It is actually an old drug with a long history of being tried for different conditions and was once even marketed commercially in some countries. It goes through cycles where news stories are written about how it might be a treatment for problems which inspires some people to seek it out, but I strongly caution people not to do this. If you try one of the ibogaine clinics you may not even been given real ibogaine, and if you do you’re playing a dangerous game.
Anecdotally: I’ve known a couple acquaintances and their friends who tried ibogaine for different reasons. Among them, there was a 100% rate of feeling convinced it solved their problems in the weeks following their experience. There was a 0% rate of actual improvement in the problems after weeks to months. I think it’s good that this is being researched, but the claimed curative powers of the drug have also become enhanced through the mythology and mystery around it.
I wonder about the editorial choice to use veterans rather than, say, women who have PTSD from assaults, which is a much larger group of people. (Approximately 4% of US men and 8% of US women experience PTSD every year across all reasons like accidents, sexual assaults, combat, etc.)
Presumably this treatment would help everyone? Or is it somehow supporting only vets?
from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41883580/:
>Longitudinal analyses assessed cortical thickness, subcortical volume, and predicted brain age (pBA), estimated from T1 scans. pBA was significantly reduced at 1 month relative to baseline (-1.3 years). Cortical thickness analysis revealed post-treatment increases in 11 regions. Subcortical analyses revealed significant volumetric expansion in 8 regions. Magnesium-ibogaine therapy was associated with increased cortical thickness, subcortical expansion, and reduced pBA at 1 month.
Not really true. There have been clinical trials for Ibogaine over the years in the US and abroad. The United States isn’t the only country capable of running trials.
A big blocker for ibogaine is that it’s cardiotoxic. Multiple deaths have occurred within clinical trials for ibogaine. It’s really hard to justify and get approval for additional clinical trials for a drug that has caused deaths even in small trials.
There are analogs of ibogaine being studied, too. These are designed to lack the cardiac properties of ibogaine and would hold much more promise. There’s a real problem of mistrust with “artificial chemicals” that causes this to be ignored while ibogaine gets the attention. I suppose that’s to be expected with politicians driving research.
Presumably isn't how science is done. They did an experiment with veterans who had ptsd and ibogaine so the results are relevant to veterans with ptsd using ibogaine.
One could, presumably, extrapolate that result to an even wider audience and say "hallucinogens could help people who experience trauma" but that'd be unscientific and irresponsible to imply this study showed that.
for starters, she had to go through cardiac tests before they would even administer the stuff because it can cause serious cardiac symptoms, up to and including death. Somebody in her group was kicked out because they had been using meth the week of the trip (no pun intended). They were telling them that even too much caffeine could increase their risk of cardiac symptoms.
Then the trip itself was like 48 hours and it wasn't a fun trip like acid or mushrooms. The few things she would tell me about were awful, and she still won't talk about most of it almost a decade after the fact.
Some drugs don't need to be caught up in federal approval but ibogaine is absolutely a drug that needs the red tape and all the pomp and circumstance of FDA approval.
Just frame it as "this drug lets you send scarred soldiers right back into the fray for pennies" and see that red tape dissolve
The US also spends a large amount of money on each veteran. If they can find a cure for trauma they would benefit hugely from it. The side effect of this is that others would benefit as well.
I’m sure someone will find some reason to dismiss or excuse these deaths, as anyone who brings up the negatives of psychedelics is usually shouted down on this site.
The cardiotoxic effects of ibogaine are well known, though. This is why analogs without the cardiotoxic effect are an active area of study.
Of all of the incredible claims about ibogaine in this thread it’s sad that the only one where sources are being demanded is for the high risk of death, which even among ibogaine communities is well known.
That would be an extremely odd comment to make, though. Not only does the category "assault survivor" obviously not exclude veterans, why would you single them out to care about?
J. was a traveling Ibogaine ... healer? He went from city to city, summoned by the loved ones of advanced heroin addicts, to attempt one last Hail Mary shot at recovery.
These were situations of absolute desperation, and I can’t overstate the seriousness with which he took his adopted occupation. He described to us in detail his process.
First, he interviewed the person requesting help, seeing what else they had tried and trying to suss out if Ibogaine would be worth the risk. He turned away most callers.
Those who he accepted would be dropped off at his van, inside which was a mobile, DIY ICU of sorts: a bed, food, water and emergency medical supplies. He would administer the ibogaine (I don’t know what form this took), and then, in his words, the patient would undergo a 2 to 3-day continuous hallucination.
During this time, in J.’s observations, the patient was almost always ‘visited’ by dead relatives, who typically admonished the patient for what had become of them, laying into them with real talk about the state of their life.
J. said half of the patients came out of this experience fundamentally changed, and effectively cured of their addiction to heroin. I don’t know if he had any data (anecdotal or otherwise) on recidivism, but the implication was that this was likely to be permanent.
But, he said, the other half went insane, which is why he spent a great deal of effort screening families and informing them of the risks.
I don’t know how much, if any, of this is true. I don’t know what ‘insane’ means, or meant. But I remember vividly how seriously this guy took it, without ever coming off as some kind of self-satisfied guru or medicine man, believing himself to be a god, or anything like that. He never accepted money. He lived somewhat roughly. I wonder whatever happened to that guy.
Any study like this is nearly useless without a control group, unfortunately. There is no way to tell if the treatment caused the changes or if they naturally occurred over the study period.
The healthcare community would be thrilled to find out – with certainty – that your interventions work.
Like, obviously we should treat veterans with PTSD, but the article is unclear about whether it's just them.
Shame it has to be a side effect.
Totally different ballparks. Well-established results vs. very little formal research.
Have you had ECT, or do you know anyone who has? It's a last resort for horrible depression and not much else. It has huge risks, and while it does often make these people's lives manageable, it shouldn't be in the same discussion as a medication that's been out of discussion for political reasons.
shivers at the thought of ECT
PTSD is a trauma response.
Are you thinking of TBI? TBI is a cumulative impact of small and large head trauma.
Because then it’s another variable in the study.
The WWI name of "shell shock" describing the same phenomenon was probably more accurate than "PTSD".
Lot of interesting studies and anecdotes on its efficacy as an antidepressant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine
"The action of ibogaine at the κ-opioid receptor may indeed contribute significantly to the psychoactive effects attributed to ibogaine ingestion; Salvia divinorum, another plant recognized for its strong hallucinogenic properties contains the chemical salvinorin A, which is a highly selective κ-opioid agonist"
If dissociation is better than regular PTSD, then go for it. We don’t expect people with hip replacements to have 100% mobility. We don’t expect cochlear implants to hear better than healthy ears. Mental health interventions have similar tradeoffs.
However there is certainly a lack of data, and facilities doing treatment now are probably incentivized not to share adverse events.
No it doesn't. But making efforts to stop it ourselves is necessary to achieve that. Same reason it's worth doing nuclear disarmament: because not disarming guarantees nuclear war eventually.
There are 0 requirements for head trauma with PTSD, it's a stress response.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the top tier, evidence based treatment for PTSD. 60-80% can actually lose their PTSD diagnosis through CBT in some studies.
I'm not saying CBT is the magic cure, but it's very helpful for retraining the body's fight or flight response.
For TBI, there is not really any amount of CBT that can impact it due to the physical changes in the brain. This is why things like ibogaine and psilocybin are encouraging, because they seem to be causing neurogenesis.
I'm somebody that has spent my life dealing with both of these issues through combat sports and military combat. It's something I stay on top of.
My interpretation of the parent comment is: Americans should stop aggressing other countries, slaughtering the population, and then publishing scientific breakthroughs on treating ptsd among the killers.
I'd say the comment says nothing about wars of survival, which is not what veterans have ptsd for. No one is 'doing war' at America.
As for TCMS? It works- if you can find a place that's not a farm.
Nash equilibrium is the religion for millennials who didn’t get sucked into the boomer/gen-x Ayn Rand bullshit
3 days ago
Chris Marshall

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(Credit: Getty Images)
Trials on veterans suggest the potent hallucinogen could provide a new treatment for PTSD, but scientists still don't know how it works.
Elias Kfoury was making what he considered to be a last-ditch attempt to remedy years of deep psychological pain. Lying on his back in a clinic in Tijuana, Mexico, the former US Navy special operations medic was deep under the influence of ibogaine, a potent psychedelic taking him on an immersive journey through old memories.
"I started seeing people that I recognised from pictures, old family or friends that had passed a long time ago," says Kfoury, who was medically retired in 2016. "I watched so many events from my life and felt like 'this is happening right now'."
And scientists are still trying to unravel how it works. Crucially, they're stuck wondering whether the drug's chemical composition or the potent psychedelic experiences are driving its seemingly life-changing, therapeutic benefits.
Twenty-one years in the military had taken a severe toll on Kfoury. He describes injuries "from head to toe". Then there were the headaches. "It just never went away," says Kfoury, who now lives in Virginia Beach, on the Atlantic Ocean in the US.
A string of 12 surgical procedures did little to relieve his injuries or pain. Nor did the treatments he tried for other psychological battle scars. "I spent my childhood in war and then I found myself again as an adult in war," says Kfoury, who was born in Beirut, Lebanon, during the 1975-1990 civil war.
He was diagnosed with PTSD in 2012. After leaving the military, "I just declined further and further into darkness," he says. He tried a range of medications and different types of therapy, none of which worked. It was when he was close to giving up hope that Kfoury first heard about ibogaine: a friend put him in touch with another military veteran who planned to join a study in Mexico, where ibogaine is unregulated, to investigate the drug's potential benefits for treating traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. Kfoury signed up too.
When you see it for the first time, it's like magic – they take ibogaine and their withdrawal syndrome completely disappears – José Carlos Bouso
Kfoury was among 30 special forces veterans from the US to travel to the clinic in Mexico and have their treatment progress monitored by researchers at Stanford University.
At the clinic, groups of five veterans at a time received ibogaine pills, up to a maximum of 14 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, over three hours. Wearing eyeshades, they each lay on a mat, spread out across a large room, as the effects set in. Beforehand, participants had been coached about what to expect during the trip, which could last up to 72 hours, and they were supervised by medical staff throughout.
For Kfoury, the experience was lucid, personal and deeply challenging. At one point during the twelve or so hours he was under, he says he had a cathartic conversation with himself as a child.

Elias Kfoury
Elias Kfoury says the treatment he received with ibogaine changed his life (Credit: Elias Kfoury)
This wasn't the first time ibogaine had been linked to health improvements. Modern scientific interest in the African ceremonial drug dates back to 1962, when a 19-year-old heroin addict, Howard Lotsof, took a single dose – given to him informally by a chemist friend – and noticed that his heroin withdrawal symptoms disappeared.
Since then, there have been decades of research into ibogaine's ability to help addicts overcome cravings for substances, including opioids and cocaine.
"When you see it for the first time, it's like magic – they take ibogaine and their withdrawal syndrome completely disappears," says José Carlos Bouso, a clinical psychologist and pharmacologist who has been studying psychedelics for 30 years.
But scientists are still getting to grips with how ibogaine might bring about therapeutic benefits. "We don't have a clear mechanism, not nearly as good as we do for the other psychedelics," says Clayton Olash, a researcher at Stanford University's Brain Stimulation Laboratory who worked on a 2026 analysis delving further into the findings from the Mexico trial on the 30 veterans, including Kfoury.
Ibogaine isn't like other psychedelic compounds. For instance, Olash points out that it doesn't interact much with 5-HT2A, a receptor that normally plays a big role in activity with other psychedelic drugs. Instead, it may have a stronger effect through other receptors such as kappa-opioid receptors, which are involved in stimulating the cells that restore the protective coating around brain nerve fibres called myelin.

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Ibogaine is a compound found in the roots of the African shrub iboga (Credit: Getty Images)
Other research suggests that ibogaine helps the brain recover from addiction by increasing growth proteins called neurotrophins, which support brain cell growth and help brain circuits adapt and heal – a process known as neuroplasticity.
The vivid experiences function like opening a window of opportunity in which people can make behavioural changes
Some research suggests that chemistry is all that is needed – that the intense psychedelic experiences may not even be necessary for ibogaine's healing effects.
Scientists at the University of California created a synthetic version of the drug, free of any hallucinogenic effects. Tests of the trip-free substance on rats showed it reduced alcohol and heroin-seeking behaviour, and produced antidepressant-like effects. Building on such research, some startups are working on drugs that mimic therapeutic effects without the hallucinations.
On the other hand, some scientists say ibogaine's rich, subjective psychedelic experiences – and particularly the so-called "life review", where many patients re-run old scenes from their life – are central to its health effects. For Bouso, the vivid experiences function like "opening a window of opportunity in which people can make behavioural changes".
In a 2017 survey of 88 patients who received ibogaine treatment in Mexico for chronic opioid use, 80% said it had helped reduce withdrawal symptoms, and more interestingly, 67% said the experience helped them unlock memories or insights into the root causes of their addiction. But it should be noted that such surveys are highly subjective.
Physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, every part of me was touched by that medicine… it's like my life is completely different now – Elias Kfoury
The effects are also evident in measurements of brain activity. By measuring the neural electrical signals of the special forces veterans in the Mexico trial, researchers have found that the most intensely-hallucinogenic ibogaine trips coincided with a reduction in a type of brain wave linked with stronger PTSD symptoms. This was still the case in follow-up tests one month later.
"That kind of thing has been shown to happen in meditation… but here it is happening even one month after treatment," says Maheen Mausoof Adamson, clinical professor of neurosurgery at the Stanford School of Medicine, who worked on the 2024 experiment in Mexico that Kfoury participated in, as well as a follow-up study in 2026.
Adamson and team point to a theory suggesting ibogaine may, like other psychedelics, increase neural flexibility and break down unhealthy, rigid thinking patterns by surfacing suppressed or emotionally charged memories. This resembles the emotional processing in vivid dreams.
"We create these rigid maladaptive coping mechanisms and frames on how we see the world and then we maintain them," says Olash. But ibogaine's potential to induce a film-like replay of memories, means that people can "see things from a completely different vantage point, they are rewriting that schema".

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Some scientists say ibogaine's rich, subjective psychedelic experiences are central to its effect on PTSD (Credit: Getty Images)
Whatever its mechanisms of action, ibogaine is no silver bullet. "There's no uniform trajectory that unfolds after treatment," says Alan Davis, associate professor at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at Ohio State University in the US. "There are some people who don't respond to the treatment."
For instance, in the 2017 study into the effectiveness of ibogaine for opioid addiction, which Davis led, 17% of patients reported no change and 6% said their opioid consumption increased after treatment. The majority (71%) said ibogaine treatment was better than other treatments they had tried and 30% reported never using opioids again following ibogaine treatment. The results, however, relied on self-reported data and so should be treated with caution.
So far, most of the data is observational and gathered from clinics in the few countries where ibogaine isn't illegal. For that to change, many more large-scale randomised clinical trials are needed, alongside a better understanding of how the drug works.
The two substances are said to complement each other. "I've heard it described as ibogaine being a power sander to your soul, and 5-MeO-DMT is like getting it polished," says Kfoury. But research to justify or explain the pairing is lacking, says Davis, who has published dozens of papers on psychedelics. He describes the challenge of distinguishing which of the two is truly helping patients as "one of the biggest limitations of any of the ibogaine research".

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There is growing interest in using psychedelics to treat serious mental health conditions such as PTSD (Credit: Getty Images)
In the Stanford trial, to protect their hearts, participants were given an intravenous infusion of 1g of magnesium sulfate – magnesium has been considered central to a healthy heart rhythm for decades. Screening and constant medical monitoring of patients during their ibogaine session is also considered essential.
This doesn't come cheap, which, for Davis, is one of the reasons ibogaine could be a long way from becoming a mainstream, regulated treatment. He says too much money is spent on ibogaine research that would be better directed towards other psychedelics that could be made available sooner.
Nevertheless, financial and scientific momentum seems to be growing. In April 2026, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the US Food and Drug Administration to expedite their review of psychedelics as pharmaceuticals, decreeing that the US should dedicate $50m (£37m) in federal funding for research into ibogaine specifically. In 2025, the US state of Texas had already committed $50m in funding for clinical trials of ibogaine as a treatment for opioid use disorder, PTSD and traumatic brain injury.
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As scientists work to gather further evidence, many veterans, including Kfoury, are already confident that the drug changed their lives.
"Physically, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, every part of me was touched by that medicine… it's like my life is completely different now," says Kfoury. The endless headaches are mostly gone and he speaks of an inner peace. "I felt like my mind was quiet… I realised I'd suffered for a long time and I needed to be gentle with myself."
However, just taking ibogaine isn't enough. "It gave me a roadmap… but you have to put the work in consistently," he says, noting he's since been journaling and meditating, as well as coaching other veterans who have tried the psychedelic too.
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