Editor’s note: The ibogaine Investigator’s Brochure discussed here was published by MAPS, where Ali is co-executive director. 

Two years have passed since the Food and Drug Administration’s decision not to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, and the U.S. government could be ready to shift its position and accelerate psychedelic medicine instead of playing the villain it has been for the last fifty years. The zeitgeist surrounding ibogaine offers critical insight into the perils and promise of this moment.

By directing Health and Human Services to allocate $50 million to match states’ investment in psychedelic research, creating novel priority regulatory pathways for “breakthrough” psychedelic treatments, and directing agencies to accelerate access through multiple administrative channels, the April 2026 Executive Order and subsequent cascade of agency actions are the clearest evidence that at least one branch of the federal government is on board with the momentum to medicalize psychedelics. 

Curiously, the EO specifically named ibogaine as a potential beneficiary of both Right to Try laws and regulatory favoritism, despite it not yet qualifying for either. The order cites serious mental illness and veteran suicide statistics that, however real, are not themselves evidence that ibogaine works. Ibogaine also carries a well documented cardiac risk, including QT prolongation, that has made it a harder regulatory case than psilocybin or MDMA. Put simply, the White House naming a specific, unapproved molecule for expedited treatment ahead of its own agencies’ findings raises a fair question about whether these reforms are driven by evidence or political expediency. Somehow, the most complex molecule in the contemporary psychedelic pantheon has found itself at the center of an appropriately complex political moment.

While it seemed to happen out of nowhere, the EO actually followed years of slow but steady signals. In 2021, the National Institutes of Health issued a grant to research psychedelic treatment, its first in 50 years to evaluate a Schedule I substance’s therapeutic potential instead of its risks or harms. In 2024, the Government Accountability Office published a report calling on the Drug Enforcement Administration to resolve obstacles to its existing religious exemption process ostensibly created as a pathway to petition for permission to utilize psilocybin mushrooms and other controlled substances as sacraments. In February of this year, the FDA announced that it would default to only requiring one instead of two Phase III clinical trials for new drug applications. As of today, tens of millions of dollars have been allocated by Congress for psychedelic studies within the Veterans Administration and Department of Defense. In this more comprehensive context, the EO comes as less of a surprise and, for supporters of medical access, appears to be a decisive step in the right direction (pun intended).

The political cover provided by the EO and the underlying advocacy that informed it have both come from and clearly penetrated to the states. Last year Texas set aside $50 million for ibogaine clinical trials, and conditioned the money on a matching $50 million from a private partner. When it became clear that early proposals from drug companies would not align with state requirements, officials announced Texas would supply the match itself. In June, Colorado established an ibogaine research pilot program that can include up to five pilot sites, and several additional states passed bills about ibogaine in the 2026 legislative session.

Less than two weeks before Governor Jared Polis signed HB 26-1325, Gabon issued Decree No. 0239/PR, affirming the national heritage and strategic role of iboga and its chemical derivatives, including ibogaine. The action mandated authorization from the Ministry of Culture, following binding review by a new interministerial commission, for any research, export, or commercial activity involving the plant. Iboga grows in Gabon, and communities across the Congo Basin have steered and stewarded its ceremonial and healing use for generations, so it makes sense that the government has a stake in the matter.

However,  it is unprecedented in the field of contemporary psychedelic medicine to see a government so experienced in navigating postcolonial dynamics, stewarding its natural resources, and managing the impact of outside interests on ecological, territorial, and traditional stakeholders. Investment follows patents, and knowledge that doesn’t readily yield intellectual property – such as the aforementioned practices honed in non-clinical, traditional, or unregulated settings – gets sidelined and tokenized.  We’ve had decades to watch this happen with cannabis, and more recently with psilocybin and MDMA, but ibogaine could be on the fastest track yet.

These worldviews are worlds apart, and they exist within an ecosystem that can have space for both, until and unless commercial interest tips from enthusiasm to extraction. To level the playing field, MAPS,  recently published an Investigator’s Brochure (IB) for ibogaine as an open-access resource, compiling known preclinical, safety, dosing, and observational data into a single document. IBs are normally expensive to produce and tightly held by pharmaceutical sponsors, so we made ours public to put it in reach of academics, nonprofits, community organizations, and other stakeholders impacted by but often left out of regulatory dialogue. 

Practically speaking, it means that a researcher without industry backing can identify open questions faster, a policymaker can test claims made by advocates or companies against the scientific record, and organizations of all kinds can engage in the overall discourse without having to recreate a regulatory document. Translating and democratizing the kind of knowledge used to justify industry interest is one way we can keep advocacy honest.

The people whose knowledge and natural resources make a commercial product possible should participate in how that product is developed and who benefits from it. Anything short of that is plainly missing the point.

Government agencies, international clinics, academic researchers, Gabonese stakeholders, and people living with opioid use disorder or suffering from traumatic brain injury all have legitimate interests, and none of those interests are inherently incompatible. However, they will inevitably have to compete and undermine each other if the people and bodies responsible for building regulatory and policy frameworks – including commercial actors – fail to make space for all of them in the interest of expediency, profit, or the perception that one group’s suffering justifies treating others’ as externalities.

For now, the hype hasn’t abated. Congressional champions seek to codify EO 14401 with the aptly named Initiating Biomedical Outcomes to Garner Advancements into Innovative Neuroplastogen Efficacy (IBOGAINE) Act. At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration is allowing an early-phase clinical study of noribogaine hydrochloride to proceed for the first time, and NIDA is backing an ibogaine study at Harvard to the tune of $11M.

The instinct in some corners of the commercial ecosystem is to route around Gabonese interests by using synthetic ibogaine or analogs like noribogaine, or by treating it as someone else’s problem. Indeed, all of this momentum is happening in the shadow of the Trump administration’s ongoing restriction of Gabonese visas into the United States. However, this dynamic presents supply chain and stewardship problems that do not disappear just because some prefer not to look at them.  

A framework that ignores the Gabonese government and peoples’ interests, the iboga plant’s ecological constraints, and the cultural knowledge embedded in territory-based traditions is fragile, incomplete, and risks undermining its own healing potential. On top of that, it will inevitably face regulatory, implementation, and reputational complications that a more accountable approach would not. Researchers, advocates, and sponsors have advocated for its promise since the 1960s and have tried to bring ibogaine into formal drug development since the 1990s. The work has stalled, restarted, and stalled again for reasons that have changed over the decades. This process is going to take however long it will take, and we might as well do it right the third time.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Ibogaine Policy

This FAQ was prepared by Psychedelics Today and does not represent the author’s views.

Does Executive Order 14401 make ibogaine legal?

No. Ibogaine remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law. The April 2026 order directs agencies to accelerate research and to build access pathways, including under Right to Try, but it does not reschedule ibogaine or authorize treatment outside approved research.

What did Colorado’s ibogaine bill actually do?

HB 26-1325, signed June 4, 2026 and effective August 12, creates a research pilot program in the state’s Behavioral Health Administration authorizing up to five sites. Sites must work through the FDA’s investigational new drug process and establish benefit-sharing plans with Central African communities connected to iboga. The bill also tightened Colorado’s rules on non-commercial sharing of natural medicine, a provision now facing a repeal referendum effort.

What is Gabon’s iboga decree?

Decree No. 0239/PR of May 22, 2026 classifies iboga and its derivatives as national strategic heritage. Research, export, transformation, and commercial activity now require authorization from the ministry responsible for culture following binding review by an interministerial technical commission. The decree also creates a benefit-sharing mechanism and a sovereign iboga fund.

What is an Investigator’s Brochure?

An IB compiles the preclinical, safety, dosing, and observational data a sponsor submits to regulators to support human trials. They are expensive to produce and normally held privately by pharmaceutical sponsors. MAPS published its ibogaine Investigator’s Brochure as an open-access resource in July 2026.

Is ibogaine safe?

Ibogaine carries documented cardiac risk, including QT prolongation, which is why every regulated program built around it requires cardiac screening and monitoring. It has not completed the clinical trials needed to establish safety and efficacy for any indication, and no ibogaine product is FDA-approved.

Georges Gassita is a Gabonese state civil servant and a board member of ROOTS Fellowship Foundation. Views are his own.

When I traveled from Libreville to Aspen this summer, I spent two days on airplanes for three days of conversations. It was worth every hour.

It was an honor to be at the Aspen Psychedelic Symposium wearing two hats. I’m a state civil servant of Gabon. Furthermore, I’m also a board member of ROOTS Fellowship Foundation, a U.S. organization committed to protecting Indigenous knowledge through supporting the next generation of wisdom keepers in Gabon, Kenya and Colombia.

One of my responsibilities in Aspen was to explain that iboga has become a political matter in Gabon. It is no longer simply a traditional medicine or a subject of scientific curiosity. 

Today, responsibility for its governance reaches the highest levels of the Gabonese government. As international demand grows, my country is working to build a relevant framework that protects our cultural heritage while engaging responsibly with the rest of the world.

Listen to Georges GASSITA speak with Josh KAPPEL on Ibogaine policy in Colorado and Gabon: Frameworks for Collaboration and Reciprocity

An emerging industry on fire

The rush toward entrepreneurship and leadership in this space is creating a climate that feels, to many people in Gabon, less like partnership and more like pressure. Gabon is watching this closely, because the consequences are real.

Since the recent executive order on psychedelic medicine in the United States, the price of iboga seedlings in Gabon has risen sharply, from roughly $4 to $17 per unit, depending on the product and market. Gabon is working urgently to clarify the value of these resources and regulate the trade efficiently in a way that serves both the people who provide this medicine and the people who seek it.

Urgency cuts both ways

Move too slowly, and the illicit market fills the gap. Move carelessly, and we risk exactly the extraction we are trying to prevent.
Word of an American executive order, filtered through rumor and translated imperfectly, has created real fear inside Gabon that our forests will be stripped, that our healers will be sidelined, that decisions will be made about our heritage without us. 

Part of my responsibility, and part of why this dialogue matters so much, is simply to continue honest communication with all sides to clarify what these policies intend and prevent the kind of misunderstanding that breeds resentment on one side and indifference on the other.

We do understand that urgency. But there is a real tension between the desire for synthetic molecules that can be manufactured at scale and the necessity of preserving the traditional protocols (the ceremony, the preparation, the relationship with a healer) that have always accompanied this medicine. 

A molecule extracted from its context is not the same medicine our healers have practiced for generations. That leads to another concern: everyone is looking at psychedelic medicine, and very few people are looking at the traditional knowledge that made it possible. For generations, Indigenous and local communities in Gabon have protected, practiced, and transmitted the knowledge surrounding iboga. 

Without that stewardship, there would be no modern scientific interest, no pharmaceutical research, and no international conferences debating its future.

I have spoken with elders and traditional healers who remain genuinely willing to share this medicine for healing purposes, but they are clear that willingness is not the same as exploitation. Fair compensation, often in the form of tangible improvements to village life, is what makes the difference between the two.

In Aspen, I was encouraged that people genuinely wanted to engage with this idea. Scientists, lawyers, treatment providers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers all wanted to understand how cultural reciprocity could become something real.

At the same time, I recognized that everyone wants to lead this conversation. Global interest in iboga is growing so quickly that many organizations are attempting to define its future. 

That is precisely why Gabon must participate actively. If we do not help shape this conversation, others inevitably will.

Gabon’s governance models are evolving

Until this year, iboga was managed as a forestry commodity. A 2004 decree (No. 01029/PR) placed it, like other non-timber forest products, under the sole jurisdiction of the Ministry of Water and Forests. That framework treated iboga as a technical and commercial matter. It had nothing to say about research, diplomacy, or the traditional knowledge attached to the plant.

Decree No. 0239/PR of May 22, 2026 changed this. Iboga and its derivatives are now classified as national strategic heritage, and any activity involving the plant, from research to export, requires prior authorization from the Ministry of Culture after binding review by a new interministerial technical commission. Approval is no longer a routine decision by forestry officials. It is a collective political decision made at the center of government.

As a representative of Gabonese administration, I faithfully presented Gabon’s current governance model for iboga at Aspen. That is my responsibility. 

As someone who works closely with Indigenous communities through ROOTS Fellowship Foundation, we continue discussing how best to protect the rights of traditional healers, how communities should provide consent for the use of their knowledge, and what role the government should play in certifying that consent.

Coming out of Aspen, I carried home three concrete recommendations for my government: that we initiate formal diplomatic engagement with the United States specifically on ibogaine, that we expand awareness among our own national stakeholders so fewer decisions are made out of fear or rumor, and that we establish cultural reciprocity itself as the foundation of our diplomatic posture on this issue. 

Organizations like ROOTS Fellowship have an important role to play here as well, serving as a legitimate, formal bridge between Gabon and the outside world. That kind of structured engagement, rooted in real institutional relationships, accomplishes far more than the scattered, unverified activity that too often fills this space online.

In my view, one principle should remain central through all of this: consent to use traditional knowledge must originate with the traditional communities themselves. The government should certify that consent. These conversations are already taking place within Gabon, and I am optimistic that our governance will continue to evolve in ways that strengthen both cultural preservation and international cooperation.

The need for a living library

If we truly believe in ethical innovation, we need a broader framework for protecting traditional knowledge while enabling responsible research to ensure that discovery does not become another form of extraction.

This is also why I have begun proposing something more permanent: community-led registries, and physical books written in our own local languages, that can preserve this knowledge against the threats of globalization, displacement, or simple natural disaster. Oral tradition is resilient, but it is not invulnerable, and we have already lost too much when an elder healer passes without a successor fully trained. 

Traditional schools like Y’azo Leyissa Academy, led by Bwiti healer Tah Mombo, remain essential for the hands-on, experiential side of this transmission. But a registry would give us something we do not currently have: a permanent record, built and owned by the communities themselves. Building it properly will take collective decision-making within these communities, and outside funding for the technical work of illustration and translation. 

This is some of the most urgent preservation work we can do.

The future I hope to see is one in which governments, scientists, Indigenous communities, nonprofit organizations, and responsible companies work together as true partners. The purpose is not to slow progress, but to ensure that progress remembers where it began.

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From the editors of Psychedelics Today

Common questions about iboga and Gabon’s new law

What is Gabon’s new iboga law?

Decree No. 0239/PR of May 22, 2026 classifies iboga and its derivatives as national strategic heritage. Any activity involving the plant, from research to export, now requires prior authorization from Gabon’s Ministry of Culture after binding review by an interministerial technical commission.

Why have iboga prices risen in Gabon?

Following the April 2026 U.S. executive order accelerating research into psychedelic therapies including ibogaine, prices for iboga in Gabon rose from roughly $4 to $17 per unit, driven by anticipated international demand.

Is ibogaine legal in the United States?

No. The executive order directs federal agencies to accelerate research and access pathways, but ibogaine remains a Schedule I substance. Research authorization is not the same as legal access.

What is the difference between iboga and ibogaine?

Iboga refers to the plant Tabernanthe iboga, used ceremonially in Gabonese Bwiti tradition for generations. Ibogaine is a single alkaloid extracted from it and studied for treating opioid dependence and PTSD. As Gassita argues, the molecule removed from its cultural context is not the same medicine.

This is an op-ed. The views are the authors’ own. Rachel Turetzky, PhD & Douglas S. Wingate, DTCM are co-founders of 8-Circuit Ascension and the Institute of Applied Metaprogramming, and the authors of two books and a certification course built around the 8-Circuit Model discussed here.

Psilocybin is moving through FDA trials for treatment-resistant depression. MDMA-assisted therapy has reshaped how we understand trauma. Ketamine clinics have opened in strip malls across America. The United States federal government is holding press conferences announcing fast-tracking psychedelic research and rescheduling. After decades of suppression, psychedelics are finally being taken seriously as medicines, and the evidence supporting them is extraordinary.

But there is a problem quietly growing beneath all of this progress, and it is one that the field will eventually have to confront: the frameworks guiding this work were never designed to hold what actually happens inside a psychedelic session.

Western clinical psychiatry and psychology were built to reduce pathology. Their diagnostic systems, such as the DSM, are organized around symptom clusters. This may be useful for certain kinds of work, but when a client encounters what feels like a past-life memory, or experiences the sensation of merging with all of existence, or finds themselves face-to-face with an archetypal figure from the collective unconscious, a symptom checklist offers no guidance or support. Neither does a CBT protocol, nor most of the frameworks that today’s guides and therapists were trained in.

This is a recognition of a structural gap, and until the field acknowledges this, we will continue sending people into some of the most complex territory of the human psyche with maps that weren’t drawn for that terrain.

A Model Whose Time Has Come

Timothy Leary, along with Robert Anton Wilson, developed the 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness (8-CM) during the original psychedelic era. This was a time when researchers and explorers were directly encountering the full range of non-ordinary states and struggling, with similar urgency, to make sense of them. The model has since been updated and substantially grounded in contemporary neuroscience and clinical research, most recently in 8-Circuit Ascension: A Guide to Metaprogramming the Multidimensional Self, published by Original Falcon Press in 2025. What has emerged is not counterculture lore but a clinically applicable meta-model capable of mapping human experience from its most basic biological survival responses all the way to states of non-dual unity.

The model organizes consciousness into eight “circuits” or dimensions of self. The lower four circuits (biosurvival and somatic intelligence, emotional-territorial patterning, reason and symbolic thought, and social-sexual identity) map the familiar developmental arc of human life. These are the circuits that most therapeutic modalities already address, whether through somatic work, emotional processing, cognitive restructuring, or relational repair. Existing frameworks do good work here.

It is the upper four circuits where the gap becomes an issue. Circuit 5 encompasses the neurosomatic bliss states (i.e., the embodied rapture and profound physical aliveness) that many journeyers encounter. Circuit 6 maps the metaprogramming function: the capacity, often activated under psychedelics, to observe and revise the belief structures and identity programs that normally operate beneath conscious awareness. Circuit 7 opens into neurogenetic and archetypal consciousness, such as ancestral memory, mythological imagery, transpersonal encounters that feel older than any individual lifetime. Circuit 8 represents states of non-dual unity, the dissolution of the subject-object boundary, and what Stanislav Grof termed transpersonal experience, in which awareness extends beyond the limits of individual identity.

All of this is territory that practitioners are routinely encountering in sessions. Most were never given a map capable of differentiating these experiences, situating them within a shared framework, facilitating a deeper exploration of their meaning, and guiding their integration.

Neuroscience is Validating 8-CM

One of the quiet revelations of the past decade is how consistently contemporary neuroscience has been confirming what the 8-CM proposed long before the current research existed. Robin Carhart-Harris’s REBUS model describes how psychedelics relax rigid, top-down belief structures and allow new patterns of meaning to form. We read this as a neuroscientific description of what the 8-CM calls the Circuit 6 metaprogramming function.

Research on psychoplastogens, the class of neuroplasticity-promoting compounds that includes psilocybin, DMT, and ibogaine, aligns with the model’s concept of re-imprinting (the rewiring of early, formative patterns that pervasively shape perception and behavior), which once required years of therapy to alter, if at all. Work out of David Olson’s lab at UC Davis, where the term “psychoplastogen” was coined, has shown these compounds rapidly promote structural neural growth, the kind of mechanism that could plausibly underlie this re-imprinting process. Studies on default mode network (DMN) suppression under psychedelics, including Carhart-Harris’s early imaging work on psilocybin, describe a dissolution of rigid self-referential processing. We see this as consonant with the ego-boundary dissolution that characterizes Circuit 8 states.

The convergence runs both ways: it’s notable how often contemporary neuroscience describes, in its own terms, territory the model mapped decades earlier, and we believe the model offers an organizing framework for dimensions of experience that a third-person, measurement-based science is not yet equipped to capture on its own.

The 8-Circuit Model as a Clinical Tool

Consider a concrete example. A client in a psilocybin session begins accessing imagery that feels like ancestral memory, an encounter so viscerally felt that it doesn’t feel like a metaphor at all, but like direct contact with lineage, with the dead, with something older than their own life. Is this pathology? Is it Jungian archetypal activation? In the 8-CM, it would be recognized as a Circuit 7 neurogenetic experience. Without a framework that can hold all possibilities simultaneously and help a guide navigate between them, the practitioner is left improvising, and the client is left without adequate support for what may be one of the most significant experiences of their life.

Or consider the classic Grofian state known as BPM-II (Basic Perinatal Matrix II), which is the experience of feeling suffocatingly trapped and compressed with seemingly no exit. This phenomenology maps in the 8-CM to a re-experiencing of pre/perinatal dynamics (what we have designated Circuit 0, addressing the earliest layer of somatic and psychic imprinting). Understanding this connection helps how a skilled guide responds: not necessarily with reassurance or distraction, which can feel invalidating, but with grounded presence that honors the depth of what is being processed.

These cases exemplify exactly the kind of clinical complexity that demands more than improvisation and more than the frameworks most guides were trained in.

Beyond Pathology

The psychedelic resurgence has, understandably and necessarily, led with its strongest argument: these medicines heal. Across treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety, a growing body of clinical trials points to meaningful, often rapid improvement where conventional treatments have fallen short.

This is an essential foundation, and it is only the beginning. Psychedelics were never only about healing pathology, and the mental health field will eventually need a framework that reflects this. The upper circuits of the 8-CM represent aspects of the psyche that current clinical frameworks barely acknowledge: the development of expanded perception, transpersonal capacities, and what we might call genuine psychological evolution. A complete framework for working with human consciousness should go beyond merely removing disorder. It should account for the breadth of human experience, for expanding human potential, not just restoring a baseline. The 8-CM maps all of these as distinct dimensions of human experience (somatic intelligence, emotional depth, cognitive flexibility, social attunement, aesthetic awakening, metacognitive awareness, collective consciousness, and non-dual insight), each accessible through practice, integration, and the intelligent use of psychedelics and other non-ordinary states.

The wounded human deserves careful, skilled attention. Yet so does the developing human. A field serious about the full range of human experience needs a framework capable of holding both.

An Invitation to the Field

The 8-CM is not asking practitioners to abandon the frameworks they already use. It is a meta-model, not a competing theory, which means that it can organize and contextualize IFS, Jungian depth psychology, somatic therapy, CBT, and every other modality with respect to which dimensions of human experience they most directly address. What practitioners gain is a navigational system proportional to the actual complexity of the territory that doesn’t replace their existing tools, but provides insight into which tools belong where.

Practitioners are already in the room with clients who are encountering ancestral memory, perinatal terror, the dissolution of the self. The question is not whether this territory exists. It is whether we hand guides a map for it or leave them improvising. The 8-Circuit Model is one such map, updated and grounded, and the field can no longer afford to work without one.

The Italian Psychedelic Movement: Buried History, Emerging Research, and the Politics of Care

There is something paradoxical, and typically Italian about the way our country relates to therapeutic psychedelics. On the one hand, a pioneering history that no one tells: psychiatric clinics scattered from Lecce to Turin (from south to north) where, between the 1930s and the late 1960s, experiments were conducted with mescaline, LSD, LSA, and psilocybin on hundreds of patients, in work that set early international precedents and then remained buried in the archives. On the other, a present day reality that struggles to acknowledge what international science has been affirming for years now with growing clarity: that certain molecules, used with care, intention, and within a solid therapeutic context, can achieve what conventional drugs often fail to do.

Yet something is shifting. Slowly, but profoundly: as is characteristic of this country.

A Forgotten First

The history of Italian psychedelia is in large part a history of collective amnesia. Giorgio Samorini, the most tenacious archaeologist of this lost memory, has unearthed an impressive body of documentation: at least 60 clinical studies conducted between 1930 and 1967, encompassing over 2,800 treatment sessions administered to roughly 900 patients across institutions distributed throughout the country. It was in Italy (in Lecce, in 1949), that Umberto De Giacomo, director of the Salento Interprovincial Psychiatric Hospital, administered the first 500 microgram dose of LSD ever given to a human being; a threshold no one had yet dared to test, and one that would only be exceeded years later by U.S. Army trials that reached doses of up to 5,250 micrograms. According to Samorini, Italy was also, in those same decades, among the pioneering countries in clinical research with psilocybin, achieving some of the most promising results in the treatment of depressive states.

Almost none of this work ever reached international journals, and to this day it remains largely unknown outside Italy. Yet those same years, in Rome, produced an episode where the history of psychiatry crosses paths with the history of cinema. In the summer of 1964, when LSD was still legal, psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio, one of the founders of Italian psychoanalysis, guided a single LSD session for his analytic patient Federico Fellini, under medical supervision. According to Servadio himself, the experience had a direct effect on the director’s subsequent work: it gave rise to Giulietta degli Spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), which Servadio described as a kind of reckoning with the spiritualist preoccupations that had accompanied Fellini until then. Fellini himself spoke about it publicly as early in a mid 1960s BBC interview, so it was never, strictly speaking, a secret, but for decades the episode remained a niche anecdote, known mainly to film buffs and historians of Italian psychoanalysis, only resurfacing with new visibility in recent years, amid the renewed international interest in psychedelics.

All of this took place in something close to silence. Today, it remains largely forgotten within Italy itself.

What makes this story even more complex is the context in which it unfolded. Italy in the 1950s and 1960s was also the country of Franco Basaglia, the Venetian psychiatrist who, in Gorizia, launched one of the most radical deinstitutionalization processes of the 20th century, dismantling the architecture of the asylum piece by piece and posing questions that still await answers, among them what do we call normality? Where does care end and control begin? Basaglia’s democratic psychiatry and the psychedelic experiments of those same years shared, despite their differences, the fundamental insight that mental distress cannot be reduced to a chemical equation, and that the relationship between patient and therapist, between the individual and their social context, cannot be reduced to a protocol.

Law 180 of 1978, a historic victory for the Italian antipsychiatry movement, closed the mental hospitals. However, it left a void that the national healthcare system has never truly filled, and into which we still find ourselves looking today, with the new epidemic weight of the mental health crisis.

There is, however, another Italy that has not stood still during this same period, that of harm reduction. Born in response to the heroin crisis of the 1980s, the Italian harm reduction network has, over time, built one of the most serious and widespread associative networks in Europe from Forum Droghe to Gruppo Abele to Lab57, from the Serds to street cooperatives consistently championing a principle that institutional psychiatry has often struggled to adopt: that those who use substances are people to be supported, not punished or forcibly medicalized. In this sense, the culture of harm reduction has represented in Italy the strongest bridge between the counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s – with its critique of the prohibitionist paradigm and its social violence – and the contemporary scientific and therapeutic approach. Some of the figures most active today in the Italian psychedelic movement come from that tradition, or know it well: the awareness that the social and relational context of use is decisive for its outcome. The principle of set and setting is an insight that harm reduction had already put into practice long before clinical trials codified it in the literature.

The Present: An Ecosystem Under Construction.

When we speak of the “Italian psychedelic renaissance” a phrase that the international community now prefers to replace with the more sober “psychedelic resurgence” we mean the return, from the 2000s onward, of rigorous scientific interest in these molecules, which in Italy began later and is proceeding more slowly than elsewhere. Over the past two or three years, the movement has reached a critical mass that is hard to ignore.

The first institutional sign was the conference at the University of Trento, organized by the Addiction Science Lab of the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, in collaboration with MAPS Italia, on November 8 and 9, 2024. It was the first academic event of its kind in Italy, and the program for the first day, held in English and streamed internationally, was ambitious: taking the stage at the 18th century Zandonai Theater in Rovereto were, among others, Rick Doblin, David Erritzoe of The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, Matthias Liechti from Department of Biomedicine of the University of Basel, Tadeusz Hawrot from PAREA, and Marion Haberkamp from the European Medicines Agency. The second day, held in Italian at the MART in Rovereto, featured thematic workshops on clinical practice, research, and legal pathways, including a roundtable organized by the Luca Coscioni Association on regulatory frameworks for access to therapies. The event was entirely in person. It was the first time an Italian university had brought together the best of international psychedelic research on Italian soil, and it represented a symbolic break with the academic taboo that had previously surrounded the topic. The event, first of its kind in Italy, opened a conversation that has continued uninterrupted ever since.

A few weeks later, in December 2024, SIMEPSI (Italian Society of Psychedelic Medicine) organized a conference in Bologna in collaboration with the Swiss organizations ALPS (Awareness Lectures on Psychedelic Science) and ASPT (Association Suisse Psychédéliques en Thérapie).

In March 2026, Chieti hosted a two day international conference titled “Psychedelics: scientific research, clinical reality, therapeutic applications and regulatory implications,” organized by the Department of Neurosciences of the University of Chieti-Pescara and the Luca Coscioni Association. Among the speakers: researchers from La Sapienza and Tor Vergata in Rome, from the universities of Toronto, London and Berlin, and Rick Doblin.

On the scientific institutional front, the landscape has rapidly expanded. SIMEPSI is the first Italian scientific society dedicated to research, training, and the application of psychedelic medicine. It organizes international webinars, publishes educational articles, conferences (as the one in Bologna in 2024) and maintains links with the European PAREA network. In 2025, it participated in the launch of Psychedelicare at the European Parliament.

Within institutional psychiatry, a similar space has opened up with the SIP-SSoP (Study Section on Psychedelics), a scientific body affiliated with the Italian Society of Psychiatry, the oldest and most representative organization in the field. Its existence signals that the topic is no longer the exclusive domain of parallel networks or independent associations, but has found acceptance within official academic psychiatry. A small but symbolically significant step.

MAPS Italia, founded in 2023 on the sidelines of the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, where the Italian delegation traveled to officially establish the affiliate, is the Italian affiliate of the world’s longest standing psychedelic research organization, founded in 1985 by Rick Doblin. It is part of the coalition coordinating the Psychedelicare campaign in Italy and works to bring the need to reform the approach to mental health to the institutional level. Il Bosco Fiorito – Psichedelia: orizzonti di cura (The Flourishing Forest – Psychedelia: Horizons of Care), is the publication commissioned by MAPS Italia, curated by the author of this article for the Animamundi publishing house, which brought together many of the key figures from various associations in a work that effectively marks Italy’s rediscovery of psychedelic therapies: the book was presented in the press room of the Italian Parliament in December 2025, an institutional milestone for MAPS Italia and the entire associative landscape.

The podcast Illuminismo Psichedelico by Federico Di Vita has become, over the course of more than two hundred episodes, the main forum for public cultural, therapeutic, and political / legal debate on psychedelics in Italy. Di Vita was also the curator of La Scommessa Psichedelica (The Psychedelic Gamble) edited by Quodlibet: a collective book reflecting, back in 2020, on “what psychedelics do and what they might still do”.

The Luca Coscioni Association, which produces Di Vita’s podcast, has long been active in the field of civil rights, particularly in relation to health and end-of-life issues. With a longstanding commitment to drug policy reform, it has recently expanded its focus to psychedelic-assisted therapies, promoting a broad range of initiatives, including an open appeal signed by more than 170 clinicians, researchers, and mental health professionals calling on the Italian government to introduce regulated access to these treatments for palliative care, compassionate use, and PTSD.

The Studio Aegle newsletter, edited by Dott. Caterina Bartoli since 2024, provides constant updates on international studies with scientific rigor and accessible, popular science writing. In 2025, UNEPSI was also founded, the first national network of university student associations dedicated to scientific outreach on the topic – a significant generational milestone.

Training Caregivers

In a growing ecosystem, the training of professionals is the most urgent frontier. It is a matter of acquiring the relational, ethical, and clinical skills necessary to accompany someone through an experience of expanded consciousness, and then help them integrate it into their lives. Illuminismo Psichedelico has also paved this path in the realm of training, with courses and in depth programs dedicated to mental health professionals.

In the fall of 2026, MAPS Italia is bringing to Italy for the first time the residential MDMA-Assisted Therapy training developed by MAPS USA based on forty years of clinical research. It will take place from September 20 to 26, 2026, at the Workation Village in San Sebastiano da Po. The program, conducted in English by MAPS lead educators, is open to mental health professionals from across Europe. Around 20 scholarships are available: those for Italian participants will prioritize researchers interested in initiating MDMA research in Italy and therapists working with survivors of sexual violence, domestic violence, and migrants. Additional scholarships for Palestinian and Lebanese researchers and therapists will be funded by philanthropists.

The Chieti Case: Genuine Research, Problematic Communication

On July 9, 2025, the first Italian clinical trial with psilocybin began in Chieti (at the same university that would organize the aforementioned conference the following year): a study coordinated by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) under the supervision of principal investigator Francesca Zoratto, and conducted at the Psychiatric Clinic of the Chieti hospital under the direction of Prof. Giovanni Martinotti of the University Gabriele d’Annunzio, involving 68 patients with treatment-resistant depression. It is funded through Italy’s Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR), the national post-pandemic recovery plan. The study is significant news. But just a few months after it began, it also became the center of a controversy that has swept through the Italian and international psychedelic community.

Early this May, the show Le Iene, broadcast on Italia 1 – a network founded in the 1980s by Berlusconi – aired a 20’ segment in which their correspondent followed the trial closely, including footage of patients under the influence of psilocybin, filmed with the entire crew present in the room and later widely shared on social media. Studio Aegle wrote about it in a commentary later republished by Il Foglio Psichiatrico, a mental health newsletter known since 2017 for grounding its coverage in peer reviewed literature rather than easy answers. The piece, titled “Psilocybin in Prime Time,” argued that the Chieti team’s protocol was built around a specific hypothesis: isolating the molecule stripping away psychotherapy, music, and the traditional therapeutic setting, in order to study the compound on its own terms. That premise, Studio Aegle wrote, made the presence of a television crew in the room not just an ethical problem, but “a methodologically catastrophic choice.” Psychiatrist Fabio Villa, who practices psilocybin and MDMA assisted therapy in Geneva, used a blunter word: “grossolano,” crude, and asked the question the broadcast never addressed: does filming a patient under psilocybin with a full TV crew not alter the very setting the therapy depends on?

The episode raised issues that go beyond the specific case: the difficulty of communicating psychedelic research responsibly to a broad audience; the risk of uncontrolled emulation in the absence of clear communication regarding the legal status of the substances (psilocybin is still classified as a Schedule I substance in Italy; its use outside a clinical context is a criminal offense); and, more profoundly, the debate over the very concept of psychedelic therapy, whether its efficacy lies in the molecule itself or in the interplay between the molecule, preparation, setting, and integration.

It is worth emphasizing that the international scientific consensus on this point is becoming increasingly clear: the best results are achieved when administration is embedded within a structured therapeutic pathway, involving preparation and integration. As Piero Cipriano wrote in his Ayahuasca e cura del mondo, the “dream of the psychedelic hospital” is not realized by reducing these substances to “smart missiles” to be added to the formulary, but by radically rethinking the model of care.

Psychedelicare: Italy Signs On

On February 6, 2025, in the Altiero Spinelli Room of the European Parliament, Psychedelicare was officially launched the first European Citizens’ Initiative on psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, promoted by over 30 organizations in 17 countries, including, for Italy, the Luca Coscioni Association, SIMEPSI, MAPS Italia, and Forum Droghe. It was the first time the psychedelic issue had entered a European institution at that level with full legitimacy. The ECI called on the Commission to support shared standards for therapies, promote research, and review the UN conventions that hinder their development. Within twelve months, one million signatures had to be collected in at least seven member states. The goal was not met by the January 2026 deadline (as is the case with the vast majority of ECIs, a necessarily difficult instrument), but the network built around the campaign has not dissolved: Psychedelicare continues as a European advocacy platform, bringing together a transnational coalition that did not exist before. And Italy, with one of the most active signature drives in Europe during the first few weeks, has shown it has something to say.

Where to? The National Health Service as an opportunity and a stake in the game

The comparison with the United States is illuminating, but must be made with caution. In the U.S., the path taken from Colorado to Oregon Measure 109 has been one of decriminalization and the creation of regulated markets. A path that has produced results alongside distortions, from the commodification of psychedelic therapy to access limited to those who can afford sessions costing thousands of dollars, and the risk, as Rick Doblin warned in his interview in Il Bosco Fiorito, that these treatments become, in his words, “elitist, exclusionary, and privatized.”

Italy, and Europe more broadly, holds a card that the United States does not: a public healthcare system, however strained it may be. If psychedelic therapies were to enter the national healthcare system through public regulation instead of through the private market, the issue of accessibility could be addressed structurally, rather than as a residual problem to be solved with scholarships or charitable programs.

The stakes are enormous. It is a matter of deciding whether these therapies which science describes as effective especially when integrated into a pathway of preparation, session, and integration, namely the PAT (Psychedelic Assisted Therapy) protocol developed by MAPS will enter the National Health Service as a treatment for those suffering from treatment resistant depression, PTSD, addictions, or end of life existential anxiety, or whether they will remain the preserve of those who can pay.

There is also a deeper epistemological issue, one that directly challenges the dominant model of mental health. In his critique of the “chemical asylum,” Piero Cipriano observed how contemporary psychiatry tends to treat mental distress as a problem of biochemical imbalance, and to respond with drugs that “mask” symptoms without transforming anything. Psychedelic molecules work in a radically different way: they do not act on the brain like classic psychotropic drugs, which depress or stimulate specific neurotransmitter systems, but rather open temporarily, with real risks that require a controlled setting windows of neuroplasticity and expanded consciousness, allowing the patient to rework memories, dissolve cognitive automatisms, and alter their relationship with themselves.

Tommaso Barba is an italian researcher at The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College, who’s very active in advocacy on general media and social media. In a collective article published in the Alias supplement of the daily newspaper Il Manifesto, A Mushroom in the Mind, he explains that under the influence of these substances, the Default Mode Network, the hierarchical control network in the brain that organizes automatic thought processes and, in depressed individuals, fuels rumination is temporarily deactivated, allowing the mind to explore new connections. Recalling what Aldous Huxley called the “reducing valve”, this deactivation is not a matter of stunning the patient, but of freeing them, temporarily, and in a controlled setting, from the prison of their own patterns.

The sociopolitical consequences of this difference, if incorporated into a public health system, are not negligible. A state that funds psychedelic treatment is funding a process of consciousness transformation, with all that this implies in terms of autonomy, critical thinking, and redefinition of values. Governments tend to look the other way, but societies cannot afford to anymore.

Conclusion: The Courage to Start Over From Here

The Italian psychedelic movement is young, diverse, and often fragmented. It still lacks a unified legislative strategy, a stable institutional partner, and resources. But it has something of value: a network of competent, motivated people who, unlike in many other contexts, are aware of the pitfalls, both scientific and political, of the path they are embarking upon. What is missing, perhaps, is the memory of how far down this road we have already traveled. Between 1930 and 1967, in mental hospitals that were still called by that name, someone had already begun. That history is buried under decades of prohibition and oblivion. Bringing it back to the surface is an act of historiographical justice and the foundation upon which to build an Italian narrative of psychedelia that goes beyond both an uncritical importation of the American model and a provincial resistance to change.

Italy had forgotten what it knew. Now it can remember and decide whether what it builds will benefit patients in the public system or only those who can afford it.

Editor’s note: This article discusses MAPS Italia and Il Bosco Fiorito; the author is affiliated with both.

Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate women for the care and sacrifice they make to raise their children in today’s world. Today, mothers are raising their children in an era of existential uncertainty and political injustices enacted by the U.S. government, including (but not limited to) policies that continue to separate women from their children, criminalize their pregnancies,  lock them out of economic stability, and remove women’s right to choose by restricting access to mifepristone and birth control medications.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) was founded to challenge the harms of prohibition, but we are still confronting the same uncomfortable truth four decades later. For more than 50 years, U.S. drug policy has functioned as gender policy. It has governed women’s bodies, dictated who is deemed a “fit” mother, and imposed lasting punishment long after a sentence ends. While the War on Drugs has harmed entire communities, women  have borne uniquely destabilizing consequences, particularly Black and Latina women and women living in poverty.

Increasingly, trans people are targeted through the criminalization of both illicit drugs and the prescriptions they need, facing daily, profound human rights violations in the carceral system. The compounded stigma faced by femmes is rarely represented in the data, so I implore you, reader, to remember: the harms and opportunities you’ll read about here are also compounded for femme and other genderqueer people. 

Since the 1980s, the number of incarcerated women in the United States has increased by more than 600 percent, the predictable result of policies rooted in punishment rather than public health like mandatory minimum sentencing laws. The infamous 100-to-1 crack-to-powder cocaine (now 18-to-1) disparity that devastated Black families by significantly expanding incarceration, for example, still lands hardest on families already navigating systemic inequality.

One in four women in the carceral system, double the rate of men, are locked up for drug offenses that are often low-level, nonviolent offenses entangled with poverty, coercion, or survival. Many are survivors of domestic or sexual violence. Two-thirds are mothers with children under 18. This deserves to be reiterated: around 50,000 American women are incarcerated today for low-level drug offenses. In the name of protecting children, we are actually causing children to be separated from their mothers and sowing the conditions that make incarceration and mental health challenges more likely for the next generation.

And increasingly, they are not in prison following a conviction; a majority are in jail awaiting trial. Nearly 60 percent of women in jails have not been convicted of a crime, often detained simply because they cannot afford bail. For women, incarceration is frequently less about risk to public safety and more about poverty.

When a woman is jailed or imprisoned, the impact rarely stops with her. Mothers are far more likely than fathers to be primary caregivers. Jail churn destabilizes entire families, pushing children into foster care and households into crisis. Pretrial detention, which can last weeks or months, can cost women jobs, housing, and custody before guilt is ever determined.

Drug enforcement has also criminalized pregnancy. From the “crack mother” panic of the 1980s to modern-day prosecutions, the drug war has policed our bodies and deemed whose motherhood is worthy of protection. Between 1973 and 2022, more than 1,800 cases were documented in which pregnant people were arrested, detained, or prosecuted in the name of protecting “unborn life,” most often tied to substance use allegations. Pregnant women who use drugs are met with surveillance, physical restraints, punishment, and separation from their newborns. These approaches, medical experts warn, deter prenatal care and worsen outcomes for families; care and evidence-based treatment are safer supports for family stability.

Inside correctional facilities, women face high rates of prior trauma and disproportionately high rates of mental health challenges. Women in jails die of drug and alcohol intoxication at twice the rate of men. Yet access to trauma-informed substance use treatment remains inadequate. The use of restraints on pregnant women, though increasingly restricted, still occurs in some facilities. These practices are not reflections of safety. They are reflections of a system designed for control, not healing.

Even after release, punishment continues. Federal law once imposed lifetime bans on SNAP and TANF benefits for people with drug felony convictions, and while states can opt out or modify those bans, barriers remain for two-thirds of returning citizens. “One Strike” public housing policies have enabled eviction based on drug-related activity, destabilizing entire families. Professional licensing restrictions block access to stable employment. Across the country, more than 40,000 laws, regulations, or restrictions can limit opportunities long after a sentence ends.

These are not isolated policies. They are interlocking systems that punish the poor, make women’s survival needlessly difficult, and burden their children with adverse childhood events.

Decades of evidence tell us that substance use disorders are most effectively addressed by stable housing, access to health care, community support, and trauma-informed treatment. Yet we have built a system that withholds those stabilizing supports while expanding criminal penalties.

Today, we stand at another inflection point. Cannabis is legal for medical or adult use in most states. Psychedelic therapies are moving through clinical research and the F.D.A. with unprecedented momentum. These developments hold enormous promise for healing, but legalization alone does not equal justice.

Even in states that have legalized cannabis, racial disparities in enforcement have persisted. Commercial markets have flourished while many Black and Brown women, survivors of the drug war,  remain burdened by criminal records, excluded from capital, and locked out of opportunity.

We have a choice: as lawmakers debate how to regulate cannabis and consider new frameworks for psychedelic access, we can replicate the inequities of prohibition under new regulatory regimes, or we can build a post-prohibition future rooted in health, consent, dignity, and repair.

Repair means automatic expungement and retroactive sentence relief. It means ending the criminalization of pregnancy. It means eliminating collateral consequence barriers to housing, public benefits, and professional licensing. It means reducing reliance on pretrial detention and cash bail. It means investing in community-based mental health care and trauma-informed services in the communities most harmed by the drug war. It also means ensuring that emerging legal markets expand opportunity without extracting wealth from those already destabilized.

Women have long led the fight to end the drug war, organizing to end alcohol prohibition, for sentencing reform, for harm reduction, for the right to parent, and for the right to heal. We have built coalitions across differences and insisted that safety and justice are deeply connected goals.

When I organized my first action at 13 years old, it was attended by one person: my mom. I learned early that change requires persistence, partnership, and the loving support of women and femmes we admire. Nearly two decades into this movement, the lesson remains the same. We must be bold enough to imagine something better and disciplined enough to build it together.

This Mother’s Day, lawmakers have an opportunity to prove that drug policy reform is not just about markets or medicine: it is about mothers, children, families, and the right to heal without fear of punishment.

The future of drug policy should not be defined by who profits. It should be defined by who heals.

Dear Colleagues,
We write as a collective of practitioners, researchers, clinicians, and integration specialists with direct, long-term experience working with iboga and ibogaine across a range of settings. The growing interest in ibogaine within the United States — including public investment, emerging clinical pathways, and public-private partnerships — represents a meaningful shift in how this modality is understood and delivered at scale. We recognize the work being done to bring greater awareness, safety, and legitimacy to something that has long existed at the margins. It is precisely because this moment carries such consequence that we feel compelled to speak directly.

What the evidence actually shows

Across our collective experience, one pattern has remained consistent: ibogaine may interrupt entrenched thought and behavioral patterns and open a window of clarity that is otherwise difficult to access. But the experience alone does not determine long-term outcomes. What appears decisive, again and again, is not the event itself but the conditions surrounding it — the depth and quality of preparation, the relational and environmental context, and the presence or absence of sustained integration afterward. When these are minimized, sidelined, or treated as secondary, initial gains rarely stabilize in any meaningful way.

As ibogaine enters formal systems of care, we observe a growing divergence in delivery models. Some prioritize scale and standardization. Others emphasize preparation, relational continuity, and long-term integration. Both respond to real demand, but outcomes differ significantly depending on which values actually shape the structure of care.

On pharmacological reductionism

We are concerned by the growing tendency to frame ibogaine in evangelical or reductive terms — as a singular “reset,” an inherently self-sufficient intervention, or a molecule capable of doing the work that preparation, relationship, and integration actually perform. These narratives are not merely inaccurate; they are structurally dangerous. They place the burden of recovery on the compound itself while obscuring the wider relational and existential process that shapes whether gains endure. In practice, ibogaine is catalytic, destabilizing, and highly contingent. Rapid interruption of withdrawal is a real and important effect for some individuals. It is not a treatment arc.

The inflation of pharmacological narratives serves a particular interest: it makes ibogaine legible to biomedical and commercial frameworks that prefer a clean, scalable, proprietary mechanism. But it does so at the cost of accuracy, and at the cost of the people entering care with expectations that the molecule alone cannot meet.

On protocol gaps and clinical competency

Current structures advancing ibogaine development in the United States include only a limited number of individuals with genuine depth of real-world experience — experience that encompasses condition-specific protocols (traumatic brain injury versus substance use disorder, for example), substance-specific considerations (long versus short-acting opioids, alcohol, amphetamines), cardiovascular risk stratification, and the less codifiable but equally important dimensions of set, setting, relational attunement, and integration support.

This is not a peripheral concern. Thorough screening, enhanced informed consent, realistic expectation-setting, and clear boundaries around what this work can responsibly offer are not advanced features to be added later — they are the floor of ethical practice. Ibogaine carries real risk. Its window of therapeutic potential is narrow and context-dependent. The gap between what clinical frameworks are being built and what experienced practitioners know to be necessary is not a refinement problem; it is a safety problem.

A significant proportion of those seeking ibogaine treatment are first responders and military veterans, often arriving with complex trauma, TBI, and moral injury after being underserved by institutional care. For these populations, relational holding is foundational – not optional – and without it, high-throughput, depersonalized models risk replicating the very disconnection they are trying to heal, carrying both clinical and ethical consequences.

On intellectual property, biopiracy, and the ethics of extraction

Ibogaine is a naturally occurring compound with a long and documented history of traditional and sacramental use. As it moves into formal development pathways — with growing interest in intellectual property frameworks, proprietary formulations, and downstream commercial stakes — questions of ownership, access, and benefit distribution are no longer abstract. They are already taking shape, and they are doing so in ways that demand explicit accountability.

Gabon is the country of origin and long-standing sacramental custodian of iboga.  Iboga is not only a biological resource, but also a pillar of cultural and spiritual heritage in Gabon, embedded in traditional knowledge systems that must be fully recognized and protected. That is not a background fact to be acknowledged once and set aside — it is a foundational ethical reality that must actively structure how ibogaine is researched, developed, owned, and commercialized. This means meaningful participation by Gabonese institutions and communities in research design and intellectual property development, fair benefit-sharing agreements negotiated at the outset — not as an afterthought — and genuine, ongoing engagement with the forest-dwelling and land-connected communities who have carried this knowledge across generations. 

Despite a recent visit by Americans for Ibogaine (AFI) to Gabon and engagement with federal authorities there, free, prior informed consent has not been obtained from traditional communities. There is a growing and warranted sense of exclusion — no defined reciprocity, no royalties, no negotiated terms. While the United States is not a signatory to the Nagoya Protocol, the ethical framework it enshrines is not optional. The 2024 WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge makes clear that any entity advancing biotechnology derived from traditional medicines must secure free, prior informed consent, negotiate benefit-sharing agreements with traditional communities before projects advance, and include traditional knowledge into development. Non-signatory status is not a legal exemption — it is a political choice, and it will be legible as such.

The pattern being established now — in which Western institutions claim legitimacy over a medicine while its origins are acknowledged only symbolically — is not new. It is the structure of extraction dressed in the language of medicine. Naming it clearly is not obstructionism; it is a precondition for any development pathway that intends to be ethical rather than merely legal.

On the gap between principle and structure

We anticipate that much of what is written here may be met with agreement at the level of principle. That is precisely the problem. In emerging treatment systems, public agreement has too often functioned as a substitute for structural change. The gap between what is acknowledged and what is actually built is not incidental — it is one of the central problems now taking shape around ibogaine, and it is already visible.

What is visible: the minimization of preparation and integration in scaled delivery models. The inflation of pharmacological narratives — efficacy claims stripped of context — that serve commercial legibility over clinical accuracy. The premature normalization of proprietary and institutional control over a medicine that belongs to no Western entity. The exclusion thus far of experienced practitioners from advisory and design roles. The use of ethical language without clear accountability to the communities and territories from which this knowledge emerges. These are not risks on the horizon. They are present conditions.

What we are asking for

We are not opposing medicalization. We are refusing the premise that medicalization, scale, or institutional legitimacy are inherently synonymous with integrity. They are not. The former can be achieved while the latter is systematically undermined, and the history of pharmaceutical development gives us no shortage of examples.

What we are asking for is structural, not rhetorical. Preparation and integration must be essential components of care — not optional add-ons stripped out by cost or scale pressures. Ibogaine facilitation models must address relational, psychological, and existential dimensions alongside pharmacological ones. Longitudinal follow-up must be built into program design from the outset. Experiential and traditional knowledge must actively inform clinical and policy frameworks from the outset, not merely be cited in preambles. And benefit-sharing, consent, and reciprocity with Gabon and its traditional communities must be embedded at the foundation of any development pathway — not deferred until commercial interests are already entrenched.

At this stage, how ibogaine is formalized may prove as consequential as whether it is formalized at all. The decisions being made now — about ownership, about protocols, about who is centered and who is consulted — will shape what this field becomes for decades.  There is still a window to address these issues constructively, but it is narrowing quickly.  In Gabon, the issue of full consultation and reciprocity is beginning to reach national-level attention, which is likely to accelerate a response from the highest levels of government. 

In summary, we make two requests: 

1. We ask that Gabonese authorities be granted time to finalise their strategy and legal framework for participation in the development of iboga and ibogaine-based therapies. 
2. We urge AFI and US State and University initiatives to engage formally and substantively with the existing community of practice, both clinical and traditional, in order to draw on the decades of accumulated knowledge to help ensure that ibogaine therapy is delivered safely and effectively.

This letter is offered in the spirit of clarity, shared responsibility, and public record.  A French language version of the letter has also been prepared for full participation among Gabonese organisations and stakeholders.

Respectfully, 

Anders Beatty, Ibogaine Coaching Services and Awake net

Jeremy Weate, Global Iboga Therapy Alliance (GITA)

Tobias Erny, Global Iboga Therapy Alliance (GITA)

Ryan “Ghenigho” Rich, Root Healing, Bassé Root

Adam Penkul, Iboga Insight

Andrew Tatarsky, PhD, Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy

Jevon Nally,  The Living Lodge, SPC. Residential Aftercare Center

Asha Caravelli, Ibogaine Practitioner, Awakening in the Dream, Doula, EKR Foundation Mexico Centro, Alumni Member

Thom Leonard, Anzelmo Ibogaine Center/ Ibogaine Institute

Paul Featherstone, Veteran Ibogaine facilitator and consultant

Ian Potapoff, Botanical Extraction Specialist, Whispering Wings / Ibogaine Advocate

Lakshmi Narayan, President, Awake.net, an entheogenic noosphere

Tricia Eastman, Cofounder, Ancestral Heart nonprofit +  Bwiti initiated traditional practitioner

Sidsel Marie, PhD-fellow specialised in iboga and ibogaine, University of Bergen

Dr. Joseph Peter Barsuglia, Ibogaine researcher, Advisor to Beond, The Mission Within, Lionheart Ventures, Delphi Circle, Ancestral Heart nonprofit, Bwiti initiated traditional practitioner

Lori Shindel, Ibogaine consultant, Global Iboga Therapy Alliance (GITA)

Yann Guignon, Blessings Of The Forest (President) & Maghanga Ma Nzambé (Ambassador) – Gabon NGOs dedicated to Cultural/Natural Conservation & Advocacy – WIPO Observer

Garyth Moxey, Inner Realms Center

Blair Bromley, Inner Realms Center

Svea Nielsen, Psychologist and Facilitator, nemus.life

Andrew White, former Special Operations Forces veteran, Addiction and PTSD survivor.

Andrew “Horse” Hudson, Former Special Operations Forces veteran, ibogaine advocate and documentary filmmaker

Ian MacKenna, Red Feather Sciences + Bwiti Initiate

Mark and Robyn Howard, Ibogasoul Shamanic Healing

Taylor “Moupetou” Albamonti, Muanga Benda Missoko Bwiti Church

Troy Valencia, Founder of Sacred Roots Foundation 501(c)(3), Iboga Provider, 2 x Bwiti Initiate

Joaly Trinidad, Founder of Sacred Roots Foundation 501(c)(3

Karen Story, Ibogaine Preparation and Integration Coach

Barry Rossinoff, IbogaQuest, founder

Reilly Smith, Seeds of Change

Cedar Rayne, Iboga facilitator and Coach

Iwan Morgan, Bwiti Nganga

Bodhi Chapman More, Bwiti Nganga Student

Hugues Obiang Poitevin aka TataYo, Co- founder of Ebando association (Present in the Gabon’s associative world with Oneto, Odimbossoukou & Rengouwa since 1981)

Dylan Geoffrey, Partner of the Association for the Peoples of Waka (APW)

Elizabeth Bast MOUGHEESI, Maboundi Nganga (healer) & ceremony facilitator

Chor Boogie GNYANGOU, Bwiti Nganga (healer) & ceremony facilitator

Ngondet na Dipouma, Founder of Yaou Yaou Wellness, Maboundi na Moudanga Bwiti Initiate

Kristie Jacobsen, Ibogaine Practitioner, Founder, Casa-Well

Noah Lara, Co-founder, Root + Ritual

Christopher Laurence, Ibogaine provider, consultant

Fernando Vega, MD

Lindsey White, Preparation and integration coach, VETS and Ambio

Mathieu Soulignac, Science communicator in anthropology, Bwiti initiate

Reed Wirthman, Founder Threshold Bioscience

Paije Alexandra West, Founder ETÉREO Baja and Stone West, Bwiti Fang and Missoko initiate

Fletcher Burdick, Co-Founder ETÉREO Baja, Iboga provider, Q’ero initiate

As couples’ therapists, we see the same painful sticking points again and again. Couples arrive at therapy with a familiar experience: “We love each other, but we can’t seem to understand or reach each other anymore. Love doesn’t seem to be enough.” Conversations escalate quickly or shut down entirely. Attempts at understanding and repair feel pointless. Even couples who are motivated, insightful, and committed often find themselves repeating the same painful patterns despite months, or sometimes years, of traditional therapy.

Increasingly, these couples are asking about ketamine-assisted couple therapy. Not because they want a quick fix, but because they have tried traditional paths and still feel stuck in entrenched relational patterns. They deeply desire increased flexibility and support in accessing emotions that feel otherwise unreachable. For some, ketamine opens a window where vulnerability feels safer, empathy feels more accessible, and new ways of relating can begin to emerge.

Why Now? 

Psychedelic-assisted couple therapy is not new. Couples were prescribed MDMA and other psychedelics in the 1980s as part of therapy. However, psychedelic-assisted couple therapy development was halted by the War on Drugs when many psychedelic medicines were classified as Schedule I controlled substances. Over the last decade, there have been several cultural and relational shifts that are accelerating interest in psychedelic-assisted couple therapy. 

On a broader level, we are in the midst of a psychedelic resurgence. This is driven by expanding research, increasing clinical legitimacy, and greater public awareness of psychedelic-assisted therapies. Ketamine is in a unique position: it is legal, widely used in medicine, and supported by a growing evidence base for clinical presentations that have particularly rigid emotion and thought patterns, such as depression, suicidality, and trauma-related conditions.

At the same time, couples are under increased stress. Parenting demands and time scarcity leave little room for connection. Trauma histories often surface more clearly in adult attachment relationships. Polarization, both societal and interpersonal, can intensify resentment and withdrawal. Many couples feel not only distressed, but exhausted. 

Ketamine-assisted couple therapy offers something distinct: a way to soften defensive barriers and create conditions where emotional access, flexibility, and connection become more possible, and can be reached without spending years in therapy.

Brief Background on KAP

Ketamine has been used safely for decades as an anesthetic. More recently, research has expanded its use in mental health contexts, particularly for treatment-resistant depression and suicidality. At certain doses, ketamine can function as a psychedelic that is capable of expanding perspective, increasing tolerance of challenging emotional experiences, and facilitating new meaning-making.

Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) is not simply medication administration. It is a structured therapeutic process that includes preparation, medicine sessions, and integration. When applied to couples, this structure must be thoughtfully adapted to attend not only to two individuals, but to the relationship itself.

Most couples seek therapy because they feel stuck in rigid interactional patterns– often some version of pursue/withdraw, criticize/defend, or escalate/shut down. They describe feeling misunderstood, unseen, and alone even while sharing a life together.

This matters deeply. Relationship distress is one of the strongest predictors of poorer mental and physical health outcomes. At the same time, people consistently report that close relationships are the single most meaningful aspect of their lives. When relationships suffer, the impact on their wider life is profound.

Ketamine-assisted couple therapy aims to help couples shift out of these stuck patterns– not by bypassing the work of therapy, but by supporting conditions that make that work more accessible.

Mechanisms of Change 

There is not currently clinical trial research on couples’ KAP; however, emerging clinical models suggest that ketamine supports relational change across cognitive, emotional, and behavioral domains. 

Cognitively, ketamine can increase flexibility and reduce rigid, threat-based stories. Partners may find it easier to see multiple perspectives, make new meaning of past events, and imagine alternative relational futures.

Emotionally, ketamine often deepens vulnerability and emotional openness. Many couples report increased self-compassion, empathy for their partner, and tolerance for difficult feelings. These shifts allow space to more deeply understand and accept one another. 

Behaviorally, ketamine may reduce avoidance of challenging interpersonal experiences and interrupt habitual and dysfunctional interaction patterns. When paired with evidence-based couple therapy interventions, these shifts can translate into concrete changes in how couples communicate and reconnect after conflict.

What Can Couples Expect? 

Couples engage in a comprehensive assessment that includes one conjoint session and individual sessions with each partner. The therapist identifies the couple’s core dysfunctional relational pattern and offers a collaborative case formulation.

Preparation sessions focus on relational intention-setting, emotional safety, and readiness for medicine sessions. Couples and the therapist collaboratively discuss dosing based on the assessment and conceptualization together, including whether sessions will be psycholytic or psychedelic. 

The conjoint medicine session is followed by integration sessions, where insights are translated into relational understanding and behavioral change. Ketamine is used as a tool to enhance couple therapy goals.

Clinical Considerations 

Ketamine is a prescription medication with medical contraindications and requires collaboration with qualified prescribers. Couples’ KAP is not appropriate for coercive or unsafe relationships, significant power imbalances, or situations where high conflict requires stabilization first.

Therapists must also attend to risks such as bypassing– when couples mistake a meaningful session for lasting change without doing the ongoing work. Misattunement can occur when partners have different depths or tones of experience. And sometimes, ketamine leads to painful clarity about wanting to fundamentally change or even end a relationship.

Why Specialized Training Matters

Couples’ KAP is not simply individual KAP with two people in the room. The relationship itself is the client. Research consistently shows that working with couples without specific training can be harmful, and this risk is amplified when non-ordinary states of consciousness are involved. Ketamine can intensify emotional material. Without a safe, structured container, couples may feel raw and unresolved. Couple-based integration is essential.

High-quality training programs in couples’ KAP must emphasize therapy skills. Training should include didactic education, experiential learning, supervision with case review, and group consultation. Therapists need to learn about preparation logistics that are unique to a couple; dyadic integration processes and strategies; managing and leveraging relational dynamics; and scope-of-practice clarity and collaboration with medical providers. Specialized training supports therapist skillset and confidence, client safety, and ethical practice.

Conclusion

Couples feel stuck and want to heal. Therapists feel stuck and want to help.

Ketamine is not a magic fix. But when used thoughtfully, ethically, and within an evidence-based couple therapy framework, it can be a powerful tool for supporting connection and lasting relational change. As interest continues to grow, therapists have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to pursue adequate training in couple-based assessment and integration, and bring this work into practice with care.

About Enamory

Enamory is a clinic, training institute, and research center specializing in ketamine-assisted couple therapy, clinician training, and the development of evidence-based psychedelic approaches for relationships.

Hear the authors on Psychedelics Today podcast here.