from the we've-built-up-an-immunity-to-ibogaine-powder dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Source: https://www.inverse.com/article/31461-ibogaine-cure-addiction
In West Africa, the roots of a native shrub contain a psychoactive substance called ibogaine. In small doses, ibogaine produces a mild euphoric effect somewhat comparable to other stimulant plants, like khat in the Horn of Africa or piri piri in the Amazon. But in large doses, its psychedelic effects are extraordinary.
[...] In Brazil, which has no such crisis, Gomes and his colleagues work with patients addicted to (predominately) crack cocaine. Though they'll meet with their patients a number of times, they'll administer ibogaine to each person only once. Speaking at the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference in California late last month, Gomes said most people he sees are addicts for whom traditional therapy and the various Anonymous programs have failed. They tend to be impatient with the precursor meetings and adherence to controlled settings, wanting mostly to get the drug, take it, and leave cured.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:22AM (8 children)
If only it were that easy to 'not be addicted'.
Addiction is usually mental as well as physical. You do not cure compulsion. You control it. Usually badly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:26AM (4 children)
Not to rarely does addiction cover up some other emotional pain or physical issue. So once the addiction is cured. The next underlying problem might have to be dealt with.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:31AM (1 child)
I can stop shitposting anytime I want.
Niggers niggers everywhere and not a cock to suck! Everywhere are Black Lesbians!!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @01:04AM
I'll believe it when I don't see it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:42AM (1 child)
The seeds take a long time to get started... I had a few growing on my window sill for a few years before I got bored watching the tiny plants do nothing. YEARS. Maybe I did something wrong, but at least they were alive. (They weren't alive for long after I gave up--I put them outside and they disappeared after putting them in some loose soil...)
Interestingly enough, the ibogaine seeds were a free gift with my order of other curious stuff that probably could have caused an addition if used against the the site's EULA...
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday May 30 2017, @04:18AM
Oh, thanks God the worst case scenario would have been an addition.
Can you imagine the world if, say, an exponentiation would occur? Extinction, I tell yea, pure mass extinction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:43AM (2 children)
given the right mental conditions, and the right chemical trip, that you could shake off the neurological effects of the addiction and given sufficient counselling beforehand, use the trip to explore and resolve the emotional/mental issues which lead you to substance abuse in the first place.
That is what the majority of vision-quest/guide type experiences are about, allowing your mind to float free, less tethered to reality so it can make rapid dreamlike experiences to work through things that otherwise might be impossible/take years to resolve.
But hey, other people have other opinions on that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @02:24AM (1 child)
Having dealt with *many* addicts over the years. I usually see remission not a cure. Even then it is 'one day at a time'. My father was alcohol free for 2 years. Right back to it. My wife is a 'pillhead'. 10 years clean. Right back into it a few months ago. It does not just 'go away'. It is a compulsion. They think they can control it. They cant. All they can do is avoid it.
Every pothead/pillhead/alcoholic/cokehead/crackhead I have come across always tell me the same thing. "they know what they are doing".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday May 30 2017, @03:06AM
In many cases, you are correct. Folks who have problems with addiction (although I'd remove 'pothead' from your list) often fall back into those holes. There are many reasons for this, and former addicts should leave their personal poison alone.
However, the idea of addiction as a chronic "disease" like diabetes that needs to be constantly treated is a product of the *Anonymous groups that have been shown to only work for a small minority [theatlantic.com].
There are many better treatment options than 12 step programs (I should know, I'm a member of 'Underachievers Anonymous', although that's an 8 step program).
What's more, many people confuse 'use' with 'abuse'. Many folks can have a few glasses of wine or get blotto on single-malt or smoke a blunt of KGB now and again and have no ill effects. As I tell my nephews and nieces, people have been altering their brain chemistry for (documented) millenia and likely tens of millenia. That isn't going to change and it's not necessarily a destructive thing. However, if such activity negatively impacts your ability to achieve your goals or live a decent life, then there's likely a problem.
Please understand, I'm not trying to minimize the terrible consequences that addiction visits on addicts, as well as on their friends, families and other loved ones. It's a horrible thing to lose control of one's life, or to watch someone you care about do so. I know this from sad experience. :(
I have close family members who have completely turned their lives around with AA (33 years clean just a few weeks ago), I have friends who walked away from their issues with drugs and haven't looked back. I did so myself. I have former friends who are long dead or who I occasionally see on the street, filthy and sparing change to get more drugs.
There are other, more effective treatments out there (and perhaps Ibogaine could be another one) that generally get drowned out by the hegemony of the 12 step programs.
All that said, the advice I'd give you and anyone else who has an addict in their lives is to encourage their loved one to seek help, but that addicts always blame someone else for their misfortunes, and they should never be trusted with money or drugs.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hartree on Tuesday May 30 2017, @01:14AM (8 children)
This comes up every few years. Often prefaced with "the government (or the drug companies) is trying to keep this information from you as part of $conspiracy".
Ibogaine has some effects that seem to damp down addiction at least in some people. This has been known for a long time. In some people it's said to be dramatic. But, humans vary all over the place. It certainly needs to be investigated more and it being a schedule 1 drug has interfered with that a lot.
If it were that dramatic in all people we'd likely already know with little question. It's not that uncommon a plant in Africa and has been taken for many centuries both for hallucinogenic effects and as a stimulant. If it were as effective as this says, people would have noticed. Alcoholism, for example, happens in the very tribes where iboga is used. Why didn't they use it to cure it as surely they'd have noticed that any alcoholic that took it was cured of addiction?
It's promising, but there still needs to be a lot more work done before it's an effective therapy. Sadly, as I noted above, the legalities interfere with that. It might well be more of a way of getting better insight into addiction via working out its mode of action more thoroughly than a cure itself.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday May 30 2017, @01:52AM (5 children)
Schedule I is unscientific and a grotesque waste of taxpayer dollars, lives, and decades of unrealized research.
DMT, ibogaine, LSD, cannabis, MDMA, mescaline, peyote, psilocybin, kratom, and probably the rest of the hallucinogens have no business being on that list. Even heroin is used as a medical treatment overseas (as a painkiller, or as a prescribed treatment for heroin addiction - heheh). "High potential for abuse" means anything the DEA wants it to mean, "currently accepted medical use" involves a chicken-and-egg/Catch-22 problem that you noted, and "lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision" has no connection to the actual dangers posed by many of these drugs (which can be far safer than alcohol even without supervision).
Sentencing discrepancies aside, crack cocaine is on Schedule II in the U.S.! As well as Mr. White's blue meth.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by julian on Tuesday May 30 2017, @03:30AM (2 children)
Our drug laws are structured to allow the State to imprison people it doesn't like; hippie leftists and minorities. It's a bit of an anachronism in 2017, but that was the objective when the policies were created. It is explicitly a racist and political tool used by white conservatives against their enemies. This isn't some conspiracy, people from within the Nixon administration have admitted this was the goal. [cnn.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 30 2017, @03:33AM
Yes, I put that in the opening of my 2016 4/20 article [soylentnews.org].
2017 [soylentnews.org] and 2015 [soylentnews.org].
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:54PM
Indeed, that aspect of it is still so prevalent that I routinely refer to the effort as the War on Brown Men rather than the War on Drugs.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday May 30 2017, @05:07AM (1 child)
What amazes me is that as loose as the criteria are, the DEA still has to cheat them. Schedule I is supposed to be for things with no accepted medical use. However, where legal, doctors prescribe marijuana for various conditions while remaining in good standing with various professional organizations, so it cannot be schedule I without cheating.
Hardly a surprise though, the drug warriors have a long history of lying, cheating, and stealing.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 30 2017, @05:31AM
By my reading of the Controlled Substances Act [wikipedia.org], all 3 criteria have to be met for the listing of a drug to be valid. Instead, we have drugs on Schedule I that meet a whopping 0 of the 3 criteria (depending on
yourthe DEA's interpretation, of course).It looks even worse when you compare the schedules:
Schedule I finding C: "There is a lack of accepted safety for use of the drug or other substance under medical supervision."
Schedule II finding C: "Abuse of the drug or other substances may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence."
1C isn't merely broadly interpreted or something, it is clearly an escalation from 2C. You could easily throw many of the Schedule I drugs into the broader definitions of Schedule II. Let's say cannabis may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence. Cool: You can easily find studies that back up negative mental effects attributed to cannabis use, and yes, even "addiction". But "lack of accepted safety"? Clearly Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama managed to recover from their cannabis use [wikipedia.org]. It wasn't like they were snorting hydrochloric acid.
It's no wonder trust in government is so low. At least in earlier decades, the public was anti-legalization [pewresearch.org]. Now there's no longer any excuse for such a blatantly biased interpretation of the law. The 70s were fucked but we are still hearing the same old lies 40-50 years later.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jcross on Tuesday May 30 2017, @01:52AM
In my opinion there's nothing special about ibogaine here, only that its traditional use is to take a massive dose. The described effects can happen with large doses of psilocybin, for example, which is found in wild fungi in parts of the USA and is far cheaper to produce. My guess is geographical separation is the reason why ibogaine *is* being pushed for this use, because there's no associated moral panic or counterculture/subculture to cast a shadow on it. As to whether/why it works, I don't think it's possible for anyone to insightfully speak to that who hasn't experienced some psychedelic in a controlled setting in a high enough dose to fully disconnect them from reality for some hours. Sure the research needs to be done, but I don't believe the effect is mechanistic like aspirin or antibiotics, it's likely at a much higher systems level.
Also you can be world-weary all you want, but there are absolutely moneyed interests who don't want to see various addictions cured, and certainly not in a single dose, and certainly not a dose of something you can grow and use without an organic chemistry lab. Many of these people have massive lobbying power, so I don't think it's too big of a stretch to assume a "conspiracy", as many organizations have both the motive and the means.
This is more speculative, but if you look at how psychoactive drugs are scheduled, the prohibited ones tends to lead users into non-compliance and the ones you can get OTC or with a prescription either encourage compliance or just "take the edge off". I'm not calling it a conspiracy, but if I were trying to keep a populace docile and productive I could hardly design it better. I find it strange that the official pro-marijuana line I'm hearing now is don't use it before age 25 or something because "your brain is still forming", yet it's considered perfectly okay to prescribe drugs for children that help them sit in a chair all day or paper a smile over their understandable anxiety and depression. We have absolutely no idea what effect that might have on them in say 20 or 30 years, so we're effectively experimenting with children who can't give fully free and informed consent while disallowing potentially life-saving experiments on consenting adults. Maybe it has to do with whether the effect helps keep "order" or not?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @08:48AM
Curing the addiction is not enough, you also need to cure whatever got the addiction started in the first place.
In many cases addiction gets started to escape from the real world, because one lives in a shitty place. If, after curing the addiction, one still lives in a shitty place, the addiction is likely to start over.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @02:03AM (4 children)
I'd bet my life on it.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday May 30 2017, @02:37AM (3 children)
Thank you, AC! I went there too when I read the headline.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by CoolHand on Tuesday May 30 2017, @03:42PM (2 children)
I went there too when I made the dept name... hah
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 30 2017, @06:03PM
explanation:
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday May 30 2017, @11:24PM
And I thought literacy was over-rated. Well done, sir!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- on Tuesday May 30 2017, @03:03AM (1 child)
Could this be an attempt to move up bogus research claims in the "SEO" game?
https://newrepublic.com/article/114112/anonymouth-linguistic-tool-might-have-helped-jk-rowling
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @11:23AM
or perhaps a clever ploy using regular expressions?