Ibogaine: the NeXTSTEP

Copyright © 2001, Patrick K. Kroupa
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Ibogaine

Original Publication: Heroin Times

Working within the limitations of the space that’s available here — during the last two ibogaine articles — I’ve basically covered what ibogaine does; followed by a short piece about what it doesn’t do.

To summarize: ibogaine will absolutely detox you from short-acting opiates such as heroin, and is equally effective for longer-acting opioids like methadone.

While ibogaine will clean you up, it will not “cure” you of the complex series of psychobiological interactions that caused you to become addicted in the first place.

What it will do is provide a window of opportunity during which you have the chance to re-establish control. The beauty and the tragedy of heroin is — it works. Most other solutions… well, they don’t work nearly as well; and being real about it, nothing that exists is as immediate and absolute as sticking a needle in your vein.

Having learned this, it’s difficult to unlearn it. Ibogaine won’t make this knowledge disappear. It’ll detox you — painlessly and quickly. Within 45 minutes of dosing you’re un-sprung. What occurs after this — during the visionary phase, is highly random and individual-dependent.

Anything is possible. I’ve met people who had a full-blown religious experience, came into contact with God, and that was pretty much it. They were all done with drugs.

This wasn’t really my case… “Heaven and hell, I know them well… I paid how much for this shit?”

In my own opinion, based upon my personal experiences and observations of those around me, who have had both success and failure; what works…?

ANYTHING you want to believe will work. Provided that you can maintain that belief with sufficient energy to sustain continuity.

Addiction is like… energy. The energy won’t go away because you pretend it’s not there; you can’t reason with it or make deals with it, but — especially after ibogaine — you CAN apply intellect, reinforce that with will, and focus and direct the energy somewhere else.

If you can manage to at least occasionally open your heart and throw love into that mix, then you’re doin’ pretty good. If you can’t, the only person who will really suffer because of that in the end, is you.

Being realistic… if you can do, whatever it is that you need to do, to break down your ego boundaries — at least once in a while — to experience love, insteada just payin’ lip service to it; and let it flow through you — with or without special effects — that’s God (or at least opening the lines of communication to your higher power, cosmic consciousness, whatever you’d like to call it).

This seems to fix most things that I personally tend to throw out of alignment on an almost hourly basis, through many years of practice, bein’ at war, with… everything, but most of all myself.

And love, is interesting. It’s not lust, it’s not a power-trip, it’s not co-dependance, it’s like a vibrational range… that’s always there, but through your programming, you have made yourself incapable of being in tune with it most of the time. The illusion of your separation causes a lotta pain.

Maintaining an addiction to drugs seems to require one essential component:the nearly infinite capacity for never-ending self-pity. Which isn’t to say that some of the things people have lived through don’t hurt. They do. I understand that, been there, done that.

But… after a while, it gets a little old. Any time you check into some rehab, it’s always the same thing; cause and effect, let’s connect the dots in reverse, “okay, who beat you, raped you and locked you under the sink. Please fill in the blanks for why you’re so fucked up.”

Yeah, all of that happened; however, nothing is ever gonna make any of it un-happen. That was then, this is now, whatever crime you think you’re guilty of, odds are, you’ve served your time.

It would be nice if I could say that the 12-step groups provide this venue. But like almost everything else, it varies… greatly. I’ve been to groups where everything is all-good and people are relatively tolerant of anything, anyone is doing as part of their recovery.

I’ve been to other places where I’ve literally been asked to, “take your collection of space-cadets and go back to whatever planet you came from” when some people I was hangin’ with, attempted to “share” their ibogaine experiences and compare and contrast ’em to a fearless and searching moral inventory.

Everyone has their own truth, when the people in 12 step groups are attempting to indoctrinate you in theirs, they are simply speaking THEIR truth, to the best of their ability and understanding.

The major downside to all this is that a lotta the groups seem to have devolved into these weird little cults — which make it extremely difficult to “take what you find useful and leave the rest” — where you are either doing exactly what they want; or you’re just wandering blind in the darkness and sure to relapse any minute now.

“I’ve been in recovery for 24 years now, and I still make 3 meetings a day, and I can tell you that what you’re doing absolutely cannot work. Let me share what I have with you.”

Whoa… is it contagious dude? ‘Cuz, really, you seem pretty miserable. I didn’t put all this effort into gettin’ clean, so I could be unhappy. Thanks for sharing.

In short: no matter how much ibogaine you do, if you change nothing and do nothing, I can almost guarantee that what you’re gonna be doing in the near future, is more heroin.

On the flipside, if you do nearly anything positive — and “positive” here has a really wide range of possibility, in the beginning it simply amounts to: not doing drugs — you have a pretty good chance.

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