[00:45]

[Luke] All right, Jonathan, I wanna start back in the dark days. Tell me about your early experiences With SSRIs and what it was like Mm... you know, eventually move yourself out of that experience.

[Jonathan] Yeah. So I got put on SSRIs in high school. I went through a big culture shock moving from Canada to Virginia Beach, and just in the process kind of felt alienated from the world that I know and was sort of frustrated by certain things. So I think that was the extent of it really. But, you know, in the process of trying to figure out what do we do about that and I went to a doctor, filled out this nine-item questionnaire, and by the end of it, I was walking out with a Zoloft prescription. So as far as I can tell, like, that was my first real entry into just being in altered states, 'cause that's what it did for me. It just put me in an altered consciousness, and it wasn't, like, correcting anything at all. And I found it mostly uncomfortable. but you know, it was maybe helping with the social aspects of what I was challenged by. Like, everybody knew that I was in treatment, and it sort of helped to, I guess, create this focal point where if I was struggling with something, it was because I was depressed or, you know, I was going through this treatment rather than the focal point of, you know, my environment around me or there's things that I'm frustrated by and so I'm justified by. So, you know, it created a sort of prism to, like, look out at the world, but it was also something that sort of entrapped me. Like, I felt disconnected from the world in a different way. So it kind of sucked.

[Luke] I'm familiar.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] It-- And how long did this period of treatment go on?

[Jonathan] I was on for a good year, and then ended up moving back to Canada, and then got switched onto a different one. Found it difficult to sleep, so they put me on another one at the same time, and then that didn't help. And so I just started to complain a lot about the side effects, and then eventually just decided that it was bogus and I-- they didn't know what they were talking about, and so decided to quit them. But even-- I talked to the doctor about the fact that I was gonna quit before I did it, and didn't get any guidance about how to do that properly. Oh. So I just stopped. It sort of-

[Luke] Just cold turkey?

[Jonathan] Cold turkey and-

[Luke] Yikes...

[Jonathan] Um, I know now that there's probably a better way to approach that by tapering off slowly and seeing how I felt along the way, but I ended up either way in a really bad withdrawal. And so it was-- The withdrawal is the part that lasted the longest, actually. It was a couple of years where-

[03:57]

[Luke] Really?

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Wow.

[Jonathan] Yeah. Like, that was probably the worst part. Like, it was far worse than how it felt before.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] Worse than how I felt during. And I really, like, isolated and became kind of socially distant and didn't know how to engage with the world. So it was, it was a difficult time.

[Luke] During that well, in the period before you were put on medication, did you have any experience with other mind-altering substances? Were you experimenting with illicit drugs and then partying as a teenager?

[Jonathan] I think alcohol a little bit. there was a little bit of weed, but that was mostly by the time I was actually taking the medications already.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] Yeah. So those things actually interact quite strongly. Like cannabis becomes quite psychedelic in really low doses while you're taking antipsychotics- Really?... or at least it did for me.

[Luke] Wow.

[Jonathan] So I definitely had yeah, like a challenging time adapting. I was, uh-- But in general, I was really drawn to the idea of altered states, and that was 'cause of literature, of just reading.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] And there was you know, a book that I came across in high school. It was called Writing on Drugs by Satti Plant. I remember it really well. and she was just looking at, throughout history, artists, authors, poets who wrote these definitive works that we know, that sort of define the literary landscape of the English world or... And then the substances that they had available to them at the time. So it was, like, Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein, but her experiences with laudanum, which was, like, opium-infused wine and stuff like that.

[Luke] Oh, wow.

[Jonathan] So it was really interesting and compelling 'cause it's like at the time when I was starting to really grasp the sort of depth of the literature, and then realizing that these writers were actually having these experiences. Like, there was something about the otherworldliness of, like, stepping into the world of a book or something that actually maybe had this correlation to being able to actually go in and have these experiences in real life.

[Luke] I would argue that all literature or maybe not all, the vast majority of literature that is informed and directed Western culture was at least involved with nicotine and caffeine. Sure. You know what I mean? You always picture the great writers with their typewriter and a cup of coffee and cigarettes or a pipe. If not

[Jonathan] A scotch

[Luke] Or something. Yeah. Maybe a scotch too. Yeah. You know, when I was a, when I was a teenager... Well, I got into drugs before I was a teenager, pre-teen so I guess that's more accurate. But there was always an allure toward substances because so many of my idols were, you know, so blatantly using them. I never thought about two aspects of that. One, that many of them had died as a result. You know, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin- Sure... and so on. And also, as I got older and was a full-blown addict and became a musician myself, I learned the hard way that, you know, all of those artists that I wanted to emulate from the '60s and '70s were already proficient musicians before they got into drugs. Right? Mm-hmm.

[07:35]

[Jonathan] That's not how they

[Luke] Got to that. Yeah. It's like, "Oh, I'm not Jimi Hendrix 'cause I took some acid." Jimi Hendrix was Jimi Hendrix, then added acid. Sure. You know? and that's something I noticed a-around, you know, just the music scene in Hollywood where I came up in my 20s. It was like, you know, I really lacked the you know, the musical kind of prowess and chops. So when I used drugs and thought, "Oh, it's gonna take me to those places that my heroes went," you know, the drugs came way before the music for me, and that was kind of a rude awakening to discover that what I thought would assist my creative process actually ended up destroying it.

[Jonathan] Yeah. I mean, I could say the same thing about taking drugs and thinking that literature would come out of it as well.

[Luke] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Anyone that's ever, you know, journaled a bit in a, in a psychedelic you know ceremony or experience a lot of it doesn't make sense outside of the experience. And also, it can be really difficult to read your own writing. Sure. Which I was like, "God, I bet this was brilliant. I have no idea what that says," you know? Yeah. I remember one particular ceremony, I just got this download. I had this you know, I took a heart opener and then some mushrooms, and before the mushrooms kicked in, I just... I had this, these, I don't know, this clarity and empathy that was so pronounced, I just had to start writing. And then, you know, I wrote probably for a couple hours straight, just pages and pages, and then it got to the point where like I couldn't even, you know, control the pen enough to form letters and words and then had to give up. But that was one case where actually the, you know, the truth that came through, what was revealed, held its relevance even after the experience, you know? Sure.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] So sometimes we are able to tap Sure... tap into the muse in a more profound way than we would in our normal waking state. So what was it like to come off of that medication? You know, what did it feel like when you talk about withdrawal? I mean, were you... Were there dark thoughts? Was there more anxiety? Did you fall into deeper depression? What did that look like on a day-to-day basis?

[Jonathan] Yeah, so it was ruminating constantly. It was like suicidal ideation, I guess is what they call it. But you know, I don't prescribe to the DSM, but like if you're gonna look at the DSM and try to you know, diagnose it does relate with what they call like depersonalization or derealization. So depersonalization is like I didn't know even that I was real. You know? I kind of enrolled myself in philosophy school, and there were people making legitimate cases that reality doesn't exist, that we don't exist, and then why you'd put so much effort into it. But then derealization just being like the world around you is not real. So I would remember having these experiences of like leaving something somewhere and then just kind of wondering about like, why would it even be there? Like, why was there any continuity to reality? Why would it still be there when I came back kind of thing. Like, that's where I was in my head, sort of very existential all the time.

[10:56]

[Luke] Oh, okay.

[Jonathan] You know what I mean? So that makes it difficult to sort of engage with people socially or kind of develop an interest in what's going on in the world. So that's I was kind of stuck like that for a while.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know? In my experience, which thankfully was limited with antidepressants, I was on a medication called Effexor, and I had just gotten sober- Yeah And was just completely insane. So I go into a psychiatrist and kind of just explain what's going on in my life, and he said, "Oh, you have anxiety and depression." And so he put me on that medication.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Of course, now I realize like it was just what I was experiencing was reality without drugs and alcohol. You know? It's Right... that's why I was never sober because my reality was terrible. so you know, he kind of lacked, I think, the understanding of the nature of early sobriety and, you know, how difficult it can be when you've taken away your anesthesia, you know?

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Or in my case, given away the anesthesia willingly. But my experience of it was that they were-- that particular medication was very addictive.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And it was... I had just gotten clean from heroin, so I was very used to withdrawal and, like, what you start to feel like when your medication's running out to the point where If I missed an appointment or I was running out before I could get an appointment, and this is like in Century City, I mean, like expensive, legitimate psychiatrist in a medical building. You know, it's not like some guy down in the hood. This is like top of the line. and I would call his office, and they would leave samples of the medication, like in the bushes at the call box at the you know, at the lobby of the building because I'd be freaking out.

[Jonathan] Oh, wow.

[Luke] And this went on for a little while, and I'm thinking, "This feels very familiar." You know, this is the world I just came out of. Only, at least with the drugs that I was using you know, recreationally, I guess you could say loosely, there were periods of relief at least, right? But when I started to go through the withdrawal of SSRIs, it, I didn't get the same sense of relief when I would re-up. You know, it's like when you're, when you're dope sick, it's a terrible feeling, to say the least. But the second you get some opiates in your system, you're good. Like, you're instantly normal again. You know? Yeah. It's like magic. and that wasn't the case with the antidepressants. And yeah, my experience of them was it's kind of like if you look at an equalizer, you know, in the old school stereos, and you had like, you know components to your stereo. In the equalizer, you have your treble, bass, and then you have the mids. It was like emotionally it cut off the high end and the low Yeah... and everything was kind of mid, right? There's just this numbness, and that really, you Mm-hmm... speaks to that sense of isolation and disconnection you had. I Mm-hmm That was definitely my experience. Thankfully, when I identified that it wasn't working and that it was in fact problematic, that doctor, to his credit, did help me wean off.

[14:02]

[Jonathan] Okay.

[Luke] Yeah. So the process of coming off wasn't that bad. But the times when I ran out and didn't, you know, was unable to wean off, I mean, it was gnarly. It was very dark.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah, really a bummer of an experience, and I don't think many people think of SSRIs as something that are addictive or even something that you can get habituated to. I think people think of it as, you know a temporary Band-Aid if you're going through a rough spot and you just need to get balanced out, and maybe it is for some people. But the idea of having to be on a medication to not feel insane for the rest of my life was not something I was interested in.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know? Mm-hmm. it's pretty gnarly. at what point did you first catch wind of ibogaine?

[Jonathan] I mean, I became interested in psychedelics in general 'cause that's where the link between the literary history and, you know, the substance experience sort of led to was all the art in the '60s and writers like Ken Kesey or people who, you know, were trying to capture the psychedelic experience. It sort of led to that, and then I just read everything about psychedelics. It was, like, non-fiction, but at the same time still had this component of, like, this other world that you could experience. So, I picked up a book at one point by Daniel Pinchbeck it was "Breaking Open the Head." At the time, it was a really, like, breakthrough story about the kinds of things that happened when you immersed yourself in the psychedelic experience, and his book starts in Gabon getting initiated into Bwiti- Oh, wow Iboga. So that's where I first heard about it.

[Luke] Wow, that's pretty forward-thinking, you know, at Sure, yeah... at that time. I mean, even now I would say amongst the menu of plant medicines and psychedelics, iboga and ibogaine, I think-- Well, now they're becoming more widely known thanks to people like you, but they're relatively obscure where your average person has heard of LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, right? Or even ayahuasca or something. But yeah, it's interesting that he opened the book that way.

[Jonathan] It was a-

[Luke] With one of the more obscure medicines, you know?

[Jonathan] For sure. It was a assignment that he got from a music magazine, and Bwiti has a really sort of compelling way of using poly rhythms and different instruments that are really ancient, you know? Bows and harps that are made from the jungle and stuff like that, so I think think it's that's what drew him out there, but...

[Luke] I've heard from I've not experienced a, an iboga ceremony, but I've heard from friends that have that, A, it's exceedingly difficult, lasts a very long time, and that the initiation itself, the ceremony can be very challenging even apart from the medicine just because the practices that are going on and the music that's going on can be quite chaotic.

[17:10]

[Jonathan] Mm.

[Luke] Like someone explained to me, it's like you have, like, five drummers surrounding you and it's just, like, nonstop really loud noise. And I think that could be great, but that could also be difficult depending on what you're, you know, what you're going through in that moment. what was your first experience with iboga or ibogaine?

[Jonathan] I mean, by the time that I was taking either of those things, I had taken many psychedelics. You know, I read that book, but I, you know, first was introduced to mushrooms and LSD, and they kind of helped me come out of that shell that I felt after the antidepressant withdrawal. And it made me feel like I was coming alive again, like I was real, the world around me is real. Okay, this is-- there's something really beautiful about life and worth exploring, and kind of opened that up again. And so I sort of threw myself into psychedelics 'cause it was the only thing that had it became an anchor point in my life. So I wanted to know everything I could about it. And, you know, it was like years down the road when I wa-- the only thing to be involved in at the time in the conversation about drugs in Canada, and I'm sure it was like that elsewhere too, was around drug user rights and harm reduction. And there was a bunch of really cool research coming out of the downtown east side of Vancouver about supervised injection site that was opened up and how it was helping people to, you know, reduce mortality from overdoses. There was another study that came out, the Naomi Trial. It was, you know, people who were being prescribed heroin rather than having to go out and try to figure out how to score and maintain, you know, multiple hundreds of dollars a day habits. They were just given heroin and were able to stabilize their lives and go get jobs. And so it was all these conversations were happening, and I kind of became involved in the drug policy scene, but kept trying to, you know, bring people up to talk about psychedelics whenever I could. And so eventually, ibogaine kind of was the only way to merge all those worlds 'cause it was psychedelic, but the, but the people who were using it were really from the harm reduction scene.

[Luke] Oh, interesting.

[Jonathan] You know? Yeah. And it was people who were trying to come off of these opiates. So it sort of merged all these paths that seemed a little bit parallel to each other. All of a sudden, they were connected.

[Luke] You know, that idea of harm reduction specifically with say something like heroin is really interesting. When you said that, my first thought internally was like, "Oh man, I wish I would've had that." But it's interesting because- Yeah... you know, in the, in the context of addiction recovery, enabling someone is ultimately harmful in many cases. Yet at the same time, if you look at someone who has, you know, destroyed their life using opiates, it kind of makes sense to remove the part of the lifestyle that actually causes the most harm, right? Because if you're ostracized by your family, you're unemployable, you're living on the streets, and so on, which is ultimately the demise that most addicts meet if they're really deep into a drug like heroin. But a lot of the harm and drama actually comes from the merry-go-round of acquisition and using and all of the dangerous situations in which you Yeah Yourself, you know, potentially subject to violence and exploitation and all of the things that can come with that. So I don't know. It's weird. In a common sense way, I see it as a double-edged sword. It's like kind of enabling and also, you know, if you have needle dispensers on every corner and you're trying to walk your kid to school past a bunch of junkies, that's not that awesome either. But if a lot of the crime and violence is around the desperation to stay high, then it seems like helping people stay high would actually reduce the harm overall. It's interesting. Where do you see that now? I mean, this is something that's not been attempted in the United States, to my knowledge, at least at scale. Where do you see the, you know, the cost to benefit ratio on a, on a program like that now?

[21:28]

[Jonathan] Yeah, I mean, harm reduction is all over, definitely in the United States, but it would look like, you know, bringing needles to places where people are already injecting so they don't have to share them. You know, it was something that came up during the HIV crisis, right? Or you know, I guess with the supervised injection site, it was-- it's in a neighborhood in the downtown east side of Vancouver. If you walk down there's people using on the side of the street.

[Luke] I've heard.

[Jonathan] So the fact that there's a place that you can go into, and then there's a nurse with a crash cart and naloxone behind you just in case something does happen. I mean, it's not that out of place. It's not creating the kind of community conflict that people are generally concerned about. So the harm reduction ethos is really about, like, meeting people where they're at. So, like, going to places where people are using and just trying to reduce the most intense, like, harm-causing aspects like you mentioned.

[Luke] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Jonathan] You know, so yeah. I think there's absolutely a place for that. I think coming To the ibogaine community, I think even though it was a treatment, which isn't normally part of-- Like, people are hardcore about harm reduction, are not directing people towards treatment necessarily. It's an option. Like, it can be available. There can be a link to it, but it's not a it's not creating a pipeline to bring people into treatment. It's really just about compassion, about meeting people where they're at and, you know, doing what you would do as a, as a good person to

[Luke] Try to help. Yeah. And also the distinction of treating an addict as a immoral or depraved criminal versus someone who is ill.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Someone who is sick, someone who has a disease, someone that needs help.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And I know, I know that was the case. Or like a

[Jonathan] Member of the community.

[Luke] Yeah. I mean, that, and that was the case for me. Yes, I was also a criminal, you know. Different stages- Yeah... of that, of that experience. But underneath it was just a traumatized kid who was trying to self-medicate, and that's the only way I knew how, you know?

[Jonathan] Yeah. So I think the-- that kind of sense of charity in the, like, the core sense of the term of just, like, seeing people as whole and, like, treating them as whole and just being generous, that carried through into the way that people were working with ibogaine.

[Luke] Right.

[Jonathan] You know what I mean? Like, even though it was a treatment model and people were doing their best effort to help people come off of opiates if and when they wanted to, but that ethos that was core to the harm reduction community was really embedded in the early days of the ibogaine providers. So I was, I was really drawn to that as well.

[Luke] Something that's been fascinating to me over the past few years as someone who is ostensibly sober, I consider myself to be a recovering addict, recovering alcoholic, who also spent the past few years, not so much anymore, but, you know, with a lot of experimentation in the psychedelic realm. The intersection of abstinence-based recovery and psychedelics is really interesting to me-

[24:39]

[Jonathan] Yeah...

[Luke] Because it's so counterintuitive, and also I'm a bit of a rebel rouser. You know, I've never been one to kind of toe the party line, so to speak. Although when I got sober, if abstinence is the way, I was completely surrendered to that and remained surrendered to that for twenty years until I finally went and sat with ayahuasca. But I think it's really exciting now because people like you and other people that are advocating for a more medicalized treatment using psychedelics are sort of combining A counterintuitive best of both worlds, right? Where you can ease someone through the process of detox, but also help elicit the kind of spiritual experience that is the very foundation of the 12 steps. Yeah. You know, Bill Wilson, who was the co-founder of AA, famously had a white light experience that was the really the origins of his sobriety. And if you look a little deeper into that history, which I did in my book well, in my life, and then put it in my book when he was in that treatment center, it was Towns Hospital in New York City, he was given a sedative plant medicine concoction called the belladonna treatment.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Which is not a psychedelic per se. I think it's classified as a delirium, but essentially, you know, puts you in an altered state.

[Jonathan] An altered state, yeah.

[Luke] And it was during that hospital stay that he had the experience, this transcendent experience that awakened his soul. He felt the presence of God, et cetera, et cetera that really became the origins of the abstinence-based recovery model.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Right? And the abstinence model makes sense because of the phenomenon of craving as it's known in recovery. And this is definitely true for me. I mean, I've tested this hundreds if not thousands of times. I'll just have one. You know, it's like, okay, you'll just have one, then you'll have another and another and another, right? And then there you are. You're right back where you started. So I think it's really interesting just on its face that a psychoactive substance can be very effective to get you off of other psychoactive substances. I mean, it's just, it's completely... The irony in that is crazy. And I think it's really hard for people who are more orthodox in their views in terms of recovery, and that's something that I've just decided to navigate myself without a lot of guidance and just trusting my own intuition Yeah Trusting the growth that I had been able to experience after 20 years of, like, being deeply committed to recovery and now sitting kind of on the other side of that, and I'm still alive. I'm not back on drugs. I'm not-- I don't drink. You know, it's like I'm not an addict.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Yet, can you really say that I'm sober in the classical sense? Because if I feel called, I'll go eat some mushrooms in a, in an intentional sort of setting, you know?

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] So-

[Jonathan] So there's an interesting group. I don't know, have you heard of Psychedelics in Recovery?

[Luke] That has been on my calendar, the Zoom meeting. Okay. That's the 12-step group. Yeah. That has been on my calendar for, like, three or four years. In fact, I think it might be tonight.

[Jonathan] Cool.

[Luke] And I never take it off my calendar 'cause I'm like, "One of these days I'm gonna hop into that Zoom," and I just don't do it, so thank you for reminding me of that.

[27:45]

[Jonathan] Yeah, I mean, by now... We started... I was a early participant when there was, like, three or four people at a time, and then all of a sudden when the COVID lockdown happened, everybody flocked to online meetings.

[Luke] Right.

[Jonathan] And so it was, it exploded, and so now there's, like, multiple meetings a day online.

[Luke] Really?

[Jonathan] Oh, yeah. There's plenty,

[Luke] Yeah. I gotta check it out 'cause I'm kind of a lone wolf, you know? I'm Yeah... I'm not actively involved in any 12-step groups at this point in my life for various reasons.

[Jonathan] But it's cool. I think you would enjoy at least understanding how people are grappling with some of the same challenges 'cause-

[Luke] Yeah...

[Jonathan] There would be this, especially in the... I don't know exactly what it's like now, but early on what I noticed there would be people who came who never would've got into recovery at all had it not been for psychedelics.

[Luke] Right.

[Jonathan] You know what I mean? Like, that's Yeah... brought them into it. Yeah. That's even what brought them into 12 Steps because maybe it was You know, as it was for Bill Wilson, connected to what Carl Jung was telling, like some of Yeah... the 12 step founders is Yep... the, Yeah... it's actually really difficult to become sober, but sometimes if you have this deeply spiritual experience, sometimes, you know, people throughout history have been able to do that. So-

[Luke] And that, and that is well documented- Yeah... you know, in the, in the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. There was a dialogue between Carl Jung and Bill Wilson, and that's exactly what he said. It was around one particular gentleman named Rowland Hazard, Right. Yeah... was a wealthy, a wealthy guy from a wealthy family. So he was flying, I think, to Switzerland to undergo treatment from Dr. Jung. Went for a series of treatments for for a period of time, got drunk on the way home and went back, and Carl Jung, in his humility, said, "You know what? I can't help you. my methods, you know, working with the mind and, you know, kind of on an intellectual and emotional basis are ineffective for this. But in rare cases, I have seen people recover in light of a profound spiritual experience." It's an amazing story. It is. And it also, it also speaks to, you know, the limitations of psychology and psychiatry when you're dealing with addiction, because addiction, to me, ultimately, and this is another thing that Carl Jung expressed to Bill Wilson, is that, you know, speaking of alcohol, the spirit of alcohol specifically, is that it's a yearning for God. It's a yearning for connection to something greater.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And for those of us that haven't had the kind of cultur- cultural Haven't been culturally inclined to seek out those experiences or don't have a spiritual practice or were raised with a-- in a secular family. Like, how am I gonna have a spiritual experience? The only way I know how to get there is by smoking some crack and hoping, you know, hoping for the best, right? So it's really interesting. I love, I love the history of all that and just starting to make these correlations.

[Jonathan] Yeah, I think, I think people are conscious of the fact in PIR that they're, you know, building upon that legacy. But you know, it was interesting. So a lot of the people like that was the case for me. psychedelics were part of my life for a long time before. But there was also people coming in who maybe they'd been in AA for 15 years and, you know, life was still whatever, and they were still hoping to find relief and how to navigate through their life and the spiritual experience, and were interested in drinking ayahuasca but didn't wanna have to go reset their clean time or something. So they were sort of grappling with how do psychedelics fit into the path of recovery. And where a lot of people were landing was, you know, the-- having to define what sobriety meant. So, like, when you were describing about picking up... Was it that you were picking up Effexor from the bushes? Yeah. Inside a... Yeah. So, like-

[31:43]

[Luke] Yeah...

[Jonathan] So that would- And-... easily mimic like-

[Luke] And I, and I-- Yeah, and I could have walked into a meeting and shared that story, and it just would've been par for the course. Someone would've said, "Oh, you need to reset your sobriety timer." Totally. "You relapsed." '

[Jonathan] Cause it's the same thing. Yeah. You know what I mean? So I think people sort of set some of the same conditions around using psychedelics. For example, like if it's something that you're finding that you have to hide from people Or things like that, you know what I mean? Yeah. Where it sort of starts to mimic the behaviors that you, surrounded the relationship that you had with drugs in the past, then they can still become easily problematic.

[Luke] Yeah. Yeah.

[Jonathan] You know? So the... Is there interesting conversations that happen around- It's-... how psychedelics fit in, especially at different stages of recovery?

[Luke] It's fascinating to me, and I think maybe one defining characteristic, broadly speaking, with a couple exceptions, maybe ketamine would definitely be one, MDMA, I mean, aren't technically psychedelics, but are kind of within the lexicon of what we consider to be plant medicines or psychedelics. But if you're looking at something like DMT, LSD, psilocybin, iboga, they're just downright not addictive molecules. You know what I mean? That's not to say that one can't become attached to the peak experience. I mean, there's a lot of other downsides and risks which I always am sure to openly share, but I don't think there's anyone on record, as far as I know, that's ever become addicted to taking mushrooms, right? Like, who takes a bunch of mushrooms and then the next day is like, "Oh, maybe I should take some for breakfast?" Like, has that ever happened? Maybe, you know, you're journeying once a week or once a month and it's getting a little out of hand, but in terms of a psychological or physical dependency, I just, I literally don't think it's possible with certain substances that are categorized in the entheogen or psychedelic realm, and I've proven that to be true myself. I mean, at any given time, I mean, well, I'm in the state of Texas and certain things are illegal, but let's just say I have access to a lot of mind-altering chemicals at any given time. I never feel remotely called to use them if I don't have a really good reason.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And also the structure of a, of an intentional group or ceremony or in a place where I'm going to be led by a facilitator. You know what I mean?

[Jonathan] Sure.

[Luke] It's just not something I take lightly. would the same be true if I was, you know, sitting with a drawer full of cocaine or heroin or refrigerator full of alcohol? I don't know. I feel like at this point I wouldn't be tempted, but if I were to start dabbling Based on my track record, I probably would become re-addicted relatively quickly. Yeah. And that just doesn't happen. I mean, I've had a bottle of LSD that lasts me like-- I've had it for eight years you know what I mean? Yeah, right. I've never been tempted to take more than one drop 'cause I know one drop is five micrograms. I'm never Okay... "Eh, I'll take a whole dropper full today and just see how it goes." Like I literally-- that would be my worst nightmare. That would never happen.

[34:46]

[Jonathan] Okay.

[Luke] Yeah. I'm so cautious, you know what I mean? So anyway, this conversation is about you. We're just-- we get into topics like this, and it's like, oh, I'm so passionate about just understanding how this works. So driving it back to, you know, the original paradox is, okay, iboga, ibogaine are drugs. How can they possibly assist someone getting off drugs?

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And what's been your, you know, direct experience or just as an observer being in the industry as you are now what does that look like? And how do we reconcile that, you know, that kind of the lack of logic to that? All right. Most of us know we should be eating more nutrient-dense plants, but getting enough of them in your diet to make a dent, that's where things tend to fall apart for me, and I'm guessing for some of you, too. You might think, "Well, just use a green powder, right?" Okay, but if you can't trace the ingredients back to their source, how do you know what you're actually getting? Urban Roots Farms grows their plants in Scottsdale, Arizona, then harvests, freeze-dries, and powders them all under the same roof. Their products start with seven organic microgreens. You got broccoli, kale, red cabbage, radish, arugula, pea tendrils, and beets harvested at peak nutrient density. That's their True Micro blend. It's those seven greens and nothing else. Just a potent whole food powder that's super easy to work into your daily routine. And trust me, if I can do it, so can you. Then they've got True Micro. It starts with those same ingredients and adds three functional mushrooms: lion's mane, cordyceps, and chaga. Same greens foundation, plus the shroom stack for focus, energy, and recovery. To get your hands on some real food, go to lukestory.com/urbanroots. And if you use the code Luke, you're gonna save 15% off your first jar. Or even better, get 25% off your first month when you subscribe. I love the transparency and quality of Urban Roots. They let you trace your nutrition back to a real organic farm in a real American city. So again, hit up lukestory.com/urbanroots and save up to 25% when you use the code Luke.

[Jonathan] I mean, I think it's not too difficult to reconcile when you see what it looks like for somebody to go through heroin withdrawal and like the long-term challenge of recovery from opiates, and then you watch somebody take ibogaine and sort of come out feeling relatively normal and be able to Have a choice about whether they're gonna use or not

[Luke] See, I can't even imagine that.

[Jonathan] No.

[Luke] Yeah, I mean,

[Jonathan] I can't either. I mean, I've seen it so many times, but

[Luke] I mean, kicking heroin is not for the faint at heart. it mean, it's absolutely the peak worst experiences of my life. Mm-hmm. And definitely didn't walk out of any of those. They were self-administered detoxes in my case, when things just got too hairball.

[37:50]

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] I would do what I called back then, go train spotting, where I just have someone lock me up in a room and just sweat it out.

[Jonathan] Right.

[Luke] And I'd take a bunch of other drugs, but nothing really, you know, fills those receptors like a, like an opiate will.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] But I mean, I'm talking four or five days of torture, and then weeks or months of just feeling extremely uncomfortable, and no path back to normalcy other than picking it up again. Yeah. And then you get a brief feeling of relief when your tolerance is still low. Tolerance goes up very quickly, and you're right back there again, and those durations of time of abstinence from heroin for me went from like, the first time I lasted a year, then it was six months, then it was three months, then it was one month Right Et cetera, until it was like I would kick and just go to the dealer right after the four or five days of kicking.

[Jonathan] Right.

[Luke] And that's when I raised the white flag and was like, "Okay, this is not happening. I know myself, and I know where this is headed," you know? But many of us aren't so fortunate, and where that's headed is prison or death.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Or in, back in my day, HIV, you know?

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] So-

[Jonathan] Yeah, it's like you're a fish out of water and on the dock, and then there, all you know that you just jump back in the water. It's fine. That's a

[Luke] Great analogy.

[Jonathan] Yeah, like I, and the challenge I think what ibogaine helps with, what seems to help a lot of people with is not just like the, you said those like four days or whatever. Now, with fentanyl sometimes a little longer than that. Depends what people are taking. But it's not just that. It is the feeling of like the weeks and the months afterwards, feeling relatively stable, like feeling at... Like it's like if you go like nine months up the road.

[Luke] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. You know what

[Jonathan] I mean?

[Luke] So it sounds like with ibogaine in terms of treating opiates, just isolating that one particular pathology, that it's going to help on a biochemical level with the withdrawal and create more ease through that process. But there's also the transcendent or spiritual aspect of it, which is really the key to lasting sobriety anyway. So it sounds like kind of as someone who's not experienced, it sounds like kind of a package deal. If you're walking into it as an opiate addict, yeah, you just wanna get clean, and you would take any medication that makes the withdrawal easier and faster. But even so, you're going to walk out with kind of the same mindset and the same orientation to life that you had when you walked in, versus having some peak experience in the psychedelic realms where you could walk out and be a completely changed person psycho-spiritually.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And then have a bit of bedrock to stand on to then build a life of recovery around that.

[Jonathan] Yeah. And I would say even in cases where-- 'Cause you should have the choice, right? And, you know, you go back home, the whole world around you didn't take ibogaine. It's the same world that you... You're changed physiologically. You don't have the same habit, but, you know, you can still have the thoughts. You still have the stuff that you left in the drawer as, like, plan B. You still have-... the number maybe on your phone. But, like, so the people go back and use, but still there's something can still change even underneath That, do you know what I mean? That can lead in a direction of even just, hey, knowing that there's a path to take. 'Cause what you described was these contractions where you had, like, a long period of sobriety, and then it kind of got more and more and more difficult to even manage any amount of time.

[41:29]

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] Right? So all of a sudden, if you can have this window of like, "Oh, wait, it's not heading in the same direction," you know, there's another way out. That creates a window where you feel like you have this sort of agency to be able to you know, imagine a future where you can be resourced enough to Yeah... a change later. So even, you know, not everybody's coming out of it immediately overnight, sober forever. That's not necessarily the case. I think sometimes it does take sort of ongoing work, ongoing support, life circumstances to change, things to sort of fall into place. You know, a lot of people a lot of people do, but what you're talking about that psycho-spiritual change that happens underneath, happens even when people are going back and using again. Yeah.

[Luke] You know? Well, there's another aspect of it, too, in the experiences that I described of, like, periods of abstinence shrinking.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] I was never sober in between, right? Yeah. It was like, I like to refer to it as, I didn't coin this, but I've heard it somewhere and I picked it up switching seats in the Titanic, you know? Mm-hmm. So it would be like, "Oh, amazing, I'm clean." And then I would start drinking 5X- Yeah... and smoking crack and doing God knows what else, right? So it's I think, yeah... that aspect of, that phenomenon of craving was always active. I would just kind of, like, put one thing down and pick up another. Yeah. A Whac-A-Mole sort of approach to just trying to get off opiates was the only goal.

[Jonathan] Right.

[Luke] So I think, you know, as you describe in the case of you know, a legitimate ibogaine treatment, because of the healing elements of that and the, you know, the emotional and spiritual clarity, that one would, I'm assuming, be less likely to go back and talk themselves into the idea, "Well, I shouldn't smoke crystal meth anymore, but I could definitely snort coke." You know? It's like-... there's probably less of that skewed, irrational, you know, thinking. The insanity of addiction, as what it spirals into, is just you literally, from the outside, you look at an addict and you go, "We can all see it. Why can't you?" And it's because- Mm-hmm... you know, just the distortions of the mind become so profound that you can rationalize yourself, you know, into the grave.

[Jonathan] Yeah, I think so. And I think it's been interesting to me 'cause I, the first 12 years that I was working on Ibogaine, that's the whole conversation basically like up to this point, like what we talked about.

[Luke] Mm-hmm.

[Jonathan] And then five years ago, we started working with a bunch of Navy SEALs who were coming down to the clinic, and one of the big things that happened in the process of seeing all these people who weren't taking opiates or other substances, was having a much better look at what's actually going on underneath.

[Luke] Yes.

[Jonathan] Underneath the drugs. Yeah. 'Cause a lot of the things that we would see, the benefits that people would describe, we could easily attribute them to the fact that they weren't doing drugs anymore. That their life wasn't, you know bent around this habit. And then, so here's, here were people coming down who they didn't have really any of that. There was other things that were going on, and we've been able to get a lot better view. And I think what I kind of settled on the common denominator between all these groups is people seem to be coming out with this greater sense of agency Just to be able to make choices or sort of imagine how you could navigate through the world in a more self-directed way. Like when people are-- this is the reality for, you know, a lot of veterans considering suicide, you know. That I think the experiences being so backed into a corner that you can't imagine what possible-- there's no choice in the, in the spread of things in front of you that you can imagine that would improve the situation, and you-- and so it's almost like less of a death urge than it is a attempt to, like, take control of the story or the situation-

[45:46]

[Luke] Yeah

[Jonathan] Again. You know what I mean?

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] Is it-- So I think being able to come out of a situation and sort of understand, just meet the world as it is, not the crazy momentum of habit and ideas that's been driving life so far, but just to come out of it kind of at the ground floor and just to see reality as it is and see what's actually in front of you. You can kind of identify what some of the decision points are that you have. It gives you this agency that you didn't maybe imagine that you could experience, right? So I think that's been common even outside of the, you know, people using substances. So it's not, it's not only the-- even if, even if people are using opiates, it's not only that it's helping just with the withdrawal. It's also helping to create a sort of reconnection to reality or to the sense of choice, which I think is what Yeah... lost in addiction.

[Luke] Damn straight.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah. Choice? What's that? How do you even spell that? Well, this speaks to, you know... Thankfully, people are becoming more aware of this. when I first entered recovery, the predominant thought was that the addiction or the drugs and alcohol were your problem and the cause of the unmana-unmanageability in your life. And so many of us myself included Felt like if I just get sober and make this 28 days in rehab, then I'll get out and be singing kumbaya around the fire and all will be well. Completely oblivious that the addiction and the substances were absolutely just a symptom of a deeper lying problem, which for me was PTSD and just unresolved trauma and things like that childhood issues, et cetera. I mean, it took me a long time to even arrive at that understanding, and really, ayahuasca for me was the thing that showed me that so explicitly and clearly that I was forced to address the underlying issues, even though I was 20 years sober and had a really great life. Mm. I was happy and successful and all of that, but there were still areas of my life that were completely dysfunctional, especially around relationships and sex.

[Jonathan] Mm.

[Luke] Because that's not what the program I was in was for.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Right? And I think this is a big missing... well, it's not really a missing link. It's more like We need more innovation when it comes to addiction recovery because if you take just one of the 12-step groups, Alcoholics Anonymous, the ethos is our primary purpose is to stay sober and help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety. That's the main point of its existence and the main point of one's membership to that community.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And you don't hear in there our primary purpose is to go back into our childhood and heal our trauma so the impetus to escape our reality is gone, right? That's not what AA is for. It's not for trauma. Right. It's to stay sober. And so, you know, back to something you mentioned earlier, how do we define our sobriety? You know, I define sobriety- Mm-hmm... as you know, not being addicted to or using mind-altering chemicals. Of course, you know, just the physical sobriety, but to me it's more around soundness of mind. It's like how sane am I? And the first time I sat with ayahuasca, I really had to grapple with my identity as a sober person, and it was challenging.

[49:21]

[Jonathan] True.

[Luke] You know? And I remember in the ceremony I asked myself, which started to hit me real strong. I mean, if you've been sober for 20 years and ayahuasca hits you like a freight train, I mean, it's intense. And I was like, "Oh, fuck. Am I still sober?" I'll never forget this. The voice, you know the voice. I don't know who it is or where it comes from, but it's a voice that's wise and maybe beyond my, you know, just limited intellect. The voice said, "Luke, you have never been more sober in your entire life than you are right now."

[Jonathan] Hmm.

[Luke] Boom. And I just got it. I got what that meant because I was less encumbered by my identity and false identity, the persona, the ego, the chatter of the mind, the body even. All of these things that I believed myself to be were just completely assuaged for those few hours.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And I was actually just in the core of the essence of who and what I am, which to me is as close as you can get to sobriety.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know? Despite the fact that I couldn't walk or drive a car, you know? It's like I was actually in my most pure state under the influence of that medicine, which was absolutely revelatory for me.

[Jonathan] Hmm.

[Luke] Just beautiful and amazing and so liberating, and also was a permission slip for me to redefine my own sobriety. You know, what does this look like now? What do I call myself? Yeah. Do I even count years anymore? Which I do. But it was just like, oh man, I have a lot of issues still left to address, you know? Yeah. And medicines have absolutely helped me in such a profound way to address those underlying issues to where the idea of throwing my life away to have a couple beers, it's like, are you kidding me?

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] I love my life and love myself. So take me back to Your first experience with, I don't know which one came first, but with either iboga or ibogaine. Like walk me through the process. Was it, you know, a full ceremony initiation? How much did you take? How did you take it? what was the come on like? What happened during the experience? And how were you different on the other side of it?

[Jonathan] So when I went down to Mexico to ibogaine clinics there-- I wasn't coming off of heroin. You know, I'd been interested in psychedelics. I'd been doing this work in drug policy. I went down to learn and to be involved. And so I didn't have this kind of urgency about treatment. I was curious about it, wanted to do it, but the place where I went was a clinic called Pangea Biomedics. It's run by Claire Wilkins. And she had-- I didn't, I didn't know this like before I went down, but I knew in general that there had been deaths around ibogaine. But at the-- that clinic, she'd had three. she's been very public about it, and she shared a lot of data with a researcher who sort of put out a big forensic study and helped to identify what the causes of like the medical risk are around ibogaine. And at the time, though, she had to find a way to work around the risks and how to manage it. Now there's, you know, fairly well-established guidelines about how to screen people and monitor them and avoid some of the cardiac risks. But her strategy at the time was to just work with a lot lower doses, which does a bunch of things. Like, for one, just the, you know, velocity of the medicine moving through the body is lower, but it also just gives you a lot more time to see if something's wrong and to respond to problems. And so she would do treatments over the course of weeks and sort Oh, interesting... take time with people. And it also, you know, kind of created a environment where you were less dependent on one overnight thing to, you know, change your whole life and to sort of work through the detox process in various stages. So she was doing really nice work. But, you know, I didn't-- Because I didn't have this urgency about needing treatment she didn't wanna give me a big flood dose. She was justifiably, you know, hesitant to do that. So I-- For years, I worked with smaller amounts-

[53:48]

[Luke] Oh, interesting... of ibogaine. Yeah. Before you had a full send.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Interesting.

[Jonathan] Yeah. So I, uh-- By the time I did a bigger journey, I knew very well like the territory that I was getting into, but they were m-much smaller experiences over many years. So I re-- I do remember the first time I took a total alkaloid extract, which would have been an iboga extract. It had other alkaloids and not just ibogaine in it. It was a relatively small dose. Like, it would have been the same dose that I saw patients walking around the clinic taking in the days after their treatment, right? 'Cause sometimes you do a big flood dose treatment, and then you have a little bit of lingering withdrawal, so in the day or two or three afterwards, you take in another amount, and it's not gonna bowl you over and make you lie down all night, but can help with the withdrawal and still have some psychoactivity. I was taking one of those doses, like smaller amounts. And the one thing that, like, that struck me from that sort of maybe became a point of reference was I was sitting on the beach and heard this helicopter, which was not super uncommon in Tijuana at the time, 'cause now I guess they probably use drones, so you don't see helicopters around all the time. But then they were always present around the border. So I-- But I heard this helicopter, and it was like if it was out in the waves, like really at the sea level, you know? I was looking for this helicopter behind these waves. They're not very tall waves, but I quickly realized that was the buzzing sound that people were describing, was this vibration. But I was hearing it like this really low pitch and frequency, like. And I could almost, like, feel the rotor wash, like something was vibrating over there. anyways, it-- Just the distinction between, like, people have been saying, "Oh, there's this buzzing sound, this buzzing sound," and the leap for me to be like, "That's what they're talking about? That's so tangible and substantial, and it's oriented spatially around..." Like, it was, it was really sort of concrete, you know? Interesting. So that became a kind of point of reference later where I realized, like, people didn't really have a great language, especially in the scientific literature when they're talking about they heard buzzing. I realized I didn't really know what people were saying, you know?

[Luke] I mean, I think that's a challenge around the scientific community merging with the psychedelics community, is science needs to quantify and describe a thing. Yeah. And these experiences are ineffable in many cases, if not most cases. Like, so how do you-- You come out of it and talk to someone who's never had that experience, you sound insane. "I heard these helicopters. I-- They were real." It's like, "Oh, okay."

[Jonathan] Yeah. I still think we can get better at it.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] But, um,

[Luke] But yeah. Do you need to see a doctor? What was the, um... Well, actually, there's something interesting in how you describe kind of this onboarding process. Yeah. In my own experience, and I think I'm just maybe just wired for more extremity, but if I was-- If I decided to work with any particular medicine i-in the past and moving forward, I've found that, like, the mid-range doses are actually much more challenging for me.

[57:17]

[Jonathan] Hmm.

[Luke] So it's like a micro dose sub-perceptual, cool. I've done a lot of experiments with that kind of protocol. And I've had a few times where I thought, "Ah, I don't know if I wanna do the full send," so I'll just, you know, I take one gram of mushrooms or something, right- Mm-hmm... instead of five. I find it's crunchier. It's almost like, I don't know, there's purgatorial space between normal waking consciousness and the super consciousness of these realms where things like DMT and psilocybin can take you. To me, it gets very crunchy in the in between. So I'm just like, I'm either going all in or I'm not going 'cause I just I wanna get through those astral levels of crunchiness to pop through to that unified field where I can actually do some work and not be distracted by the, kind of the tug of war that can happen in the mid-range phase. Did you-- Have you experienced that or are you acclimated in that way?

[Jonathan] Um-

[Luke] Or were you comfortable in the kinda mid-range as a, as a bridge to taking the full send with iboga? Or ibogaine rather.

[Jonathan] So I would say that as much as ibogaine and iboga are challenging by all accounts, especially when you take a big dose, there's something about them that's easier- Oh, okay To navigate than a big dose of LSD or mushrooms even. Because when you take a larger amount, it really just asks you to lay down. You know what I mean? If you take a big dose of mushrooms, it's actually a lot easier if you just lay down and put on an eye mask and you stop trying to navigate through the world around you, 'cause it's what you're describing. It's like the being in one foot in two worlds and trying to translate between them. Yeah. Socially is the most challenging. You know?

[Luke] Definitely.

[Jonathan] Um-

[Luke] Definitely.

[Jonathan] So if you just melt into the mattress, I mean, that's a lot easier. But but ibogaine doesn't have the same general effect as other- Oh Psychedelics do. it's sort of... I mean, at some point it makes you, it sort of forces you to lie down. but there's not this sort of I don't know. It sort of places you in the stance of being more of like a witness-

[Luke] Mm. Mm-hmm...

[Jonathan] Of what's going on. Sure. So if you're sitting up, you sort of become just more of a witness of your own thoughts and your own self, and it's not necessarily as rapturous the way that you kind of can't tell the difference between you and the world around you and that kind of thing. Like-

[Luke] Mm-hmm...

[Jonathan] It doesn't, it doesn't quite have that. So the mid-range dose is the most crunchy thing about it, like what you're describing, is that they can be a little bit stimulating. Oh, okay. And then if, as you get higher and higher, it makes you lay down.

[Luke] I

[Jonathan] See. So the most crunchy thing is, you know, you're in this sort of witness stance and things-- It's getting harder to control your limbs and stuff like that, but you still have energy and feel a little restless. But I was able to manage that fine. That wasn't as challenging as what I know what you're describing- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm... with other psychedelics.

[1:00:29]

[Luke] Yeah. Also you mentioned, you know, interacting with people too in these spaces. Yeah. There's a lot of crunchiness in that.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Like, I'm definitely the eye mask guy, you know? I mean, I've had Right... I've had a few moments of profound connection, but usually they've been instances in which I've also paired whatever medicine with a heart opener.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Right? Then it's like, oh, and I've had a couple pretty social journeys with, you know, where there's a group of people, and it's encouraged that you interact, and I've had some beautiful experiences like that. But still, it's like, I don't know, just talking to people when you're on medicine is weird. It's weird. It can kinda put me in my head, you know? It's just Yeah... it gets, it gets awkward personally. so tell me about- And I've realized we skipped past a major you know, kind of anchor point here, and that is just explaining to people what iboga and ibogaine are. We'll get to that, so I'll have to do that retroactively for the uninitiated. but I'm so curious about people's subjective experience. So you go through these kind of handshake doses. You get acclimated. Walk me through the first time you did the full meal deal.

[Jonathan] That was in Gabon. Oh, okay. So it was the first time I took a larger dose. I was getting initiated in Bwiti, which is a spiritual practice that's been happening for centuries and has roots in, like, millennial old Pygmy traditions.

[Luke] And to be honest, I know some of these stories from your Yeah... which we're going to talk about, but-

[Jonathan] Yeah, it's how the

[Luke] Book starts... not everyone's read your book yet, so.

[Jonathan] It's how the book starts 'cause, I mean, for me, after that experience, it sort of recentered my whole vision of what Ibogaine was there because it made sense. I was so rooted to that place and into the jungle, and so it really sort of-- Rather than sort of looking at you know, the tradition as this foreign thing, I almost started to understand that, no, okay, I'm sort of the foreign thing, and we're developing something. There's a lot of knowledge and, like, a base of history here that I need to be able to expose myself better to, you know, to understand. So that's you know... The initiation was really deep. I, to be honest didn't really see anything. I mean, I was-- The vision to me was being in Gabon and the community that was around leading up to the ceremony, all the preparation that we did, the beautiful rituals of bathing, you know, plant baths and just other things that they do to sort of cleanse the body or the eyes or, you know, different things. And then afterwards, sort of coming out of it and having overcome this big challenge. But during it, I didn't see a lot of, lot of visions.

[1:03:32]

[Luke] Interesting. Yeah. Was it, was it physically challenging? Was there-

[Jonathan] Yeah...

[Luke] That time or subsequent times you ventured into those realms physical challenges, nausea, things like that?

[Jonathan] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I-

[Luke] Is there a lot of purging involved in either iboga or ibogaine as is common with ayahuasca, for example?

[Jonathan] It's pretty common that people purge even when they're taking ibogaine.

[Luke] Oh.

[Jonathan] I would say maybe 80% of people are purging at some point. I don't purge with ibogaine, but with iboga, it's inevitable. Like, I mean, I purged- Okay... a good bunch. Yeah.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Which is, strange as it might sound to people who haven't, you know, ventured into this lane it's kind of part of the process, right? I remember when I went and sat with the Shipibo on my second round of ayahuasca ceremonies, and the first day before you even sit, there's a purging ritual, right, where you drink like lemongrass water until you are forced to purge it. Oh, in

[Jonathan] Shipibo?

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] Oh, okay. Huh.

[Luke] Yeah. I didn't know. Really interesting. and I just, like most people, I'm very adverse to vomiting. It's just not something I enjoy at all. But when in Rome, so I did that. But it's-- I mean, I'm sure there are other reasons of which I'm totally unaware in terms of their tradition, but one of the reasons that was explained to us was that Yeah, to help us get over the fear of throwing up basically. Mm-hmm. And just like you know, there's like obviously the cleansing aspect of it, but to basically to show us before we're in the medicine experience that it's kind of no big deal if you have to throw up, you know?

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] That said, I've never purged during an ayahuasca experience, but I've spent hours and hours feeling like I need to or want to

[Jonathan] Okay.

[Luke] Which is almost worse. It's kinda like when you have the flu, and you just finally like, "I've just put my finger down my throat," you know? And just like, "All right. I gotta get it over with," and then you feel so much better, you know? Yeah... I've just writhed on the mat sweating and torturing myself 'cause I just, I can't throw up. One time I did make myself throw up 'cause I just couldn't take it. But I almost at one point would like envy the people that were purging 'cause they seemed to move through the experience, I don't know, not faster per se, but like they got that issue out of the way and then could do their work, you know? Mm. And I find at times when a medicine is really physically difficult and cumbersome-- And again, all respect to these ancient traditions. I know this is part of the process, but I find it to be kind of counterproductive.

[Jonathan] Mm.

[Luke] Like if ayahuasca didn't make you sick, I would probably do it fairly often.

[Jonathan] Mm.

[Luke] You know, and it's been a couple of years for me. I have no plans of working with that medicine again just 'cause the physical toll is so high. It's just so uncomfortable and difficult, and the recovery period afterward, and I'm just like, "I don't know. I could take some mushrooms and like be feeling great the next day and not throw up at all," you know? Different animal, I know, but I think that's a definitely Yeah... barrier to entry for many people is just, you know, we don't like to feel sick. And a lot of these medicines, you know, there's like you gotta pay the piper. It's kinda part of how the body reacts to these different uh, molecules. It's just the body's, you know, it's doing different stuff, and it doesn't feel good a lot of the time.

[1:06:38]

[Jonathan] Yep. I think with ayahuasca, I The, one of the hardest things is that you have to throw up sometimes. With iboga, it's not the best part, but that's not, like, necessarily the only way that it's physically challenging. Like, there's just a heaviness of taking it. Like, it's exhausting-

[Luke] Mm. Mm...

[Jonathan] Physically and emotionally. It's so exhausting. Um-

[Luke] And the duration is quite long.

[Jonathan] The duration is really long. Yeah.

[Luke] Is there a difference in duration between the whole plant iboga and ibogaine, or are they both, you know, 10, 12 hours?

[Jonathan] Well, it's hard to judge because you can't be as precise about the dosing, but when you're eating plant material, you metabolize it differently. It absorbs differently into the body, so the duration is different- Sure... just because of that. So it tends to last a little longer. Also, I've found even working with purified extracts that have the other alkaloids, it lasts longer. It goes a little deeper. So there's something about the interaction of the other alkaloids that are present that also draws Okay A lot further.

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[Jonathan] 20%.

[Luke] When-- going back to the addiction aspect of working with either of these medicines, I just kind of bucket them together, but you can explain the difference. it seems like there might be some inherent value in the duration.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Because you have-- you just have more linear clock time to do that work, right, in the experience. Whereas something like DMT or 5-MeO-DMT can be, you know, profoundly moving and transformative to say the least. But it kinda hits you, and you go to this, you know, just place that's beyond description, but it's for five or 10 or 20 minutes, right? And it's Sure... so much happens in such a compressed period of time that it's difficult to contextualize it or integrate it because it's just so overwhelming and so mind-blowing that it seems like... I mean, and that's, you know-- They're obviously, I'm sure you're aware, doing a lot of research now with extended doses of IV DMT-

[1:10:19]

[Jonathan] Yeah...

[Luke] Et cetera, so people can kind of get acclimated to that realm, and also while in their realm, have some time to explore and do some work. So the sudden hit might be revelatory but not necessarily transformative because you come out and, especially with, you know 5-MeO-DMT, for example. I mean, you're completely sober 30, 45 minutes after. I mean, you can get in your car and drive, and you're in a good mood. You feel great. It's like nothing ever happened in a way, in terms of physically, right? And that can be sort of I don't know, counterproductive or disarming in a way because something huge just happened. But, because it happened so fast It's harder to derive the full benefit from the experience. So do you think that with the iboga or ibogaine, that the long duration, as challenging as it might be, is one of the reasons that it can be so transformative?

[Jonathan] Yes, and maybe for slightly different reasons-

[Luke] Okay

[Jonathan] Than you're thinking. 'Cause again, like the, that experience that I had in that first initiation was so long, but I didn't see anything at all. So it wasn't necessarily like the content or being able Right... work through stuff or sort of navigate aspects of my mind or anything like that. But what we definitely know now from some cool research that was done by John Hopkins Medical School and Gool Dol and there's now here in, here in Texas actually, is that the duration of the experience, which is far longer with ibogaine than it is with other psychedelics, also opens up this really extended period of neuroplasticity. Oh. This like long critical period where it's possible to make changes or sort of that experience of freshness or being able to sort of see the world just very plainly and with the less of the momentum of the dopamine drives that usually-

[Luke] Uh-huh...

[Jonathan] You know, push our behavior and just be able to experience things. That sort of opens up a longer window of that. And I think that is actually the For me, if I was gonna say what was the most valuable vision that people get out of the ibogaine, it's usually things that they experience in the weeks afterwards.

[Luke] Oh, interesting.

[Jonathan] Yeah. Interesting. That's where the interesting work happens.

[Luke] Huh.

[Jonathan] The stuff that happens during the night is sort of like it can be extremely beautiful. It can be... Like, some people have ridiculous stories, and they're really interesting to look at. But people have just as transformative experiences without seeing anything. I've heard people describe going in there, seeing stuff for an hour, and then it, like, cuts off like a TV's getting unplugged or whatever. It, like, it... The visionary content isnMm-hmm... the same thing as, like, the bigger context of the experience.

[1:13:28]

[Luke] Fascinating.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And that kind of speaks to the inherent and mysterious wisdom of some of these plant medicines, right? It's like we think, "Oh, we understand the alkaloids and neurochemistry." It's like, dude.

[Jonathan] Nah.

[Luke] These plants are so much smarter than us, you know, in one way. And it's like I think of ayahuasca in this way. I think I actually wrote something to this effect. It's like it rarely, if ever, gives you what you want, but it always gives you what you need.

[Jonathan] Hmm.

[Luke] And I my last, and which could very well be the last 'cause it was, it was just so difficult, but my last experience with ayahuasca was one of those where I drank a lot of medicine and, quotes, "nothing happened," right? Yeah. I'm just kinda laying there feeling super sick, got sweaty, almost called 911. I mean, it was rough. It was by far the most difficult medicine experience I've ever had, and I didn't get any of the bells and whistles, the entities, the ancestors, the higher self. Like, no realizations, no visuals. Like, literally no content, just a torturous period of context.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] The next day I noticed the next day I drank some huachuma, which really helped me kind of, like, get out of that mental spiral that the ayahuasca seemed to lead me into. The next day I noticed that my vertigo was gone, which was becoming pretty frequent and problematic. And I thought, "That's interesting. I don't, I don't feel that dizzy feeling." I wasn't, like, working on that. Yeah. And the medicine didn't tell me the reason. Like, nothing happened- Mm-hmm... right, objectively. And to this day, I don't know, two, three years later, I've never once had vertigo ever. No. Knock on wood, right? So it's like, okay, that ayahuasca had some sort of intelligence and knew what my body needed or maybe, you know, God or great spirit working through that medicine knew that what I needed wasn't more fireworks. Yeah. What I needed was, there was, you know, it could've been an infection or who knows what, right? That was, that was causing that imbalance that was getting to be quite uncomfortable. Driving cars is difficult. I'd get kind of dizzy and nauseous. Sure. And it wasn't fun, and no one could fix it, by the way, and I'm pretty well-resourced in alternative medicine and various healers. I have access to a lot of resources in that way and, you know, everyone just kind of threw up their hands like, "Oh, it is what it is. Learn to live with it."

[Jonathan] Hmm.

[Luke] Like I said, with ayahuasca, that was not at all my intention. It wasn't even on my mind, and somehow, in the mysterious way that it does, that medicine was like, "Oh, actually, we're gonna work on this," and I'm so grateful for that. Yeah. You know? And it was a torturous night, but in hindsight, I would rather have one torturous night than 20 years of vertigo- Yeah... or however long that might have lasted without intervention. So I think this is one of the most fascinating things is the ideas we have and the attachments we have around how we hope to benefit in these experiences. I think there's something or someone that's kind of giggling, you know, at what we think it's going to be or do, right? Yeah. And at the other side of it, you're like, "Oh, okay. I just need to learn to trust and surrender and not be so bound to, you know, the idea or outcomes that I, that I hope for," 'cause sometimes it's even better than what you can imagine.

[1:16:46]

[Jonathan] Yeah. So that Gabon, in Bwiti, that's sort of embedded into the way that they understand the medicine and, like, how it shapes our life. So they call when you're taking it for the first time in, like, kind of large doses an initiation, which is the beginning of the process. So while you're going through it, they don't explain anything. You're just getting this reference point. There's a lot of symbolism behind the ritual. there's a lot of richness to what happens that night, but you're not meant to understand any of it. You're just supposed to go through it, and sometimes people do have these wildly beautiful visions or whatever. But again, the main point and the focus is on afterwards. Now that you've been initiated, now that you have this reference point, now you can start to learn Because as now I can tell you what that thing was in the ceremony, because you understand what it was. So now I can sort of over time gradually, you know, feed you information or whatever. I think naturally that's what happens in our life anyways. Mm-hmm. Because like you go through this experience, it's not necessarily that we figure everything out, but we have this reference point now to be able to navigate through the world. Like the next time that you're in a wildly uncomfortable situation, the fact that being in an uncomfortable situation has become part of your spiritual practice, it helps you navigate the discomfort because you don't immediately recoil from that. You can just kind of sit in the long, extensive like moment of pause a little better than you could have before, something like that. And those little tiny moments are what add up.

[Luke] Right.

[Jonathan] Not necessarily like fixing some mechanism-

[Luke] Mm-hmm...

[Jonathan] In the mind or something.

[Luke] You become a bison that runs into the storm instead of away from it.

[Jonathan] Yes. Yeah.

[Luke] So you know what's on the other side.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] You know, clear skies.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Wow, that's interesting. So it's like in the Western kind of model of intentional psychedelic use, thankfully, there's a lot of emphasis on integration now. That's a buzzword, right? Yeah. That it's not about the experience, it's about, you know, what you gain from the experience and how you apply what you've learned to your day-to-day life.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] But it's almost like they're compartmentalized, like, oh, you have the experience, then there's this other thing we do called integration. It sounds like within the huichi tradition that it's almost implicit. The integration is like, that's the whole point from the way you describe it.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] It's like the experience. And I never thought of initiation in that way. Initiation to me, the way I would read it is like, oh, now you're qualified to do something or have something. I never thought of it as like, oh, this is just the opening of a door. The point of the experience is not opening the door, it's walking through the door and what you find on the other side of that door, which is what in the Western model we kind of think of as this compartmentalized integration period after.

[1:19:59]

[Jonathan] Right. No. The initiation into huichi is not a qualification of anything other than now you're allowed to start to learn some of the things that normally they wouldn't explain. The qualification comes from how well can you absorb it and embody it and demonstrate that you know or you're capable. That takes years. Like, you can see it's so obvious in the temple who's been doing it for a long time. Like, you just can't just do that.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] You can't. It's a

[Luke] I've really been fascinated by that in the experiences that I've had in ceremony, you know. I mean, I've been in ceremonies with shamans where their kids are in the ceremony and theyYes Drinking medicine, too, and they're just, they're just sitting there at the altar just chilling, and I'm over here like sweating and writhing around and crying and freaking out. You know? It's like that's a different life path, right?

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] I mean, the shamanic path from whatever tradition is it's a different path.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And you really can tell, especially in my experience, when the facilitator or shaman and their team or extended family members, et cetera, are also taking the medicine that you are, but they're completely functional and able to guide sometimes even a large group of people through the experience, and they're also in it. I mean, there's been so many times when I look up and I go, "How are they doing that?" Right? It's like, oh, they didn't learn this at a weekend retreat. This is their life. Like, Mm-hmm... culture is-- it's in their blood. You know? It's not just like a parlor trick that they do on the weekends. This is really their path, and I think that's an important distinction and also one Yeah One that's humbling, right? At least that asks for our humility and teachability, that no matter, you know, how much of a devout cosmonaut you are, if, you know, you grew up in the suburbs in Toledo and discovered medicine, like there's a huge gap between your experience and that of someone who is just completely embedded in that culture and has carried those traditions forward. 100%. I have so much reverence for that, and it is-- it's actually fascinating to watch and experience-

[Jonathan] Yeah...

[Luke] Just someone in their mastery in that particular realm who really knows how to navigate those spaces, you know, from years and years and years of practice and also, you know, helping other people navigate those spaces. Super cool. okay, so let's back up to something I probably should have done in the first five minutes. For those that are unaware of kind of what we're talking about, let's zoom back out and just give people a framework for what iboga is, where it comes from, a little bit of its historical context, and at what point did ibogaine, the isolate, start to emerge out of Mm And kind of what's the difference between the two of them.

[Jonathan] Okay, so iboga is a shrub That's endemic to Gabon, which is a small country in Central Africa. most people know roughly where the Congo is. It's just west of the Congo and along the coast. So the shrub can grow to the size of a tree or whatever, but it's pretty widespread throughout the jungle. And what-- The other way that we talk about iboga is when you're just talking about the bark of the root. That's what people take from it. So normally they're scraping off the dirt and the kind of thin outer crusty layer of the roots, and then there's a another sort of wet layer between that and the root stem, the, like, hard wood of the root stem. So they're scraping off that inner layer of the bark, and those shavings sometimes get powdered down and dried out. Fresh or dry, that's what people are consuming in these ceremonies that we talked about a little bit.

[1:24:03]

[Luke] So it's not typically administered through you know, like a wondering if it's the word I'm looking for, a tea or some sort of extraction. You're just eating the whole plant matter.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] I have seen it made into a tea, but it's not the most common-

[Luke] Okay...

[Jonathan] Way to do it. Okay. It's mostly plant matter-

[Luke] Okay...

[Jonathan] That you're spoonfuls and spoonful-

[Luke] In a, in a large iboga dose what would be the, you know, kind of the net weight of that?

[Jonathan] So dried and powdered-

[Luke] Uh-huh

[Jonathan] Uh, you could be talking anywhere from... It depends on the tradition 'cause some traditions- Okay... you're taking a very huge dose, and they're expecting you're just gonna lay on the ground for a long time, and we'll talk about it when you come back.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] And there's other ones where the intention is not that. It's we're gonna guide you, and it's gonna be a lot more interactive, Okay... there's things that you're supposed to see and do and that, and so they work with smaller doses.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] So but you could be talking about anywhere from like five to 10 grams would be low-ish to Quite a bit.

[Luke] Wow.

[Jonathan] Yeah. To Wow I don't know of-- Like the initiation that I describe in the first bit of the book, I think I ended up taking like 72 grams.

[Luke] Oh my God. That's wild. Okay. Okay. Yeah. before we get into the ibogaine first I just find it interesting how the creator, whatever and whoever that is, put these rarefied plants, or in some cases like reptiles, in the case of the Bufo alvarius toad, in one place on Earth, and that's the only place you can get it. That's so interesting to me, right? In the US Southwest and into what is now Mexico, the Sonoran Desert. As far as I understand, that's the only place this particular toad that excretes this particular venom exists in the world. And and it sounds like this is the case for iboga. It's just like God went, "Oh yeah, we're just gonna do it right here in this one jungle." But not, why not in New Zealand too, you know? It's so interesting to me.

[Jonathan] So if you were gonna look for ibogaine, you could find it in other plants.

[Luke] Oh,

[Jonathan] Okay. But it's not in concentrations where if you ate five grams of root bark, you're gonna have that experience.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] It's like the concentration in the plant would be so low, you'd have to eat so much of it, and maybe there's other stuff in the plant that would make you nauseous first or whatever. It's Sure... practical.

[Luke] Sure. Kind of like some of the DMT Yeah... containing plants. They do grow in different places around the world, but they're not all created equal and, you know. Yeah. You have acacia and, you know, ayahuasca and all these different kind of forms of it, but you're gonna Yeah To take varying amounts to get the potency needed to take you there.

[Jonathan] So interestingly, though, there is a plant called Uchu Sanango, that it's in the Amazon, and it does sometimes get used either in dietas and also sometimes in a ayahuasca admixture that has some ibogaine in it. And sort of Oh... way that people describe the effects is similar. It has yeah. How interesting. It has ibogaine in it, so

[1:27:25]

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[Jonathan] And what about the, um,

[Luke] Conservation aspect of iboga, you know, due to the fact that it is limited to a, you know, sort of geographic boundary? What are the issues around scalability in Mm-hmm... ibogaine industry and so on, and you know, plant medicine tourism and things like that have been problematic for something like peyote, for example?

[Jonathan] Yeah, peyote's a good reference 'cause I was just thinking there's not a lot of psychedelics that I know of where they come from a tree, and so trees take longer to grow than, like, you know, cannabis is an herb. You can grow an Sure... in a greenhouse, you know. Ayahuasca happens to be this fairly fast-growing vine. But when you're talking about a tree, you're talking about, like, orchard timescales.

[Luke] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Jonathan] Peyote also can take a long time to mature. It's very similar. So-

[Luke] I can attest to that 'cause we have a lot of San Pedro cacti on the property.

[Jonathan] Uh-huh. Yeah.

[Luke] And one little peyote button.

[Jonathan] Right.

[Luke] And that peyote button has not grown in like four years. Right. It's alive. I'm like, "Is-- Are you alive still?" "Yeah, I'm alive. I'm just growing real slow." Yeah. So I can imagine in nature, you know, it's like, wow.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And also I guess it's... I would assume that if you're harvesting the root bark from the iboga shrub or tree, that there's probably no way to do that sustainably where you can keep the thing alive and take some of the medicine out. I mean, do you have to kill the plant in order to extract the medicine?

[Jonathan] It's definitely easier. Otherwise, you're digging and exposing the root while it's under the ground. This is a taproot, so it goes down really deep. So, you know, then you can, you can scrape off the root bark like that, cover it back up again, and it'll stunt the growth for a bit, but it'll regenerate the root bark layer. But on scale, that would be really difficult to do. It's really labor-intensive. So there's a You know, the challenge is that forever, you know, people were using the iboga that was available near them in the forest, and it would have been more than abundant enough to be able-- for their needs, right in most cases. And then what happened is people started to become interested in ibogaine in the West, and there was a bigger demand for it. you know, people started to... As they were maybe going towards the city in Libreville and, like, driving along these highways in Gabon, for example, they would stop and sort of ask people to provide whatever they could and whatever they had on hand and give them a little bit of money. And eventually, so as people started to see that there was a market for it, they would sort of use up the iboga that was close to them and push further and further back into the forest and eventually into, like, the national parks and stuff. So there's been a bunch of really amazing efforts by this organization called Blessings of the Forest And they've helped to build capacity in communities to farm, which was not a thing. It was never- Oh, interesting... a requirement, you know? But even to farm to the extent that they can potentially participate in the market, like, you know, create surplus-

[1:32:14]

[Luke] Interesting... you

[Jonathan] Know, beyond their subsistence needs to keep the tradition

[Luke] Going. If you moved into a commercial cultivation model with iboga, I mean, obviously to get to a tree status, you're y- 20, 30 years or something, I'm assuming, for, like, a full-grown tree.

[Jonathan] I would think five.

[Luke] Five years? Oh, okay. Yeah. Not as bad as trying to... you know, I've thought about, "Oh, I wanna grow an apple tree." It's like, "Dude, I don't have five years to wait 10 years to try to get apples." Yeah. I gotta keep the thing alive through the winters and everything. but in that model that's being pursued what kind of timeline are we looking at in terms of, you know, seed to soil to viable, potent enough medicine, point A, point B? Is there more value or potency in the full-grown tree that produces iboga versus, you know, a medium-sized shrub? Or are you gonna get the same raw materials out of either one, making the cultivation model more sustainable 'cause it doesn't take as long? Or do you have to have more shrubs- You want older To get the same, the same net amount of the medicine?

[Jonathan] You want older trees.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] Like, you know, you could produce a commercial grow and maybe be harvesting trees that are five years old. That's the general target, you know? But if you have 20, 30, 40-year-old trees, the alkaloid content's just way more complex. It's way more interesting. If you understand the effects, you can notice the difference.

[Luke] Okay.

[Jonathan] You know what I mean? Yeah... it's definitely-- Especially, like, trees that grow really healthy, or it depends on what else is growing around them, and things like that.

[Luke] Got it. Got it. So

[Jonathan] Growing on a small scale for a village is a lot easier than when you start talking about industrial cultivation.

[Luke] Is industrial cultivation possible in other climates? Yeah. Or is it really-- It is possible. Okay.

[Jonathan] Yeah, I mean-

[Luke] I mean, you can control the climate to a certain degree to make it viable.

[Jonathan] It's not happened. It's not been proven. But there's people who have tried or at least have started to try-

[Luke] Sure...

[Jonathan] To see, you know, if they can get there.

[Luke] Yeah. speaking of conservation, you know, there's some buzz around the you know, the conservation of the bufo toad, right? Yeah. 'Cause if there's money to be made, obviously people are gonna be incentivized and they're gonna go out and decimate the entire population. there was a guy on Instagram, I haven't seen his, him in my feed in a while, but he's in Canada, out in the woods in the middle of winter, and he created this little aqua, aquaponic environment and is, and is breeding bufo toads up there for research purposes, not to, you know, not to extract medicine from them. But I thought that's really interesting, you know, that we have the ingenuity to sort of You know, disrupt ecosystems with well, you know, well-intentioned disruptions and actually, you know, remove that particular species, whether it be a reptile or a plant, move it somewhere else and lessen the burden of the extractive commercial you know, profiteering basically, and actually sustain it. Like, I think if and I haven't experienced ibogaine or iboga myself in at least in a threshold dose, but I mean, it would make me so sad if there were no bufo toads. To me, like, 5-MeO-Oh, yeah... is like the key to humanity's future. You know, I'm kind of idealistic, but I think, "Oh my God, if that molecule is unavailable." So of course, other people have had that thought, and they're able to synthesize it. And so you have, you Yes... synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, of course, and other you know, forms of regular DMT. So when it comes to the ibogaine, first just frame, you know, what that is, how the extraction works, et cetera, and how that ties to the sustainability of the native tree.

[1:36:15]

[Jonathan] Sure. So yeah, it was a problem as people started to use ibogaine more. So there's a-- maybe like rapid fire here. So in Sure... 1962, Howard Lotsof was using heroin in New York, encountered ibogaine, and realized that he didn't have any withdrawal. Like everything that we were describing before. He went through this withdrawal, realized he didn't really wanna use heroin anymore, and stopped using it. And it was years later, like decades later, that he started to build upon that, got researchers interested, brought it all the way to the point where in the early '90s there was clinical trials happening, or at least approved to begin happening in the United States. along the way, hundreds of people were taking ibogaine and corroborating what he experienced. And so the clinical trials got shut down for a variety of reasons, and the kind of experience that came from the underground just bubbled over into the sort of led to what we have today, which is outside of the United States there's practitioners all the way up to clinics where you can go and take ibogaine. So that process along the way has been scaling, I think at relati- at a relatively consistent pace. It's just been very logarithmic, so now all of a sudden it seems like it's you know, if it doubles again, it's huge. You know, but before, if it doubled, you know, the difference between, like, two and four and eight people taking it wasn't so disruptive at first. So we started hearing in, like, the mid-2000 to 2010 there was a break in the supply chain. So until that point, people had been getting iboga from Gabon, and something happened to the supply chain. Nobody could get iboga. There was none around. And somebody named Bob Sisco, who was one of, like, the early pioneers in the ibogaine movement, developed a alternate pathway. There, it was known already, but he sort of made it into a thing and started producing medicine from a different plant. And so it's actually... And we call it semi-synthetic because what is happening is they're taking a very similar molecule called voacangine and converting it into ibogaine.

[Luke] Oh, interesting.

[Jonathan] Yeah. And that comes from plants in Ghana and other parts of West Africa that are already cultivated. Voacanga has use in African traditional medicine, Chinese traditional medicine. It has uses. So there's already this cultivation, this agricultural sort of industry around producing voacanga, so they were just tapping into that.

[1:39:17]

[Luke] And that is able to produce a viable version of ibogaine-

[Jonathan] Yeah...

[Luke] That can be used clinically in the same way?

[Jonathan] Yeah. So most clinics- Wow... now and for years have been using the semi-synthetic ibogaine. Interesting. And the original thing-- Like, I got very involved in helping to promote that because it was at least a way of avoiding the problems in Gabon Right, because there wasn't this culture of agriculture. Blessings of the Forest was helping to build the capacity in these villages. But again, it was gonna take five years before there was mature trees. So that, you know, the best alternative was just to avoid the ecological and cultural problem that the demand would cause and go this alternate route.

[Luke] Amazing.

[Jonathan] So that was pretty effective.

[Luke] That's

[Jonathan] Pretty cool. It's a-- for a very similar reason why you'd rather use, you know, synthetic Yeah... which we also prefer for the same reasons. Poor little toads, you know?

[Luke] Wow. Yeah. Pissing off those toads.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] It's funny, you know, there's there's some people I think can be quite dogmatic when it comes to a natural substance derived from nature and one that's made in a lab. When it comes to bufo, I've never worked with a synthetic version, so I can't speak from direct experience. But there is kind of-- even though I'm not dogmatic about it, I would say generally speaking, I just, hmm, intuitively feel more drawn to medicines that are, you know a few steps less removed from nature. But at the same time, if you zoom out and think about it's like whatever created this realm in which we live and created human beings created the mind of a human being that knows how to get into a lab and synthesize the stuff that is found in nature, right? So it's like-

[Jonathan] Yeah...

[Luke] Can you really say that anything is not natural? Because that would be removing the human from the cycle of life and the cycle of nature. So it's like if the ayahuasca vine synthesizes DMT, or I guess the chacruna plant has the DMT, but anyway, say the combination of those, it's like what's the difference between a plant synthesizing someone and a human synthesizing someone? It's almost the dogmatic side of that is almost to discount the ingenuity, wisdom, and beauty of being human, and we've been given these minds that are able to create laboratories and run equations and understand chemistry.

[Jonathan] Yeah. Now, I think, you know, Blessing of the Forest did a lot of incredible work. Some of those farms are matured. Actually, the there was one in particular that's in, like, the northeastern Gabon, where there was a gentleman, a member of a Fang community there, who got initiated, and in his experience, something told him, "You have to plant a bunch of iboga and bring it to the world." He-- There was no reason why he should plant a bunch of iboga because, again, like if iboga is just growing around the village You just use the stuff that's been there for years. But he surrounded his house with iboga trees, and he followed up on his vision. That's what he was supposed to do.

[1:42:42]

[Luke] Mm-hmm.

[Jonathan] So nobody really questioned it 'cause, I mean, like, it wasn't extremely practical, but he was a Nganga. Like, that's what he thought he was supposed to do.

[Luke] Hey, man, sometimes you gotta follow the directives. Yeah, he They don't make sense until later, you know?

[Jonathan] Until later, and then all of a sudden he was the only one in Gabon who had cultivated mature iboga. And so I actually made the first application to the Gabonese government to try to export iboga through a program. They have a UN treaty called the Nagoya Protocol that they've used to sort of structure their laws around iboga and its relationship to the, to the West. and so yeah, I got, I got approved to export from his farm. Wow. We were able to produce some medicine, and we'd been sort of developing a product that would contain other alkaloids from the plant 'cause for the same reason, like I would prefer it.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] And it's just cool. Like, there's a beautiful story and a relationship. But until that point, and to the extent that's not able to provide for all of the clinics You know, I think the reason why we're drawn to that in part is because of the relationship that it represents to nature. But if the relationship is corrupted or causing harm, then you-- that's not really good. Yeah... so then going the synthetic route- Dysfunctional

[Luke] Relationship... or

[Jonathan] The alternate route is actually better connected to nature. So it's like more, feels more whole, feels cleaner.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] You know?

[Luke] Yeah. Totally. That makes sense.

[Jonathan] So.

[Luke] Okay, so wanna share a recent e-experience with you and see what your take is. So I've been addicted to nicotine for, like, 40 years. Mm-hmm. Couple breaks here and there, but pretty consistent since I was a teenager. And it's fine, you know. I quit smoking ages ago, so I don't smoke cigarettes, but I use, like, oral nicotine, these little pouches. You've probably seen me-

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm...

[Luke] Pulling these things out of my teeth, wondering what the hell that is. so over the past couple years when I was working on my book, I got, I would say, addicted might be a strong word, but let's say at least very attached to chewing coca leaf and chewing- Yeah... ambiel, the tobacco paste, right? And so I'm just, like, wired to the gills, you know, basically all day, every... Well, not basically. Literally all day, every day for a couple years. And, you know, it's not bad for you. There's no the toxicology of it is not an issue, so I didn't have a problem with it. But I just, when I finished my book, I just thought, "I really don't have an excuse anymore to be using something with this lack of reverence and the consistency with which I was using it."

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] So I thought, "Okay, you know, now would be a good time for me to just stop that." And so we planned a trip to Costa Rica. This is, like, just a couple weeks ago. And you know, I just went nuts, just continued my diet, my dieta you know? I was using it like crazy. And then-

[Jonathan] Your zen dieta, you mean?

[Luke] Yeah. Okay, yeah. And then my you know, my plan was when we land in Costa Rica, you go through customs and stuff, so I don't wanna be bringing coca leaf. I mean, it's not, you know, it doesn't get you high, but still you know, I don't want my wife to get nervous, et cetera. And I thought, "Great." So we land there, and I leave my medicine in the, in the you know, in the wastebin in the bathroom there and walk through, and I just had some of my little nicotine pouches with me. My plan was I had about half a tin, and I'm just gonna wean off for the first two to three days, and then that's it. Mm-hmm. I'm in a beautiful Caribbean coastal location. I got nothing to worry about. I got a little bandwidth, you know, off work and whatnot. Long story short I went completely psychotic. I mean, I was in bad shape. The withdrawals were just horrific. but I didn't wanna give up. Every day I made into it, I just thought, you know, it's kind of five miles into the woods, five miles out. I've been using this, you know, nicotine for many years, and even the past couple years, the combo of those two with great consistency. And so I just thought, "I just gotta weather the storm and get through it." And it wasn't getting easier at all. I was just a... Like, I was literally a living craving. You know what I mean? It wasn't like, oh, the cravings come and go. It's like all I can think about, and I'm so uncomfortable, and I know if I just had some nicotine, I would be totally normal. Mm-hmm. Which is what's happened in the past. So one thing I did as part of that, you know, protocol or that experience for the first time, I started microdosing iboga.

[1:47:07]

[Jonathan] Hmm.

[Luke] Thought, "Oh, you know," I checked in with a couple people. It kind of made sense pharmacologically, dopamine system, you know, all that. I thought, "Well, it gets people off opiates. I mean, this is-- We're only talking about nicotine. Should be no big deal." So I'm taking, you know, one capsule in the morning and then one capsule in the afternoon. No psychoactive, you know effects sub-perceptual. And then I started, you know, and I was having such a hard time and just so much anxiety and just felt so raw and irritable and just uncomfortable that there were a couple days where I just skipped the iboga to see if that was contributing, and I started to track that I was actually getting more uncomfortable and more anxious on the days when I would take the iboga. So I stopped that.

[Jonathan] Mm.

[Luke] Things didn't get better. Came home, made it about a week. You know, I'd gotten rid of my coca leaves, so it wasn't in the house, you know, tempting me or anything like that. I did have some nicotine still in the house that our house sitter just missed. I asked her to take it with her to help me avoid temptation. Anyway, long story short, I get home and make it a week, a week and a half, and I'm just like, "I can't do this." Like, I gotta work, you know? I was so dysfunctional. so I started... You know, I just had to concede and just humble myself and go, "You know what? It sucks to be attached to something like this, but I just feel better when I'm using nicotine." So I started again and just had to work through feelings of failure. Where that leaves me is based on that experience, I feel like when I am willing and ready and feel like it's time to really end my relationship with nicotine permanently, I feel like I need to go do an ibogaine treatment.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Like, I literally just, I mean- I am not capable of doing it on my own. I just tried, and I'm a pretty capable guy, you know? I mean, I've quit a lot of things, and this was, I would say, the hardest of any substance I've ever tried to get off of on my own without intervention. So that is to say, A, just to be transparent with the audience and let you know your old podcast host, Luke, here, I still got my issues. I'm happy to share them. you know, hopefully they could inform someone else's, you know, understanding of themselves and their tendencies. have you seen any evidence that ibogaine specifically is helpful in the case of acute nicotine addiction?

[Jonathan] Yeah. That's usually not... You know, when we were treating people coming off of heroin and crystal meth and all these things, normally wasn't the main reason why people were coming. It wasn't, like, enough to take on that-... whole experience Of

[Luke] Course...

[Jonathan] To quit cigarettes or whatever.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] But plenty of people were doing all those other things and smoking cigarettes, and even if it wasn't their main intention, were able to stop. And I Really?... people who even now that people are coming down and they're not intending really to make any changes to their diet, they're maybe just curious about the psychospiritual Experience and they're able to make changes. Not everybody, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. Like, if you're already that committed to doing it certainly makes that a lot easier to do and sort of places that choice within reach- Cool... if that makes sense.

[1:50:26]

[Luke] Cool. That's a, that's a good lighthouse for me to kind of keep on the horizon. Yeah. I actually thought of the idea now that I think about it. I follow my friend and former podcast guest, Paul Austin-

[Jonathan] Yeah...

[Luke] On on X, and he posted something about having just gone and had a ibogaine treatment, and he came home, and he's just like got rid of all his cannabis and kratom and kava and nicotine- Oh,

[Jonathan] Yeah

[Luke] And everything, and he's like, "Oh my God, I'm amazing. I'm totally addiction free." Like, "It's just totally easy. I'm stoked," you know? So I reached out to him and asked him. He's one of the people I consulted with. I said, "I'm, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna experiment with, you know, quitting the mambé and the ambil and and I'm gonna microdose some iboga." And he's like, "Eh," kind of basically said, "Good luck." Like, "Go do the full thing," you know? Mm. Was essentially his answer because that's what his experience has been, you know? So that kind of planted- Right... the seed in my mind of like, yeah, when the time comes, when I really need to, you know, hit this thing for real it'd probably be a viable way to do it.

[Jonathan] I think it's really interesting 'cause you know, I think that's what keeps us attached to a lot of things is even beyond the psychological craving, I guess, or the physiological craving, is if there's something that helps you to sometimes be able to get into a flow state. You know what I mean? Like, it's difficult to be able to access flow. It's a lot of work. Like, it takes a lot of preparation to be able to get to the point where you can get into a state of flow with something.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] You have to be very well practiced at what you're

[Luke] Doing. Every day that I record a podcast, I spend about two hours doing that-

[Jonathan] Yeah

[Luke] To be my best self when I sit down with people like you.

[Jonathan] Right on. Well, it's yeah, it takes, you know, a lot. We organize our lives really around it, I think sometimes without knowing it. But I think if we tried to change a habit, even if it doesn't have any other effect other than all of a sudden we're not able to access flow as readily, it becomes extremely challenging Because flow is something that we pursue. It's almost like, it's like happiness or something. It's almost like we pursue it for its own sake, you know? And it sort of becomes a, doesn't matter too much what it is that we're doing, but it becomes this kind of north star that guides our drives.

[Luke] That's a great way to frame it. And that would, that would describe the experience I had recently, is like anti-flow. You know, open the laptop and I'm just like-

[Jonathan] Yeah, you can't focus

[Luke] On shit... I can barely breathe. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I'm just like, I can't even do email, you know? Like, I'm so incapacitated.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

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[1:55:00]

[Jonathan] So one of the cool things about some psychedelics is that they help people get into flow states. There's these cool stories of athletes like Dock Ellis was a pitcher in the 1970s and forgot he had a game and took some LSD and realized he had to go play and ended up pitching a no-hitter, like perfect game. You know, probably would be difficult to do that super intentionally, but career highlight moment, right, on LSD. And then there's a gentleman, he's now we have to say like the late James Orack, who's like a Burning Man fixture and wrote some really cool work about 5-MeO-DMT early on. But he was into extreme sports and was describing how all these extreme athletes are using psych... Not everybody, but a lot of people are using psychedelics to try to emphasize getting into a flow state. And I knew up in British Columbia people who would take a tab of LSD with them in their avalanche kit if they were going like backcountry skiing. So if they got into a bad situation and needed to climb out of a snow hill or what, I don't know what, but they would know already how LSD affected them, but they would take this to kind of harness all of this energy and focus- Fascinating That you need, right? So there's definitely this component of those psychedelics that sort of push you into connection with the reality around you that you can kind of explore flow, especially if you're very, already very practiced at something. And so, you know, people use it to try to deepen their level of flow or extend it or just practice getting into them more regularly. That's a big reason why people microdose and code in Silicon Valley or whatever. The thing is with ibogaine is, like, you're not gonna be in a flow state

[Luke] Noted

[Jonathan] You're not. It's-- nobody's gonna pitch a no-hitter on ibogaine-

[Luke] Noted...

[Jonathan] At all. Like, it's-

[Luke] Okay...

[Jonathan] It is the opposite thing

[Luke] Right

[Jonathan] Like, you are in a sinkhole, like a metabolic sink. Like, everything makes you have to lay down and turn inward, and you're not performing anything.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] It's really like-- normally with flow, what happens is, like, we get into, it's like a peak state, right? You have to be very practiced at it. you know, but one of the components of it is we can't be in it all the time, right? So you have to build up into this flow, and then you have to come back down and rest and regroup. And even if you're, like, a master at something, you still do this process of, like, you perform, then you pull back and you kind of assess. And at mastery level, you're able to do it at more and more subtle levels to be able to integrate what went well, what could you improve on, and you're just refining, right? But you still are not in a flow state all the time. That's just impossible, right? So-

[1:58:17]

[Luke] Yeah...

[Jonathan] You

[Luke] Brainwaves aren't meant to be alpha all the time.

[Jonathan] No.

[Luke] Otherwise, they would be.

[Jonathan] So what ibogaine does, I think it really brings us into that valley in between, and it helps us to kind of work through how we... Even on a cellular level, what's happening is, like, how we metabolize energy, right? But on a cognitive level too, it's like how we navigate through problems and stuff. That's why it's not so much about the content of what happens, 'cause you're not doing the work then. What you're doing is, like, the same thing, like, when you're in REM sleep. Like, you're piecing things together or synthesizing information or whatever. And it's really afterwards that you start to see the benefit of that. But I wouldn't even say that afterwards it's necessarily like you'd be coming out, like hitting these higher peaks of flow, but it's more like the baseline, like when, you know, the lows that you crash to in between become higher.

[Luke] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Jonathan] You know what I mean?

[Luke] Totally.

[Jonathan] That's what we're talking about. Like, when you're taking this thing to kind of keep you at this elevated state, and then when you stop, you're feeling like, oof, like this huge crash.

[Luke] Yeah, Grand Canyon.

[Jonathan] And if you can just actually... Like, it probably has more to do with how we feel, like how things are going in general, if we can raise baseline.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] Rather than, you know, having this peak moment where you like, you know, ring the bell on the stock exchange or you're, you know, doing the no-hitter or whatever. Like, these are cool, but if you can raise baseline a little bit, long term, that's having a way bigger impact on, in your life. So I think that's what Ibogaine does, is it just helps us kind of figure out again, like, where's the ground floor?

[Luke] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Jonathan] You know what I mean?

[Luke] Yeah. Well, that makes sense with, you know, the anecdote from Paul Austin. It very much sounded like a reset, like a reset of state of mind, neurochemistry, just back to a new baseline.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] And I think, you know, based on my recent experience, it's like, oh, my baseline is like way out in left field somewhere still, right? So that's why I just suddenly removed this stuff and I'm like a basket case, 'cause, like, I have not reset that baseline in a long time, you know? Interesting anecdote here. a few months ago, I had a woman on Caitlin Thompson, who's a very experienced kambo practitioner, and so she offered to, you know, take me through a little ceremony while she was here, which I reluctantly agreed to. And having done that once before many years ago, but I thought, you know, it'd be good. I'm just working on some things, and I thought that would be, would be advantageous as uncomfortable as it was. Thankfully, she was highly skilled and a great listener, and so she gave me a pretty light dose. Mm-hmm. But with kambo, even a light dose is exceedingly uncomfortable. So we finish, we wrap up, and I found I really had no interest in the mambe and the ambil For like a couple days.

[2:01:27]

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] And I thought, "This is amazing." Like I-- that attachment has been loosened, right? And I didn't go throw it away and make a big declaration about it. I just noticed, like I walked by where I keep it, and I'm just like, "Eh, I'll have some later."

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm. I'm

[Luke] Like, "This is amazing. I'm cured. Like I can actually moderate it now." Then I had some, and it was just like, boom, within two days I'm just full blast again.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] But it gave me a little bit of purview into that kind of reset that you described, right? Mm-hmm. Where like just, I don't know, I just felt calm. My nervous system felt very balanced, and I just didn't need that external stimuli to achieve my sweet spot of flow state. It's like it just put me in kind of a baseline flow state, and then I wasn't paying close enough attention and thought that I had beat the system when in fact I had just taken a break from the system, you know. But that's kind of, you know, piqued my curiosity in terms of like, oh, that sounds like what people describe with ibogaine. Yeah. You know, it was a similar kind of thing where you're just-- there's no struggle to trying to resist temptation. It's just like the temptation is obliterated because you're just in a, you know, as you said, a new baseline.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] Really interesting. okay, so we've been going for a couple hours. I meant to mention your book, which I read most of already, and I highly recommend. how do you pronounce that? Bic-bicameral?

[Jonathan] Bicameral. Yeah.

[Luke] Okay. So Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind is Jonathan's book, and it is a fascinating exploration of both your journey and how, you know, both versions of this medicine have kind of emerged into the world, and I look forward to finishing it. But in the interim, tell us about your clinic. You know, I've seen ibogaine clinics kind of in the background of my awareness, and it wasn't something that I sought to pursue, so I just thought, "Oh, that's interesting. Good for them." But, you know, now we're seeing legislation in the United States- Mm-hmm And clinics like yours in Mexico have always had to operate outside of the U.S. borders. So where are we in terms of legislation? And also just kind of give us the birth story of your... Do you call it a clinic? Is that Yep... an appropriate word? Of your clinic. What's it called? Where is it? How does it work? Kind of bring us up to speed on where we are now and where you are with that particular venture.

[Jonathan] Sure. So I mean, I spent, so I was describing, you know, these years around clinics, kind of apprenticing with people who had come off of heroin and other drugs and were building the protocols and, you know, figuring out how to improve on the care that they received. And then you know, I spent a couple of years organizing conferences 'cause there was risks of taking ibogaine. You know, there's deaths that have happened that we talked about a little bit and those papers that came out that sort of identified what those risks were helped to give this base of, you know the guidelines for like how do you mitigate those risks then? What are the steps that you can take to prevent on the front end or monitor during the experience to intervene if you need to? And so we sort of built that framework. So for years I was involved around treatment without having any inclination to run a clinic Five years ago I got a call from now, my now business partner, and he was talking with Amber and Marcus Capone from Vets Incorporated, and they'd been sending down a bunch of special operations veterans and needed a place to consistently be able to keep doing that. And I realized at that point, I think that the narrative was changing about ibogaine in an interesting way. My story wasn't about coming off of opioids. You know, I knew and I'd seen that it was more than that, especially in Gabon. So it was really compelling, this idea of, hey, there's this other story emerging about what it is, but it's also pretty obvious that if the veterans were gonna get involved, that story was gonna explode. Like it was gonna need to figure out how to scale. And so we'd learned a lot about treatment, not only like how to do it medically safely, but just how to provide it, how to usher people through that experience. So wanted to see what does this model look like if it's gonna, if it's gonna grow. So Ambio really came out of this vision of like, how do you keep the authenticity that's been developed around it about caring for people? Is it really this idea of like treatment means multiple things. Like it's become this really mechanistic thing where treating the body means you're like trying to find the source of a problem and addressing it. But like how we treat people in general, this is like, how do you care for somebody? Like how to, in a community, like how do they feel when they're a part of the situation? I think in medicine we kind of drifted away from just like how to, how to treat people. So, you know, anyways, the Ambio is a, is a clinic that came out of this model of trying to treat Navy SEALs who are coming down in groups as teammates, as, you know, small cohorts of guys going through this experience together. And it's gradually grown like way beyond that. So now athletes have followed, you know, the veterans and 'cause they have similar kinds of neurological problems after repeat head injuries and concussions and stuff like that. And then we've just seen a obviously a massive uptick in interest and learned even about more advanced neurological conditions like Parkinson's and MS and ALS. These are much more advanced neurodegenerative conditions where people are also seeing benefits.

[2:07:26]

[Luke] Really?

[Jonathan] So Ambio right now has three programs. We've got a detox program that we still run It's the slowest growing program at this point because it's been around for a long time. People have known that you know, and, uh You know, we still, we still-- it's very helpful to have a house. Like, if people are enrolled in another program but then show up and pop positive for cocaine or heroin or something, we can move them over to that house. Doesn't happen very often, That's funny... you know? so we have a d-

[Luke] So because they're just like, "Yeah, I just want a spiritual experience."

[Jonathan] Exactly. "

[Luke] You're on coke."

[Jonathan] Yeah. "

[Luke] Let's get real here."

[Jonathan] Like

[Luke] If- "We've seen your blood work."

[Jonathan] Yeah. Or like just decided to party before. No, it doesn't work. So, you know, a detox program is one, and then we have a neuroregenerative program that's really designed for people who have more advanced neurodegenerative conditions, or they're older, 'cause people who have Parkinson's are usually older. And so there's different reasons why, you know, we direct people towards that. We're working with lower doses and microdosing, and we've seen really interesting results there. And then we have a foundational program, and that's for people who don't need to fit into either of those other categories. Maybe they're drinking alcohol sometimes, or they can easily stop for a week, that kind of thing. Or anyone else who's interested in coming to take it. So that is by far the largest group that we treat, like 80%- Okay... of our patients- Okay... or something like that, which is abnormal historically for ibogaine treatments, and that's the fastest growing segment for sure. It's just people- Wow... who are interested in ibogaine. It's by far the safest program that we have. Like, there's less risk when people are not taking opioids or you know, fentanyl especially a lot nowadays. So anyway, so Ambio's there in Mexico, and then we've recently opened a place in Malta. So we run the foundational program as well in Malta.

[Luke] Where is Malta?

[Jonathan] Malta's in the Mediterranean. It's Oh, okay... like if you're on a flight a couple hours south of Italy.

[Luke] Oh, okay.

[Jonathan] It's, like, pretty close. On a clear day, you can see Sicily.

[Luke] Oh, okay.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] It's an island.

[Jonathan] It's an island. Okay, cool. It's a, it's a small archipelago. There's a large island, and then there's a couple of smaller islands. Got it. but we're on the, on the large island.

[Luke] I only know the word because of the Knights of Malta.

[Jonathan] Yes. I'm like,

[Luke] Where is it, actually?

[Jonathan] Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke] And what's the duration of your three programs? Are they each unique, or are they all the same set period of time?

[Jonathan] So the foundational program is five days. The neuro program, we can do it in four days. It's a smaller loading dose. And the detox program is variable. Like, people are coming 10, 16, 20 days. It depends, 'cause there's a lot of stabilization- Sure... that needs to happen before you can actually take the ibogaine.

[Luke] Depends if someone's addicted to Zyns or fentanyl.

[Jonathan] Oh, you're fine with Zyn. Yeah. Yeah,

[Luke] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay. and then tell me about the recent legislation. I saw some buzz on social media. you know, all of a sudden I see Joe Rogan and the White House Yeah... Trump is signing executive order to further the the ease of medical use in the States, where are we with that? A. B, when I saw that, and I don't know the exact specifics, which you can explain, but I'm someone who just, you know, looks at history and even the history of this administration going back, let's say, to Operation Warp Speed, for example. I have a hard time believing the government ever does anything for the betterment of its citizens. Call me pessimistic, but that's what history and my own subjective life experience has taught me. So I'm looking at that and I'm going, "Donald Trump does not care about veterans or care about people. What are we doing in Iran, for example? What, you know-- What's his motive here? Is it like a money play? Is it, you know, an economic play?" 'Cause I have a hard time believing that it is purely altruistic. So, you know, you don't have to be on either side of that, but what did, what did the government do, and why do you think they're doing it?

[2:11:39]

[Jonathan] Yeah. So I guess the trigger point was, you know, a couple years ago, we did a study with Stanford University, and it was looking at 30 Navy SEALs who came down. You can kinda see it in the Netflix documentary, In Waves and War. So you see some of the guys. You see them going through the Stanford study before and after.

[Luke] Oh, cool. And you were involved in that?

[Jonathan] Yeah. It's a couple of guys coming down to Ambio for treatment. Epic. That's on,

[Luke] On Netflix. I gotta, I gotta watch that. Definitely. Jim, put that in the show notes so I can watch it, and, you know, of course, the audience too. By the way, guys, our show notes will be lukestory.com/ibogaine. Okay, carry on.

[Jonathan] Yeah, check it out. So it's a lot about the Navy SEALs and their backstory. What's the name of the film? In Waves and War.

[Luke] In Waves and War. Yeah. Okay, cool. Noted.

[Jonathan] Yeah. And then, you know, so the-- but the Stanford study that came out, it was published in like January 2024, was very groundbreaking. Like, it really shook up the scientific community and the regulatory conversations that were going on because of the results that they posted about-

[Luke] Impossible to ignore.

[Jonathan] Yeah. Like, nothing does that. Nothing makes guys who are-- They have mild traumatic brain injury to the extent that they all have severe disability and PTSD and depression, anxiety, like all like all of the above. And then all of a sudden, right after treatment, they don't. Like, it's baseline. And now there's a recent- Wow Follow-up that showed, like even a year later, those results are highly consistent.

[Luke] Wow.

[Jonathan] Even a year after treatment. So anyways, the first study that came out was really compelling data. So even though the FDA had looked at ibogaine in the early '90s, it was always impossible to imagine, like how could somebody bring it back to the FDA? There would have to be some new data to really awaken that interest. The other thing that was going on was we're like post, oh, I don't know. I guess we could say post-opioid epidemic Right? And so it was Pfizer and all these companies had to make these massive payouts. So there's all this money floating around in the States, and the state of Kentucky had like $900 million. And so the commissioner of the Opioid Abatement Advisory Committee that was supposed to figure out how are we gonna spend this $900 million in his investigation heard about Ibogaine and really just took up the cause. Like, he wanted to put $42 million from that fund towards Ibogaine research. Anyways, his name is Brian Hubbard. He's all over the, all over the place on social media.

[Luke] Come on, Brian. Kentucky is not the s-- I've never been there, you know, to be fair. Yeah. But it's not the state that I would ever guess would be at the forefront of this kind of regulatory allowance or innovation.

[2:14:42]

[Jonathan] They got hit hard by opioid over-prescription.

[Luke] Got it. Okay.

[Jonathan] So anyways, and they, you know, they were, like, looking out at the what could be done with the money and you know, what was gonna just be a place to spend it and what was gonna, like, remediate or potentially, like, have this positive impact on the state overall. So that-- He was really looking for something you know, radical.

[Luke] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Jonathan] And so that's what he took up. Anyways, it got shut down. He got fired from the committee with the incoming attorney general to the during the process of the committee hearings and whatever. So he ended up in Texas, and he and former Texas Governor Rick Perry were the ones who led the charge to get Texas to commit fifty million dollars. And

[Luke] Rick Perry wrote the the forward to your book.

[Jonathan] Yes, he did. Yeah. Yeah. So they they together got the Texas government to sort of break ground and commit this massive chunk of money. other states have followed, and they've been really active on the state level trying to requisition funds from various sources, sometimes from similar kinds of payouts from pharmaceutical companies, other times from other parts of just like, you know, state coffers. So, you know, all of this happened and sort of set the stage for Trump. And if, you know, if I was gonna guess, it was politically expedient at the time because the war in Iran was extremely unpopular. And, you know, Joe Rogan was really into psychedelics and sent him a text, and he sort of realized Oh, boy. "Hey, if we, if we give something like this-"

[Luke] I wish I could send Donald Trump texts. I'd have some great ideas to run by him.

[Jonathan] Yeah, but he, you know, he realized like, "Hey, this would be a way to slowly start to pull back some of the veteran lobby that was drifting," because even amongst the SEAL community and that, like, nobody was really into the Iran war. They were all looking back at the wars that they were involved in and trying to wrestle with, like, how effective they were even at the things that they were motivated about.

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] Yeah. You know? So anyways, it-- maybe it was politically expedient, but it actually has created, like, quite a lot of momentum in the, in the federal government. And it was a bit of a tinderbox. Like, there-- He was surrounded by people who wanted to do stuff with psychedelics, and it was just like that moment just brought it to the fore so that it didn't take a long time for them to have an executive order because they already had it all mapped out.

[Luke] Sure. Sure. They had it mapped out, and they had reliable data.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] Yeah. And I've had Bobby Kennedy on the show, and I was supportive in the early stages of his run for president. And I remember him telling me directly that members of his immediate family, or at least a member, had, um-- was suffering from addiction or PTSD or something of that nature and worked with ayahuasca or something and had this remarkable reversal. And although he, at least according to him, hadn't had those experiences himself, it was enough for him to be like, "We should be paying attention to this."

[2:18:00]

[Jonathan] He was open to it, yeah.

[Luke] So it seems like you know, maybe having him in the orbit of the Trump world-

[Jonathan] A hundred percent...

[Luke] You know, was probably helpful with that too. It's funny, you know, so back to my earlier statement that I can't imagine any government institution or politician really having the best interest of people at heart. Maybe they do, and maybe he does sometimes, and maybe in this case. But what came to me when you were describing, you know, these studies and the results that that are on his desk, it's like you could also think rather than having empathy for the suffering of our warrior class, that it could be like a way to recycle them, right? It's like they're coming Mm... with all of these issues, and we can fix them and get them back on the battlefield faster. I mean, that would be the, you know, the pessimistic side of me that sees that. In any case, I'm really happy about it because I think if anyone needs to be looked after, it's it's our veterans and teachers and people that are actually-- you know, have dedicated their lives to helping and protecting other people. As much as I have my issues with law enforcement, and I would say that I'm definitely not pro-war in any case, under any circumstances, I think most of the people that get involved in those fields are well-intentioned, you know?

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm. Well, it's interesting because, you know, we're gonna be in Washington next week, Ambia, along with a lot of other people who are interested in this grant that ARPA-H is putting out, and the first one is fifty million dollars to try to study ibogaine for the treatment of opioid use disorder. So even though, you know, it's the veteran lobby that's really brought this to, obviously, to the Oval Office. Like, he's surrounded by guys who we've treated, you know, a bunch of Navy SEALs. And you know, it's-- that's who brought it to them. There's definitely gonna be studies that are focused on veterans' issues, but it's also bringing it forward in almost like primarily for opioid use disorder. Got it. So there's been Got it... I think, general understanding that there needs to be better available options for people who are trying to come off of opioids, obviously. Otherwise, there wouldn't be this massive crisis and, like, public health concern, and that ibogaine might be an answer. So there's just-- it's created this willingness now for people to be able to push like, all of the above narratives forward about what ibogaine is and what it could do.

[Luke] Sure. Do you see... I mean, obviously, this is a really positive step forward. Do you see this as you know, a domino that could help facilitate the research and availability of psilocybin treatments, MDMA treatments, things that have, you know, that are... Even LSD, right? I mean, that's how it started. some of these other substances that have been used clinically and proven themselves to be efficacious, yet because you have kind of the cultural stigma around them being drugs 'cause people do also use them just for fun, ostensibly. I mean, do you see this as a, as a meaningful domino that could sort of, in a positive way, open the floodgates to other medicines that are also used in similar ways?

[2:21:13]

[Jonathan] Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the executive order did a bunch of things. It focused on ibogaine quite a bit, and it created this $50 million ARPA grant, as well as there's probably other federal funding that's Gonna come through the pipeline for Ibogaine specifically. But a lot of the content of the executive order were these really technical things about the drug approval process that would normally hold up a psychedelic medicine, like getting it rescheduled at the DEA level.

[Luke] Right.

[Jonathan] Right. Like if you're studying psilocybin as a Schedule I substance, and then you get FDA approval, you still have to wait for the DEA to reschedule the drug. Oh, okay. So there's little things along the way, things like that would accelerate the approval process and bring them to market faster. And there's also like vouchers that they were giving out to companies that... 'Cause the thing is with psilocybin, with 5-MeO-DMT, you know, with LSD even I think was one of the companies was looking at an LSD-based treatment. Anyways, they're a lot further along in the development process. Like they're all in phase two or three even, and, you know, some are getting ready to file INDs. So those steps help them a lot, whereas Ibogaine's way back in like there hasn't even been a phase one safety study to be able to start testing its efficacy according to the clinical trial plan. So so there's a, there's a heavier lift to bring Ibogaine forward. Oh, okay. But some of the other-- all the other psychedelics will benefit from that same order for sure.

[Luke] Cool.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] I mean, I imagine a world where rather than someone being prescribed SSRIs, they're prescribed a weekend at a beautiful retreat center Sure. Yeah. That turns their whole life around, which is, you know, is not guaranteed, but it's really common- Mm-hmm... as you know, you know, that people have these experiences, and if they're-

[Jonathan] It's worth

[Luke] A try... well intentioned and well structured and there's the right kind of support and as you said, care, like health Yeah If they're really being loved on and-

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm...

[Luke] Cared for, I mean, it can be absolutely life-changing. That's been the case for me.

[Jonathan] Yeah.

[Luke] So I think that's a really positive thing and you know, thank you for doing the work you do in the world. I'm sure in many ways it's an uphill battle. You know, it's like you're kind of one hand tied behind your back sort of battle, right? Where your, you know, your intentionality is solid and you're doing it from a place of you know, authentically wanting to help humanity move forward and heal, and yet, you know, you're dealing with an antiquated, really cumbersome system that has a lot of, you know a lot of barriers to say the least.

[Jonathan] Yeah. I mean, it's still, it's still gonna be a cumbersome system even if you make parts of it more efficient, and that's what, you know, I wanted to do with the book was to try to describe things that are like beyond the convenient data about the treatment effect- Mm-hmm... like from the veterans or whatever. Yeah. Is that they still had to go through this experience, and we had to hold it for them in a certain way. So the book is trying to provide some, like, qualitative context for the history and for the experience itself and other things that don't end up in the, in the graphs, you know?

[2:24:36]

[Luke] Yeah.

[Jonathan] So.

[Luke] Called the human element. That's

[Jonathan] Right. Yeah.

[Luke] That's awesome. Well, we'll put a link to your book in the show notes, and I encourage everyone to grab themselves a copy. It's a really good read, and it... I mean, if you wanna know anything about this topic, I feel like it's right there in that book.

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm.

[Luke] So it's like a, it's a real you know, biblical approach. It's like, wow, okay, there's no stone left unturned, so you did a really great job, Thanks... from what I've read so far, about three-quarters in. Okay, last question for you. Who have been three teachers-

[Jonathan] Mm-hmm...

[Luke] Teachings, it could be a book, a philosophy, a person, et cetera, who have really impacted your life that you'd like to share with us?

[Jonathan] Yeah, so I mean, it's gonna be the mentors that I've had doing this work. I really feel really blessed that I had this opportunity to learn from people who came before me. And so it was Claire Wilkins, who I mentioned, who was the first one to give me any ibogaine and really helped me to understand the experience in a really qualitative way and how to, how to work with the medicine. And then Dimitri Mougianis, who... All these people are in the book as well, but Dimitri was a really early on ibogaine provider who has a kind of like a punk rock approach to it. He was literally in a punk band before he Is he the

[Luke] French guy that moves to Gabon?

[Jonathan] No.

[Luke] Oh, okay.

[Jonathan] No. He's, um... I mention him a couple of times. He's like a New Yorker who was doing ibogaine treatments underground and Oh, okay... and got initiated in Gabon. Right. And anyways, he's, he really has sort of helped to embody that harm reduction ethos in the ibogaine work. And then, yeah, it would be, it would be Yann Gouyon who you talked about. That's the guy, yeah. The French guy. Yeah, he's really like, I mean-

[Luke] He sounds like a real character.

[Jonathan] He's like, he, you know, his name that they gave him when he got initiated in Gabon, he's, you know, adopted Gabonese. He's, you know, patriated now as a Gabonese citizen. he's spent decades now in Gabon. He's, runs Blessings of the Forest. We talked about their great work. But he's just been, like, an incredible friend. And they, when he got initiated, he saw himself as, like, a bridge between Gabon and the West. Like, they named him, well, his name means, like, the Son of Science.

[Luke] Oh, wow.

[Jonathan] And he's really been that. Like, I don't know if maybe I have more of a perspective on that than anyone else 'cause of the time that I've spent with him there. But but yeah, just incredible dedication and persistence and that. So you know, buy the book, but if anybody's interested in this and wants to learn more, please check out Blessings of the Forest and consider supporting their work, 'cause it's critical for this story to unfold in a, in a good way going forward.

[2:27:37]

[Luke] Beautiful, man. Thank you so much.

[Jonathan] Yeah, thank you.

[Luke] And that, my friends, is what we call a wrap. Thanks for hanging out on this week's episode of The Lifestylist. But before I sign off, I want to remind you about one of the best ways to support the show while also upgrading your life, my online master market. That's where I've curated a collection of my favorite lifestyle design products, world-class supplements, EMF protection gear, water purification, blue light solutions, biohacking tech, and tons more. And these aren't just random health products. I mean, you can find that on Amazon. I've tested and vetted every item on the site. So if you see it there, it's something I personally use and trust. So if you've ever wondered what brands I actually use day to day or where you can find the gear I'm always talking about, the master market is your one-stop resource. To check it out, head over to lukestory.com/store. Can browse around, pick up some upgrades, and know that every purchase helps this show keep trucking. And the best part is that nearly everything listed there comes with an exclusive discount just for Lifestylist listeners. So you get cutting edge tools to optimize your mind, body, and spirit, and save some dough in the process. Again, that link is lukestory.com/store. Get in there and dig around and stock up on the best of the best, and you can click that link right in this episode description. Oh, and don't miss the search bar while you're there. That's how you can quickly find exactly what you're looking for without getting lost. All right, that's it. Until next time, be well and share this episode with someone you love. Hell, share it with someone you're struggling to love because everyone deserves it

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