In the spring of 2022, a 49-year-old New Yorker named David* headed south to Cancún, Mexico. He went to overcome his dependency on drugs using ibogaine, the primary alkaloid in a central African root bark named iboga. The lengthy visionary journey that typically ensues with this dream-inducing psychedelic is so intense that it is known as “the Mount Everest of psychedelics.
” Some hardcore psychonauts take ibogaine for “psycho-spiritual” purposes, but most only subject themselves to it because they are in the depths of substance dependence and see ibogaine as their last hope. People like David. *David’s name was changed for this story at his family’s request.
He had a huge incentive to get sober once and for all. David had recently inherited several million dollars from his father. Starting in 2018, David had lived in a sober community in South Carolina, working as a baker, after some 25 years battling addiction.
But his father’s death in August 2021, and a subsequent romantic relationship, ultimately had a destabilizing effect. By February 2022, David relapsed after four years sober. He went swiftly back to his old ways, taking fentanyl and cocaine, while using the heroin-substitute drug Suboxone and copious amounts of Valium.
He was nodding out almost daily, including with a needle in his arm. He was driving his own death train, and was going off the rails. “Out of nowhere, he called me, and his mom, because he had relapsed and was in a really bad way,” s.