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Ibogaine - The Science

 Ibogaine has been known and studied for about a century, but its
scientific evaluation in the treatment of addiction has occurred 
principally since 1987.  What led to the scientific review of Ibogaine was
the discovery in the early 1960's within a group of drug users, some of
who were dependent on heroin, that Ibogaine not only eliminated
withdrawal, but also was able to break the craving and desire to continue
drug use for periods averaging about six months from a single Ibogaine
treatment.  What amazed the addicts who tried it was that they did not
take Ibogaine to stop using drugs.  Yet, without the intent to stop drug
use, none of the heroin addicts went through withdrawal and five out of
the seven addicts in the group did not return to heroin use for periods of
time between five months and three years.  The period of somewhat over
three years of non heroin use was accomplished by a series of once a week
treatments for  four weeks.  Two of the addicts returned to drug use
within two days.  When asked why they wished to use heroin they said they
weren't sick, but that they just wanted to be heroin addicts.  This work
was conducted in 1962 and 1963 by  Lotsof.

 Twenty years later Lotsof decided that the importance of the discovery
was too great not to be pursued and began a search to obtain Ibogaine
supplies that were no longer readily available as they had been restricted
in 1967 and now required special DEA permits  even though no abuse
potential was ever shown.  Drug dealers did not want Ibogaine on the
streets.  Lotsof later found out, neither did certain pharmaceutical
companies who had spent tens of millions of dollars to develop
non-addicting pain killers.  The medical community viewed the opiates as
the most effective pain killers and if what Lotsof said about Ibogaine's
ability to interrupt addiction was true there would be no need for the
not-as-effective non-addictive drugs.  Patients who had become addicted
during surgery aftercare or from narcotics given to kill the pain from
burns could be given Ibogaine and released from the hospitals.  Lotsof's
attempts to obtain purified Ibogaine were blocked by these companies for
about two years until he met with the President  Omar Bongo of the
Republic of Gabon who gave him a small supply of the roots of the
Tabernanthe iboga plant from which Ibogaine is obtained.

 A sample of these roots was given to Dr. Robert Goutarel, a former
director of the Institute of Chemistry of Natural Substances of the
National  Scientific Research Center in France.  Goutarel had the roots
tested for Ibogaine content and additionally gave Lotsof 50mgs of Ibogaine
that had been obtained during the evaluation for potency.  Fifty
milligrams is not a lot of Ibogaine.  It is probably equal  in weight and
size to the contents of a bag of heroine.  Six months late it was in the
hands of Dr. M.R. Dzoljic at Erasmus University Medical School in
Rotterdam, Holland.

 Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been too small an amount to
find out anything.  Dzoljic, however, was using a technique of injecting
drugs directly into the brains of rats.  Using this method of
administration, Dzoljic was given a thousand to one advantage over other
means of administration, like I.V. in terms of drug potency.  Six months
later in New York, Dzoljic called Lotsof, met with him, and told him that
"it works".  He  confirmed that Ibogaine blocked certain aspects of
narcotic withdrawal in rats.  Dzoljic was also the first scientist to show
Ibogaine reduced cocaine self-administration and the first to find a
natural substance in the body that acted like Ibogaine.

 Dr. Stanley D. Glick, Chairman, Department of Pharmacology and
Neuroscience at Albany Medical College in Albany, New York was the next
scientist to become involved with Ibogaine research.   From 1991 to 1996,
the Albany Medical College Ibogaine research group published more then a
dozen papers on Ibogaine.  Working in the group were I.M. Maisonneuve,
S.M. Pearl, K. Rossman, M. Teitler and R.W. Keller Jr to name a few. 
Glick also formed an affiliation with one of the worlds experts in
Ibogaine chemistry, Martin R. Kuehne at the University of Vermont,
Department of Chemistry in Burlington.  What these researchers and others
too numerous to mention did was amazing.  

 Their research supported Dzoljic's findings that Ibogaine would block
narcotic withdrawal in rats. They also showed that Ibogaine would cut down
or interrupt the self-administration of morphine in rats that were hooked
up to give themselves shots.  The Albany Medical College researchers found
Ibogaine to normalize increases in dopamine caused by the use of both
narcotics and cocaine.  Dopamine is believed to be the chemical the
reinforces the pleasurable sensation of taking certain drugs.  Glick's
Department studied how Ibogaine interacted with morphine, cocaine and
amphetamine.  They found that Ibogaine would work differently in certain
ways depending on which drugs it was given with and which drugs his
laboratory animals had previously used. 

 Glick was the first neuropharmacologist to recognize the effects of prior
trauma, emotional damage, due to handling, diet or genetics in the animals
to whom he was administering Ibogaine in behavioral experiments.  The rats
in Dr. Glick's laboratories were acting just like the human addicts who
had taken Ibogaine.  Some of them stopped using drugs.  Some of them cut
down on their drug use.  Some of them were hardly effected at all and some
of them who did not stop taking drugs after the first treatment, stopped
after the second or third treatment with Ibogaine.  

 Within two years Glick was joined in Ibogaine research by two other
scientists, working independently of Glick and each other.  One was Dr.
Henry Sershen of the Nathan Kline Institute in Orangeburg, New York and
the other was Dr Patricia Broderick of the Department of Pharmacology at
City University of New York School of Medicine in Manhattan.  Sershen and
researchers working with him at the Nathan Kline Institute published six
papers.  These papers were concerned with Ibogaine's effects on
diminishing locomotor activity caused by cocaine, diminishment of cocaine
self-administration in mice and the effects of Ibogaine on brain chemicals
in the dopamine, opiate and 5-HT (serotonin) systems.  Dr. Broderick's
specialty was in vivo microdialysis, a process by which she could measure
changes in brain chemicals in living animals.  In this case she measured
changes in dopamine and 5-HT.  The most dramatic findings in her research
for the non-scientists were results showing that Ibogaine virtually
eliminated cocaine induced stimulation  of rats in a special apparatus
designed to measure locomotor activity (movement).  These dramatic results
are shown below.*

 In 1991, Dr. Deborah C. Mash, a brilliant scientist and scientific
administrator at the University of Miami took interest in Ibogaine and
formed an alliance with Lotsof resulting in the signing of two research
agreements between the University of Miami School of Medicine and NDA
International, Inc., Lotsof's corporation that had been established to
market Ibogaine for the treatment of dependencies to narcotics,
stimulants, alcohol, nicotine and poly-drug abuse.  Mash's first research
was to determine  behavioral, toxicological, and pharmacokinetic effects
of Ibogaine in monkeys at a primate research facility in St. Kitts in the
Virgin Islands.  These studies showed no toxicological effects.

 In 1993, as a requirement of the second research agreement between Miami
and NDA International, the Miami researchers observed Ibogaine treatments
on Human addicts conducted by Professor Dr. Jan Bastiaans in Holland.  Dr.
Mash and Dr. J. Sanchez-Ramos who was to become the principal investigator
for the FDA approved human studies in the United States followed the
treatments of two patients and flew urine samples back to the United
States for evaluation to determine how rapidly Ibogaine was being
eliminated.

 This study was followed in 1994 by studies in the Republic of Panama with
the approval of the Panamanian Ministry of Health under the direction of
Drs. Edgardo Della Sera, Saul Alvarado and Carlos Smith, all founding
members of the Panamanian chapter of the American Society of Addiction
Medicine (ASAM).  Patients in the first study were given first half doses
and then full doses.  Blood samples were taken for the first time and
electroencephalographs (EEGs) and electrocardiograms (ECGs) were recorded
during 24 - 48 hour periods after Ibogaine administration.  There were no
abnormalities.

 The blood samples allowed the University of Miami researchers to
determine how fast Ibogaine was getting into the human system and at what
potencies.  What Dr. Mash and her working group discovered was that not
only was Ibogaine present but, an active metabolite (desmethyl ibogaine)
was being produced by the body from Ibogaine and this substance also had
anti-addictive properties.  Dr. Lee Hearn, working with Drs. Mash and
Sanchez-Ramos, played an important part in this work and the
identification of desmethyl ibogaine.

 The FDA approved human studies were going slowly.  First the FDA insisted
that only persons who had been treated with Ibogaine previously could be
in the study.  This presented a number of problems.  Patients treated with
Ibogaine had to be flown to Miami from cities in the United States and
Europe.  Most problematic was that hepatitis, a disease common to addicts
was considered as an exclusion criteria and many of the test subjects who
showed up were rejected.  Eventually, the FDA allowed  non-ibogaine
treated patients to be included in the study.  This research is now
ongoing.  It is a dose escalation safety study that can take patients up
to 8mg/kg or about half of the dose that would normally be used to treat
addiction.

 Another important Ibogaine research group was at the National Institute
of Health (NIH) Neuroscience Research Laboratory where Drs. Piotr Popik,
Richard T. Layer and Phil Skolnick were to discover Ibogaine's effects on
the NMDA receptor complex.  This receptor complex had previously been
shown to effect tolerance and dependence to both alcohol and opiates. 
Thus, preliminary studies were showing that Ibogaine was acting in areas
of the brain that effected tolerance and dependence (NMDA); on Dopamine,
the chemical believed to reinforce the pleasurable effects of drugs, at
the 5-HT site which has been shown to moderate behavior and learning and
at the opiate receptor sites that would effect withdrawal.  Ibogaine was
doing all of this  simultaneously.  And, the above research does not even
begin to go into the theories proposed by Dr. Goutarel concerning the
reprogramming of the brain through the waking dream state and recalling of
repressed memories caused by ibogaine.  This research still remains to be
accomplished.  What all of the researchers do agree on is that Ibogaine is
exciting science.

 This is an extremely brief review that does not do the science or the
scientists justice.  A more technically detailed abstract of the science
of Ibogaine and desmethyl ibogaine including a bibliography is available
at web page HTTP://WWW.IBOGAINE.DESK.NL

*A copy of this paper that includes graphics is available from Methadone
Awareness, 5311 Atlantic Avenue, #C-3, Ventnor, NJ 08406