repeating, you can kind of ask it, hey, like why is this repeating? What's this about? And so that conversational or that dialectic approach can be actually useful in navigating the experience. Jonathan Dickinson (47:28.138) And what I thought was maybe like an interesting clue from that, because you know, I read a lot of reports, I listened to a lot of people talk about it. It's not necessarily very clear what what's going on in the IBegain experience, because sometimes people want to say, well, it creates this life review. Like you go back through your whole life and you go back through all of these things that happened in your childhood or all these traumatic moments. And I just don't like in real life I don't see a lot of people coming out with that kind of report. It's not that they don't see maybe flashes of childhood or something, but it's n tha that's maybe like one component in a circus of other things that are going on at the same time that's quite a lot more complicated than just like watching a movie of earlier life, you know. Like it's much more strange and complex than that and sometimes feels completely impersonal and nonsensical, like it doesn't really make sense to a lot of people. Maybe 25% of people don't even see anything at all. So I think one of the reasons why I thought that kind of bicameral fact was interesting is because there's a thinker named Julian Jaynes, who's a Princeton scholar, and he talked about the fact that at least in his you know his theory and his reading of literature, ancient literature. you know, people didn't used to tell the same stories about who they were and how they thought and how they reasoned. And so, you know, his suggestion was that people didn't think and reason the same way, that it was actually quite different, and that our experience of consciousness or modern experience is actually distinct from our ancestors of more than 3,000 years ago. And so what consciousness he tries to sort of limit when we talk about Jonathan Dickinson (49:31.369) consciousness like we should just be really specific about what we're talking about. And he says that it is not necessarily the same thing as general awareness or experiencing. He's saying consciousness is this ability that we have to be able to create a map of the world and be able to play out scenarios in it. Like to be able to sort of imagine a future scenario and play the tape and see what happens. And And that is a s very specific problem solving mechanism. You know, and what he said is prior to developing this kind of frontal cortex, maybe reasoning apparatus that people were driven by what he called the bicameral mind, which was an earlier form of awareness, an earlier way to reason, where people would sort of be associating themselves with their routine and their tradition and their habits. And then when they entered into moments of decision stress, like when something new came up, a new problem that they had an encounter Before that they would hear this voice come and sort of present an answer. And what he said was that there was actually just another part of the mind that was reasoning that we didn't normally identify with. And on its way to transmitting the information to the mind that we do identify with, sort of had to pass through. language circuits and auditory circuits to the point where it you know came out as a as a voice that we heard and that we responded to and obeyed. And so I thought that was really interesting. And maybe what it signaled wasn't necessarily that we all or everybody needs to go into IBogain in search of this specific answer, but just that IBogain kind of brings us into a place where we Jonathan Dickinson (51:33.518) Have more available to us other forms of reasoning, other apparatus of solving problems that we don't normally rely on or that we're not normally practiced in using because, as you said before, they've been kind of covered over, paved over by more modern approaches to thought that we've been trained in. Dr. Roger McFillin (51:55.358) Well, this is fascinating. Let me throw some things at you here. so first of all, there's this concept of the default mode network, right? That our mind gets in this three dimensional reality, the being of the human being. It's a thinking mind, it's a doing mind, it's conditioned, it's a survival mind. Another word is the ego, and we're really used to engaging that part of the brain. most humans are. Jonathan Dickinson (51:58.543) Sure. Dr. Roger McFillin (52:22.737) unless you learn to kind of almost, I guess, train yourself out of it. One way to do that is through meditation. And that's something I've been deeply involved with the past five years of my life, where the where at this point it's the, it's a part of my day I see essential, right? It's like brushing my teeth. Like I have to be in silence. I have to be without that egoic mind. And one of the things I've found from that experience is That I am open up to receiving information outside of that mind. Like, like you're connecting to a energy. sometimes I experience it as God or other times like guides. Sometimes it's just this intuitive knowing. It's I think it's a it's a relationship to the divine that indigenous cultures have always experienced, especially when you you talk about the The African tribes and communities connected into the forest, right? They are one with their environment. And we've lost that in the Western world and we've become overintellectualized. And so we've moved away from the spiritual, the interconnectedness of all things and what exists beyond the the five senses, right? So spirit, energy, forces. Outside of us, lower frequency dimensional states, higher dimensional states, higher frequencies, angels, demons, whatever you want to call it, there's an energetic reality, a spiritual reality that is beyond just the physical. And I think most modern physicists would support now what I think has been written in the sacred traditions and across the cultures through most of human history. Now, when I've when I was able to do psilocybin and I started off just very low doses, it quieted that mind very quickly, allowed me to go into that meditative state and just be in an extended state of awareness beyond what my mind would generally make sense of it. So it's almost like there's this exposure to knowledge or other ways of understanding the nature of reality. And it felt like a divine connection to me. And I Dr. Roger McFillin (54:45.522) It was a meaningful experience and it still remains a meaningful experience. And when I've talked to, I've spent a lot of my career working with trauma survivors, and most frequently it is like violent sexual assaults, but also combat veterans, or accidents, severe loss. And one of the things that I've encountered from talking with them with people who have gone through traditional therapies, which Have a limited effect when you talk about prolonged exposure, cognitive processing therapy, EMDR. There's some relief in this, but there's a lot of people who don't get help at all from that. but those who've been able to use a psychedelic, they come out of this a changed person. They're changed because their understanding of reality has shifted. So I was you you you're talking with one person who's attaching meaning to the event. And there's a lot of fear and they're tied to this understanding of who they are, just this personality, this one life. It's all we have. And it's hard to establish any meaning to the event that just happened. And then they go through a psychedelic journey and they don't see themselves in the same way. They understand that even an event as painful of that had meaning, that they sometimes describe themselves no longer to be just this body, that there's a soul, it's on a journey, there's an experience here. And as painful as that was, there could be something on the other side of it. And that was the shift that is so powerful. And I'm curious to know your experiences with Ibogaine in that regard. Jonathan Dickinson (56:37.816) Yeah, no, I think I think I'm a hundred percent I I I see the same thing. I think where we see people in addiction, we wanna almost treat the addiction like a like a symptom of something, but in in a lot of ways it is quite a logical response. Like if you like according to a certain kind of logic in a way that we're, you know trying to solve the problem, it makes a lot of sense to try to relieve that stress in a way. And I think that actually a lot of what causes us pain is is not necessarily like an original traumatic event. It's just like the the way that we can imagine and conceive of trying to cope with that over time creates additional suffering. And we can't we can't really conceive of another way to approach the a relationship with that experience. And so I think what psychedelics do they offer us to do is it's not necessarily that we have to go back and engage with the content of that experience directly, like we're excavating something. physical, but there's but just being exposed to a different way of processing reality and processing our experience gives us the opportunity maybe to be able to reason around something in a new way. Dr. Roger McFillin (58:21.717) Yeah, well said. certainly see the same thing. let me just make sure we get this this subject because this is another thing that is important when you're talking about something that's relatively novel into a culture. from what I understand and Rick Doblin was actually talking about this yesterday, that there are some potential cardiac concerns with Ibogaine and You know, th those the original users of this of of Iboga like almost were aware of this and have them walking around a lot potentially. tell us about the potential risks of this drug physically and what exists out there to what to what degree is the risk? Jonathan Dickinson (59:12.066) Sure. So I mean the degree Of the risk is not trivial. I think you know, the way that we talk about it in the West is that ibegaine blocks the uptake of potassium, which is an electrolyte that is involved in cardiac induction. So it because of the lack of potassium that emerges, it sort of slows the heart rate and like a specific part of the the heart rate, we call it repolarization. So if that happens. happens too much or if it's already prolonged too much and then we add I begin on top of it then it can lead into certain kinds of arrhythmias where the the the heart rhythm doesn't become able to sustain itself anymore, right? And so then you can ultimately get to like cardiac arrest. So you need to make sure that the there's a first of all enough electrolytes in the body to be able to manage the temporary reduction. And so one of the ways we do that is by loading the body with magnesium at the beginning. And magnesium helps to facilitate the uptake of potassium into the cell and stuff like that. So leads to an increase of Potassium. And then the other way is just by preventing people from like who have already prolonged QT intervals, or if they're taking medications that prolong the QT interval, that kind of thing. So we do have to do all that. And then that a lot of that happens pre prior to treatment. But then, you know, in a clinical setting, we also hook people up to a heart monitor, and we're able to watch what happens as people as people absorb Ivy. Jonathan Dickinson (01:00:59.76) gain. And there's a very small number of people who we still have to intervene with, even though they've been through all of this screening. So like in the first 1500 treatments that Ambio did starting about five years ago, I think I look last I look back, the first 1500 treatments we had to administer atropine like 10 times, which just meant that there was no symptoms, the body wasn't symptomatic, nobody would have even noticed They didn't wouldn't have felt anything, you wouldn't have seen anything on the outside of the body, but we could see on the heart monitor that there was enough concern that we would administer atropine. But the first thing that we would do, this is a sort of a second resort. The first resort would be just to try to touch somebody's feet or their shoulder, sort of like wake them up a little bit, and then even like walk them around the mat a couple of times to try to get their their heart moving. And if there was still any reason for concern, we would give atropine. That was basically the extent of the cardiac issues that we'd we experienced. And so I think at this point we're pretty comfortable saying that the cardiac concerns are a known quantity. Like we can measure for them and we can mitigate for them quite well. Where there are still risks with ibogaine is in drug interactions. And so when we're working with people like there's a paper that will come out hopefully later this year, and it looks at since we published the clinical guidelines for ibogaine-assisted detoxification 2015, there's been a marked reduction in the number of fatalities that have occurred to the point where, like now, modern clinics. The only issues that have emerged are actually with people who are taking fentanyl. And that, you know, it has a lot more to do with the complications related to fentanyl and then the ibigain treatment than it does with just the pre-existing heart conditions. So all that to say, like there's still risks, but the cardiac issues are being managed in a way. Like we've we've learned how to manage them. In Buiti, they don't have heart monitors, they're not doing electricardia. Jonathan Dickinson (01:03:20.272) Prior to treatment, they're not doing blood chests to check for electrolytes, but they are doing quite a lot of other things. And that involves putting people into challenging situations prior to the treatment that involve heat or vomiting, or those different things that people have to do. And then in lower doses, there is quite a lot of moving around for various reasons. But there are situations where there's higher. Doses where people end up laying on the ground for a long time and there's not a lot of movement happening. But in those circumstances, some of what they use to steer the heart rate are is music. And so there's a lot of polyrhythms that make the beat sound sort of grab onto your ear. Like if you just heard like a 4-4 beat over and over again, eventually you will let it drift into the background. But polyrhythms sound like they're always evolving. They're always something new about them. So they keep grabbing your ear. And they keep if you're especially when you're in a heightened state, you're listening to the nuance and the subtlety. So it keeps you engaged with the music. And then there's also just the drumbeat that you can feel through the floor. And so you're getting entrained to a very specific rhythm while you're going through it. So there's ways that they kind of keep the heart rate up. And then there's also things that in Buiti that they will do. I think it it's become more talked about. Like a lot of things are still considered like secret knowledge, but it has been talked about recently because we administer magnesium. And so there was a acknowledgement of the fact that, you know, in buiti they also use bananas for very much the same reason to you know, feed the body with magnesium and keep the heart rate up. So there's sort of like what we can see has emerged in the Western context as sort of correlates. It doesn't mean that we have correlates for everything that they know about, but in terms of the cardiac issues, I think that's how it's managed on both sides. But there's adverse events that you hear about in Gabon, they're understood a in a different way. They're they're quite rare as well because of all the preparation that goes into it. And so taking Iboga and Ibigaine is not without risk. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:05:47.118) Final question, I'm interested in just your general kind of thoughts on this, not just with Ibogaine, but just the psychedelic world. As we're about to kind of medicalize this, monetize it, it's pushed into the pharmaceutical world. This is you know, clearly this is a a sacrament. It's it's sacred, it's it's it's born out of indigenous cultures, there's purpose to it. If you could say one thing too, the FDA, the venture capitalists, the politicians, all at the same time. And you knew they would listen, what would you communicate? Jonathan Dickinson (01:06:26.018) What I've been trying to communicate is that It's really important to listen to the people that came before And so there's a whole bunch of knowledge that is out here now. And you know, these all these different stakeholders should be taken in as strategic partners in how this gets developed. And it's going to be challenging, like we've talked about with different regulators. I don't see based on FD. Guidelines for like how you treat the heart, or how or how you're able to prescribe other opiates, or how you're allowed to even take people off of Suboxin or methadone. There's too many rules to be able to bring iogane in for opioid detoxification in the United States right now. Like you're gonna have to change something. And that's just on a technical level. Like you also just need to understand that this is more than just a medication, the way the FDA is used to. Regulating it. And it's not just that there needs to be therapy around it. There needs to be love and care and community around it in a way that doesn't necessarily get institutionalized into the healthcare system. So I think these are important signals. I think it's valuable again, the fact that we've been able to build this from Jonathan Dickinson (01:08:03.008) a very bottom-up organic mode with a lot of freedom to be able to understand what works and and we we have a great deal of understanding about why it is that that works. And so as this kind of top-down interest, you know, tries to absorb it, I think I think IBegain has a bit too many edges to fit into quite the same square box that people are hoping that it will fit into. And so we just need to have that flexibility. And that that conversation needs to happen. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:08:37.603) Before I let you go, can you tell me about Ambio? Tell me about you know, what you're accomplishing there, how people can find you. Jonathan Dickinson (01:08:44.014) Sure. So Ambio is a clinic that started about five years ago. our first location was in Tijuana, Mexico. Now we've added sites there. it's available to not only to combat veterans and athletes like the folks who have mentioned, but there's a lot of people who come down for different reasons. and we recently opened a place in Malta in early January and so MBO is trying to understand if Ibigain needs to be administered at scale to be able to address a larger demand, what would that look like in a way that sort of retains the knowledge of what came before and to keep it integral, you know, to keep it designed around the experience itself rather than regulation first? Like really what what's the this kind of like optimal way to you know, to provide this. So that's that's the the Ambio project right now. And if you're interested to learn more about what we're doing and about the research that we're involved in, then you can find us online at ambio.life Dr. Roger McFillin (01:10:08.973) Jonathan, I really value the way that you approached this conversation. There was optimism and there was caution. I think there was a real balance with an open mind and an open heart about how this can help people who are suffering, but also how much we need to learn so much more about this. So there's there's a lot of possibilities, especially with what you described as just happening physiologically. You know, this what it could be doing on acting on ourselves, our brains, our entire body system, us as energy beings, on what it can do to kind of rewire, you know, who somebody is. And to be able to overcome something as debilitating as opiate addiction is just I mean, that that's something that would be a blessing that if we can follow that trail and really know how to help people, because as we all know, what's gone on in the United States over the past few decades has been absolutely horrific. And there's a lot of people that that are suffering. So, but I'm grateful because I think there there needs to be a degree of caution and and always kind of weighing risks and benefits and respecting the individual choice and decision. I'm a I'm a person who is more libertarian. I am not for government intervention. And I think a lot of this should occur from the ground up and it should be outside. of the walls of of government. And I mean that's what free people should be able to do when there's something that can be offered. And I think then that's the that's the love of of a community to be able to learn what's gone on across the world where people can be supported and when there's natural potential cures. I don't like when you use the word cures. It's not always the right word, but when there's when when nature can inform us of our own humanity and our understanding of disease and ways that we can overcome challenges. Of life, and that has always exist, and we have this knowledge that's been built into these communities, and we get disconnected from that as a Western culture. For those who are bringing it back in, we want to bring it back in with this you know, this understanding of the sacred for the lack of a better word, and and having a deep reverence for where these molecules have come from. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:12:29.597) and why they may be helpful and then also how can we use modern medicine to be able to like measure this effect to again better inform those who those who are suffering. I just thought you did an an amazing job that and just very grateful for such a radically genuine conversation. Jonathan Dickinson (01:12:45.518) Well thank you so much, yeah. It's been it's been a pleasure chatting with you about it. Dr. Roger McFillin (01:12:50.307) Thank you.