People in Gabon have used the psychoactive plant iboga for thousands of years to tap into their subconscious for personal growth and revelation. As the plant enters fair trade, officials hope regulation ensures equity and sustainability
, a group of clinical facilities in Mexico serving as a pilot for the new legal trade program. There, therapists will use the iboga extract to treat a primarily American clientele for substance use disorders and trauma.
While ibogaine “does save lives,” says Kirran Ahmad, a psychedelic research clinician at Imperial College London who’s in charge of ensuring mutual benefit between Gabon and the West at Blessings of the Forest, what’s usually missing from the Western experience of the drug is the “narrative of what’s happening in Gabon. Gabon is where slaves were extracted from, and to me, this is another extractive process that’s going on with iboga.
The U.S. banned all use and virtually all study of ibogaine in 1970 under the newly created Controlled Substances Act, and a number of other countries have bans, especially in Europe. In South Africa, New Zealand, and Brazil’s São Paulo state, ibogaine is a prescription medication; in most other places, it falls into a legal grey zone—not explicitly approved for medical use but not expressly forbidden, either.
Ibogaine can be made in a lab but has yet to be developed that way at scale, and it can be derived from certain other plant species, especiallya tropical African tree. Iboga also grows outside Gabon. Ralf Vogtel, a German citizen, launched an intensive iboga plantation in Ghana in 2016 after learning that demand was increasing and natural supply dwindling. He now has 40,000 trees on 170 acres and ships all over the world. “It’s a tradable commodity, the same as cocoa or bananas,” he says.
A Gabonese man dances in a Bwiti ceremony in Libreville. In creating a fair trade iboga program, Gabon hopes to preserve its natural and cultural heritage. Skyrocketing demand puts traditions at risk as poachers plunder national parks and buy up iboga stocks from villagers. Much of it is smuggled into Cameroon, where it’s sold online to foreign buyers for up to thousands of dollars per pound.Please be respectful of copyright. Unauthorized use is prohibited.
In the early 2000s, Guignon got a job in Paris with an information and communications technology company as the sales director for sub-Saharan Africa. Cocaine and alcohol were common in his workplace, and he began using both substances, sometimes to excess.
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