EP. 17: Ibogaine Therapy
It’s a root to treat the root cause…Tabernanthe iboga (iboga) is an evergreen rainforest shrub native to Central Africa and Trevor Millar has utilized its healing properties to treat folks like you and me who are addicts or recovering addicts, veterans or suffering from PTSD, battling traumatic brain injuries, struggling with anxiety or depression, and even Parkinson's disease patients.
Trevor is the owner of Ambio Life Sciences and his psycho-spiritual treatment is legal in Tijuana, Mexico where he operates two coastal homes that are setup with medical providers, chefs, and caring specialists.
In the early 1970s, so many plant medicines that have psychedelic properties were outlawed in the U.S. and the U.N. followed suit along with much of the rest of the world after that. But Professor David Nutt who was an English neuropsychopharmacologist put out a chart in the early 2010s that showed the #1 most harmful drug is alcohol followed by heroin while psychedelics are at the opposite end of the scale.
Show Notes
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So I'd like to welcome Trevor. He's a social entrepreneur with over a decade of experience providing Ibogaine therapy. He's responsible for various aspects of Ambio's operations and communications. He previously served as a board member and co-founder of the Canadian Psychedelic Association. And from 2018 to 2021, he was on the board of directors for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies in Canada where he acted as a chair of the board for over two years. He was featured in the award-winning documentary about using magic mushrooms and iboga to treat addiction, anxiety, and depression called Dosed,
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which was released in 2019. So I'd like to welcome you to the podcast. How I came in contact with you. We of course listened to your interview on Sean Ryan. And my husband told me about it. I listened to it. And I have a background in clinical nutrition and herbs.
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And you're my people. So I wanted to pick your speaking. Just about Ibogaine and your services that you guys do offer. So I know the story but I'd like you to share how you actually got involved with psychedelics and your journey into what you're doing
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now. Sure, thanks Heather, thanks for having me. Yeah I guess journey from from psychedelics came from multiple paths. I think for one I was exposed to them at a fairly young age just as a you know as a naive teenager. I was kind of very much raised on the just say no to drugs but then in the mid 90s there was a flood of LSD into Canada and when it turned up I took it. So I had zero idea about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics at the time.
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But I do remember saying to my friends when we were on it together, that this is what adults have forgotten that has made the world so screwed up. So, you know, some kind of a therapeutic edge was coming through. So I moved to Vancouver from Toronto in, I moved to a ski resort called Whistler in 1996. I moved to Vancouver in 2001. And then there was a shop in Vancouver called the Urban Shaman.
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And I saw it kind of from across the road. I'm like, that couldn't be what I think it is, is it? But I went in and sure enough, they sold all these entheogenic plants that were legal in Canada, kind of obscure plants. So it was through that shop
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that I actually first heard of Eboga, but I was a broke 20-something at the time. I heard it's a 24-hour long psychedelic journey and it costs 500 bucks. So I'm like, I'm never gonna try that one. But then, you know, years later, after 9-11, I was very kind of distraught with the
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state of the world and I started looking at how I might be able to give back. I started focusing on Vancouver's downtown east side, which is known as the poorest post-Dakota Canada. There's a very high rate of drug use down there. And just started plugging away, seeing if there might be able, if there might be something I might be able to do. And that turned into essentially about a 10-year networking and research project. And then eventually Ibogaine came on the radar as a way to potentially help. I was having
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a meeting with a woman who had worked down there for decades, looking at different ways I might be able to help. We really couldn't come up with much. But the whole time I was speaking to her, there was a binder on the wall behind her that said Ibogaine on it. I said, well, what about Ibogaine? She said, actually, I have people calling me for that all the time. So Ibogaine has incredible anti-addictive properties.
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So I had never really put two and two together. But she, from that point forward, would forward me any calls of people interested in Ibogaine. I gave it to a couple of people. Right out of the gate, I saw quickly that I didn't know what I was doing, so thankfully nobody got hurt in that process. But in 2012, I was invited to my first Ibogaine conference and I was introduced to a gentleman who became my first business
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partner. He knew what he was doing with Ibogaine. We set up my business in Vancouver called Liberty Root Therapy Limited. I was able to legally operate in Canada from 2012 through until 2017. Ibogaine was listed as a natural health product within Canada during that time, so there was this window of opportunity where I didn't have to be an underground provider, which was never my intent. And, yeah, we treated about 200 people in that time, mostly for opioid use disorder.
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And Ibogaine, that's really what it's particularly good at, is getting people off opioids without the painful withdrawals. It's got a very high success rate at doing that. And then, yeah, in 2017, Health Canada changed the regulatory status of Ibogaine, so I haven't been able to work with it there since. But I was able to be on the board of directors of those non-profit, the guy who
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started MAPS, Rick Doblin, eventually introduced me to Amber Marcus-Compone, who started a non-profit that was sending US Special Forces veterans for Ibogaine treatments. Marcus is a former Navy SEAL. He had tried everything after retirement to make himself better and eventually tried Ibogaine as a last-ditch effort. And it worked very well. And they started this nonprofit that has now sent more than a thousand Special Forces veterans
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through for this treatment. But after that meeting, Amber was very diligent in being in touch with me every couple of months, kind of thing, to see if there might be a way for us to work together. And that meant that I needed to find a place to legally operate. So I am now, I now co-own a company called Ambien Life Sciences and we have three facilities here in Tijuana. We pick people up in Mexico, or in San Diego, we bring them down to Tijuana, just south of Tijuana on the coast. We have
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some beautiful homes that we work out of. And yeah, we have three houses, one house where we detox people and two houses where we do the five day psycho-spiritual protocol, we call it. And it's the one that's been working very well for veterans and people with traumatic brain injury and things like that.
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I love that. What do you think, from your standpoint, the success rate with that is?
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For addiction, for one, there needs to be way more studies on Ibogaine overall. But for addiction, anecdotally, the success rate seems to be anywhere from 40 to 60 percent. And then you really need to look at, well, what does the success rate mean? Does that mean they abstained for a little while and their addiction has never been the same since kind of thing. So it's tough to really nail down, but I think that's a good ballpark 40 to 60% success rate,
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0:07:51
which many doctors I've spoke to over the years said even if it's a 10% success rate, it basically obliterates any other addiction statistics out there. So for addiction, that seems to be the ballpark. And then with this psycho-spiritual protocol, I don't know, it's a super high success rate. So people come to us for, whether it's a soldier with PTSD, or it is, you know, somebody who's coming to us with symptoms that
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are similar to those of PTSD, whether that's depression, anxiety, lack of focus, lack of meaning, the triggers that set people off, anger, rage, things like that. And then the other reason people are coming to this five-day protocol is Ibogaine seems to be working very well to treat traumatic brain injury. So we finished a study with Stanford University, 30 Special Forces veterans. They needed a traumatic brain injury to get into the study. They went
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to Stanford prior to coming here. They got brain scans and a battery of other tests. Then they came here for Ibogaine. Then they went immediately back to Stanford for more brain scans, more personality tests. And then a month later, they did a follow-up as well. So there has so far been one paper published out of that study. It's been published in the journal Nature Medicine, so a very prestigious journal, but that first paper measured depression, anxiety,
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PTSD, and disability scores, which all went from almost off the charts down to next to nothing after Ibogaine. In fact, most of those guys don't qualify as having any of those things anymore. The interesting thing is a month later, a lot of the scores got better, or a handful of the scores got better, most notably the disability score. So Ibogaine stays in the system and continues to do something, you know, even up to a month later it seems. The imaging studies haven't been published yet, but I know from speaking to the faculty and staff involved in that study that the pre-Ibogaine brain scans are clearly showing traumatic brain injury.
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The post-brain scans in a lot of these guys are showing definite improvement in the traumatic brain injury and even complete reversal in some of the guys. So this is a long way to say there's a very high success rate in this five-day protocol. I would say we have, you know, I'll be conservative and say we have a 95% satisfaction rate. I think it's quite a bit higher than that. It's very rare that somebody leaves here and says, Ibogaine didn't do its job,
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or didn't do what I was hoping it would do. So, yeah, to treat things like depression, anxiety, you know, lack of focus, ADHD symptoms, all of that stuff, Ibogaine seems incredibly effective. And then the fact that it's actually working on traumatic brain injury is just incredible.
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0:11:17
And the fact that we've got the scans now to show that, I'm excited for that, the imaging scans to get published. But the other things I know about the data on the imaging scan is, you know, it's fairly common, you know, it's still quite remarkable that the gray matter in the brain increases volume or changes.
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When we talk about neuroplasticity, we're talking about gray matter. But they actually saw the white matter of the brain, which is kind of some of the more in brain systems. They saw the volume increase in some of those areas in the brain, which they've never seen anything do that before. They took those brain scans and they ran them through an AI algorithm. So this, this AI has, you know, studied thousands upon thousands of brains, and
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the age has been inputted. And they took these and, and normally, like if you have, you know, you scan your scan your brain, once it's a 40 year old brain, if you scan it again, a week later, it's still going to be a 40 year old brain. But what they found from this AI algorithm is the brain on average out of these 30 guys got one point three seven years younger after an Ibogaine journey. So super exciting and interesting stuff for sure.
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Yeah, I love that.
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And I love that there's research now coming out behind it from that medical standpoint. So it's almost it's addressing the root cause
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and regenerating that nervous system. Yeah, yeah, a nervous you know and I don't like saying things like this because it's probably not exactly what's happening but the word reset comes up a lot like a nervous system reset and you reset. And, you know, who knows if that's what's actually happening, but that sure
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seems to be what's happening for a lot of these people. That's amazing. I love that. And then I remember hearing from previously listening to you that it works well with Parkinson's, right? You're seeing some improvement with
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Parkinson's? Yeah, so the story there is somebody much smarter than I once wrote a paper that said it seems that at least the dopamine system in these people who use drugs is getting benefit from taking ibogaine and it is the dopamine system in Parkinson's disease. And the patient D, he has since passed, not necessarily from his Parkinson's disease, I believe he had cancer when he passed,
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but there's a paper out there and the patient is labeled patient D. And he was the first one to come down to Mexico and microdose with Ibogaine. So he stayed down for a month, I think, the first time. And I think he started with just five milligrams of Ibogaine
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a day which is next to nothing. I think they increased it to 10 or 20 milligrams by the end of the 30 days because everything seemed to be going fine. But just a small amount of medicine every day, you wouldn't even feel it, you wouldn't know you've taken anything. But at the end of 14 days he started seeing improvement in the dozen or so symptoms that they used to measure Parkinson's disease. At the end of 30 days, he was smiling for the first time in years because that's one of the things that happens with Parkinson's patients. I actually became a good friend
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of this guy. I was providing Ibogaine to him at a certain point. And he had a bad back a car accident years ago, but I think he was in his early 70s when I first met him, and you wouldn't have been able to tell he had Parkinson's disease. He ended up maybe near the end of his life, he was taking closer to anywhere between 50 to 100 milligrams of Ibogaine a day. He still didn't feel it at all, but these symptoms got incredibly better. So this small paper was published about patient D and then a friend of a friend got in touch with me. He had Parkinson's disease. He
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was about 50 years old. When I first met him he had just driven from Arizona to British Columbia straight to my house to get some medicine. He lived in British Columbia but he spent winters in Arizona. And he was very, he obviously had Parkinson's disease. He came, he picked up some microdoses. He went off, he started seeing improvement. He picked up more microdoses. There was actually a kind of an accidental, I don't know if we call it a blinding or he was kind of accidentally given a placebo because
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I had this was early days in my Ibogaine career and I got a batch of Ibogaine that wasn't very good. It wasn't very strong at all. And one of these batches of microdoses that I gave to him was this bad batch. But then he took off to Arizona and I wasn't able to get in touch with him. I was trying again and again, couldn't get in touch with him.
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A couple months later he gets in touch with me and he's all depressed and he's like, oh, it's not working anymore. I'm like, I know, I've been trying to get in touch with you, you don't have good medicine. So he was relieved then, but that kind of shows that it wasn't a placebo for him. It stopped working when it was a different batch of medicine. So his line to me that I like to share with people is,
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you know, a couple years down the road, I just asked, you know, is this still working for you? He said, Trevor, I should be getting worse and I'm not. So now we've seen, you know, dozens of people who have seen success microdosing from Parkinson's with Ibogaine, yeah.
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Well, that's a great option. I know my dad had Parkinson's, and of course, you know, L-DOPA, there's not a whole lot of options, and it's growing in diagnosis and popularity. I feel like so many more patients
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have Parkinson's and autoimmunes now. So I love that we're using native medicine, right, to kind of treat the root cause.
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Yeah, beautiful, and it's a root. And it's a root, yeah.
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It is.
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Now, something I want you to share is just a little bit of background with Ibogaine and then the 5-MeO DMT. Because I know a lot of my listeners are not familiar with the 5-MeO.
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Sure.
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Sure, probably a lot of your listeners aren't familiar with Ibogaine either, so maybe I'll take a couple steps back on that. But Ibogaine comes from a plant called Iboga, which is native to central West Africa, countries like Gabon and Cameroon. It has been used there for centuries, if not millennia, as a medicine and as a tool to initiate people into adulthood. The Bwiti spiritual tradition has grown out of the use of this medicine. It's a beautiful tradition. And it's actually the second layer of root bark on a shrub called Tabernanthe iboga, which is used in these rituals and initiations and healings.
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that route called Ibogaine and in 1962 a gentleman by the name of Howard Lotsoff his chemist buddy knew that he would try anything and he said I have this Ibogaine stuff it's pretty interesting you might want to try it. He took it and Howard was also addicted to heroin he was physically dependent on heroin and he went on this incredible journey had no idea what he was getting in for, came out 24 hours later and said, wow I'm never gonna do that again, that was crazy. But then he
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noticed, wait a second, I haven't wanted heroin the whole time I've been on this nor do I want it now. So that's kind of when it's anti-addictive properties was were discovered in the West and he became a champion of the medicine and started knocking on doors and got the right kind of attention and you know I can I can I owe everything to Howard being an Ibogaine provider now we wouldn't know about it so that's Ibogaine and yeah we're learning more and more things about it over the years it's not
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0:20:21
5-MeO-DMT, it is 5-Methoxy-Dimethyltryptamine is what it stands for. It comes through nature through the Sonoran Desert Toad or the Bufo alivarius toad. So it is a toad native to And it has a secretion that comes out of its back when it's stressed out. And you can take that secretion and kind of smear it on some glass and then dry that glass out
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and then vaporize that substance. And it's an incredibly powerful psychedelic. I think, yeah, it's mind-blowingly powerful. So there is a synthetic version of that available and that's actually what we use down here. And it is, you know, to describe the experience of either of these substances or any psychedelic substance is very difficult, but 5-MeO-DMT has been called the bliss molecule or the God particle, the God molecule, it very much, it kind of brings you into a
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non-dualistic state. So the way I describe that to my clients when I'm working with them is, imagine you're a drop of water or a drop of rain, and all of a sudden you get to experience yourself as the whole ocean for a few minutes. So it really puts you in touch with kind of everything and you get to feel yourself as one with everything to varying degrees.
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So it's beautiful and we work with Ibogaine and 5-MeO together and the reason we do that is it was called Crossroads. Martin Polanco ran it and he had a staff member called Annie Ortiz who started working with him and they had she had been kind of trained on the use of 5-MeO and she saw these people going through Ibogaine and Ibogaine is a very challenging substance to take.
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You really feel physically depleted afterwards. It takes a while to recover. And she kind of just recognized where these folks were at and said, I think taking 5-MeO-DMT might be really good after Ibogaine. So Martine agreed, they did that, and it really is.
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0:23:07
It kind of speeds up the recovery process. There's a bunch of metaphors we use. It's the cherry on top. It's the icing on the cake. I love one I like is Ibogaine seems to sandblast you from the inside out. And then 5-MeO polishes you nicely from there.
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0:23:27
So I first I heard about the mixing of the two medicines. I was skeptical at first. And then in 2020, I was still in Vancouver. I did a bit of underground work that year. COVID was happening. The phone was ringing off the hook for people wanting to detox off opiate. So I did do a handful of underground treatments in Vancouver that year,
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although I don't like doing underground work. But one young gentleman that I had treated, he went through his Ibogaine experience to come off a decade long heroin habit. And he was pretty rough afterwards. And I said, Well, I heard 5-MeO DMT might be good after this. Do you want to give it a shot? I happen to have some. He said, Yes, I gave it to him. And he just kind
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of laid down after I gave it to him, but then sat right back up and yelled, Wow. It was, it was the most authentic wow I have ever heard in my life. If I was as loud as he was, it would probably blow out our speakers. So I won't do that. But he kind of immediately popped through he immediately kind of recovered from the Ibogaine journey. And when I moved to Tijuana, that was the
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protocol that had been used for the veterans that were coming down was the Ibogaine and the 5-MEO. So we were asked if we could provide that protocol. We said sure, we have been doing that and it is a really spectacular combination those two
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0:25:03
medicines. Wow, that's really neat. I know you've shared some stories but one story that has stuck out with me is the story of the young girl, the 12-year-old, that was, was it depression, anxiety? So if you could share that one, that struck me.
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0:25:21
Sure. That's my partner, Brianna, my lady Brianna, who is nine months pregnant. We're due June 30th. She can probably hear me right now, but she, her friend knew that Brianna kind of met me and was kind of working in this healing world as it were and she shared that her daughter, she had three children and one of her daughters was kind of severely depressed, was about 11 or 12 years old, couldn't, you know, had no zest for life. It was really hurting the family overall. And Brianna said, you know, you may want to try microdosing mushrooms with her.
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0:26:14
And this was kind of out of this family's ballpark. This was kind of a very strict Christian family, but they were desperate to do something. The mother was actually a medical professional, but they were desperate to try. Microdosing mushrooms again is incredibly safe. Psilocybin mushrooms are technically the safest drug we know of. There is a graph put out by
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David Nutt at Imperial College of London a number of years ago. You can find it out online, but it lists all the drugs and how dangerous they are and Alcohol by far is the most dangerous and the most debilitating to society Heroin is number two behind alcohol and all the way at the other graph other end of the graph is psilocybin mushrooms They're very very safe. So
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0:27:07
You know Brianna didn't mind suggesting that you might want to try some psilocybin mushrooms. So they got their hands on some and she started putting the mushrooms into this young girl's smoothies in the morning. And it's just a tiny tiny bit, again you don't really feel microdosing if you're doing it right. It's kind of a sub-perceptual experience. And she was honest. She's like, I'm going to give you some mushroom medicine. And it worked wonders. And they
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she would she would have it she would not have it every day. She would say, Mom, I think I need some mushroom medicine today when she felt as though she needed it. Her siblings would say, I think she needs some some of that medicine today and that went on for maybe three to six months and now there's no need for it. She's kind of completely moved beyond whatever that depressive phase was and she hasn't needed any mushrooms for more than a
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couple of years now I think and she's doing incredibly well so it really got
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her out of that funk. I love that. It's frustrating to me as a provider how we use some herbs like valerian and ashwagandha and lion's mane, but then other herbs we don't or we can't use, you know?
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0:28:36
Yeah, it's the arrogance of mankind, right? Like, if it grows out of the ground, I think, in my opinion, nature has legitimized it enough. And when we start in our human arrogance, outlying things like plants, I think that's what it is, is human arrogance. And of course, there's plants that can kill you. That's kind of the argument I hear all the time. Well, nature, you know, the poppy is, you know, heroin comes from nature too. I'm like, yeah, and there's nothing I would prefer on the battlefield if I got my leg blown off, then some heroin, you know? Like
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0:29:17
there's an appropriate time and place for everything. It's all about context. So just to flat outlaw a plant without considering larger contextual things, I think, is arrogant. So yeah, it is frustrating.
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0:29:34
were there cultures that noticed that that toad secreted that psychedelic? Like what was it all about? Because I don't think I know.
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0:29:46
That's an interesting one. There doesn't seem to be any indigenous use of this toad. It seems to... I wish I could remember. I'm gonna try. Hopefully it comes to me. There's somebody who Hamilton's Pharmacopeia he He does a YouTube show you can check it out But he kind of really traced this down and it seems to have been somebody in the 1970s You know a westerner who had an intuition that
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0:30:19
a toad would produce DMT. And I don't know how he did his research or what he did, but that's the big, that one's the big stretch. Like a lot of these substances, like ayahuasca, like how did you know to take those two plants, boil them together for 72 hours, and then you would have this potent psychedelic potion.
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0:30:44
Well, and then they will say, well the plants told us. And I can see that, that there is, you know, there's plants that can open you up to kind of ideas and maybe direct contact with spirits as it were from these other plants. And yeah, the plants might tell us, but the 5-MeO-DMT, that one's a big stretch. I'm going to take this toad, I'm going to freak it out a little bit get this secretion dry it on a pane of glass and then put it in a pipe and Smoke it and see what happens, right?
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0:31:21
Yeah, whoever this guy was he I believe he wrote a guide on What to do and that kind of got things rolling in this direction with 5meo DMT But there's yeah, there's a bunch of conflicting stories on that so okay yeah I was curious about that one. The other crazy one which apparently comes apparently the the ayahuasca told them to do this but the other one is cambo or combo K-A-M-B-O and it's another it's a frog from the Amazon and it secretes something out of its back as well. So you kind of catch
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0:32:07
this frog, you don't have to harm it, you take this secretion from its back, you dry it on a little piece of wood, and then you rehydrate it with some water and it basically turns into what looks like little snot balls. But then the root of administration is burn your skin, peel off the blister, and put that snot ball on that blister, or on the wound from the blister. So that's a wild one. Like how did you figure that out? And it's a very powerful
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0:32:42
and beautiful medicine. Huh, interesting. And do those act similar to you know Ibogaine where I know I've heard you say before the plant or the medicine will show you what you need to see I mean are those all pretty
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0:32:59
along that same that same line? I think so yeah I think you know these these substances have a way of going in interacting with your mind your body your subconscious your spirit as it were and pointing out what you need. The combo is interesting when you take it. For one, it isn't really psychedelic. It's about a 20-minute experience. It's incredibly purgative. You drink loads of water beforehand because of that. And you can really take it and you feel it scanning your body
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0:33:33
and then focusing in on particular areas. It seems to be very effective at treating a lot of different things. Wow
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0:33:40
that's neat. Is there a, I know this is a silly question, is there like a book or textbook or history book where they looked at all of these ancient cultures on these psychedelics and have like broken it down? I think the best one that
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0:33:58
I've seen as kind of a complete compendium like that is a book called The Plants of the Gods. And it's written by Richard Evans Schultes. He was a Harvard professor in the earlier part of the 1900s. He was the first white man to take ayahuasca, for example. Yeah, there's a, I think Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, is a co-author on that book as well. But that's, that's the best one that I've found. It just has every, every known psychedelic and, not every known psychedelic, every known planned medicine
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0:34:45
and a description of the potential. Okay, I'll have to look that one up. Yeah. And currently, outlawed obviously in the US, outlawed in Canada, Mexico is the only place for these, correct? Yeah, so Ibogaine itself,
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0:35:03
Ibogaine is unique in that so many plant medicines or you know drugs, whatever you want to call it. In the early 1970s, the US outlawed a whole bunch of psychedelics and the UN kind of followed. And then from there, from the UN, they got pushed to the rest of the world. So in many countries, the same drugs are just outlawed in as many places. Like in Canada, I worked with it as a natural health product, which is like a supplement, so it's actually misclassified there, but they didn't then outlaw it. They rescheduled it as a
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0:35:53
prescription drug, but because it hasn't gone through clinical trials, it's not available as a prescription. So in Mexico, it's just it's unregulated. It's not mentioned anywhere. So it's, you know, I would still say there's a bit of gray to the area, you know, it's it's, but but we're not breaking any laws by working with it here. And there are New Zealand, it's just not regulated.
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0:36:31
That's a gift for sure. And then 5-MEO-DMT is just kind of a lot newer on the scene, a little more obscure, and again, has it been regulated in the same way?
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0:36:45
Good to know. Now, explain to everybody if they would come down because I know my husband and I plan on coming down next spring and we were going to do it this past spring but then we are pregnant with our third so we'll see you in the spring but I'm looking forward to hearing your perspective with what everyone can expect if they want to
1
0:37:09
come down and for sure experience yeah so it's super easy to get to us. You just have to fly to San Diego. We encourage people to fly in the day before and put themselves up at a hotel so that they don't have to mess with flights first thing in the morning that they're going to be getting picked up. We pick people up at a hotel near the airport at about 1030 a.m. It tends to be on a Monday or Tuesday. We have two houses that do these five-day protocols and we stagger them
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0:37:40
so one gets picked up Monday, one gets picked up Tuesday. We're only about 40 minutes from the pickup point to the house that we operate out of. Upon arrival we help people unpack, we quite honestly go through your luggage, make sure there's nothing that's kind of contraindicated with Ibogaine because it can get dangerous if you mix certain substances. You kind of hand over any medications that you have with you.
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0:38:06
Some of those medications are fine to take while you're with us, as long as they're not contraindicated with Ibogaine. We just need to dispense anything that people take while they're here. We are fully medicalized. We have at least a physician and three nurses or paramedics on duty as well that understand the medicine. We
1
0:38:34
actually have three physicians that work with us overall. So after everybody's unpacked we'll have a circle to get to know each other. We have groups of up to six people. In that circle I also start preparing people for the Ibogaine experience, what they can expect, how to make the most out of it. We have some lunch after that. We have incredible chefs that cook for people all week long.
1
0:39:01
After that, after lunch, everybody gets taken upstairs for a quick EKG. We need people to send an EKG in prior to arrival as well. Then everybody leaves to a Te Mascao, which is a traditional Mexican sweat lodge, which we've found is a great way to kick off the week. And after that, some dinner, an IV to rehydrate you from the sweat lodge, and a doctor comes
1
0:39:25
in that evening to do a medical intake, get some rest. The next morning, we do some blood work. A lab tech comes in for some blood draw, then breakfast, then breath work. We find breath is like this untapped ally that it's very good to get reacquainted with prior to doing something like Ibogaine. And then another circle to help further prepare. We also include coaching before and after. So everybody before they've even gotten to us has had two one-hour long coaching sessions and
1
0:40:05
then two one-hour long coaching sessions are included for after the process as well to help with integration. But yeah, group circle on the second afternoon and then some lunch and then we invite people to fast after lunch. We don't want people to eat after lunch. Then there's a one-on-one session everybody has with their on with the on-site therapeutic support then some massage therapy in the afternoon as well an IV to get everybody ready pre ibogaine we include magnesium in that IV which is a good prophylactis
1
0:40:43
for the heart before going into ibogaine there. We invite everybody to be up in the treatment room by about 9 30, at which point we'll hook everybody up to a heart monitor. They'll have their own mattress and essentially you put on a blindfold and go deep into the experience. The experience itself with Ibogaine has been called Oniric, which means as related to dreams. So it's kind of like a lucid dream type experience. Not everybody gets visions But you don't need visions for Ibogaine to work for you. So
1
0:41:20
some people experience dreamlike things Just sometimes the visions are just sheer chaos Auditory hallucinations are super common. You become very attaxic when you take Ibogaine very shaky So you're just gonna want to lie still on your mattress most of the night. Nobody wants to move around when they're on Ibogaine. In the morning we give you a couple IVs and then you're free to leave.
1
0:41:50
The day after Ibogaine is notoriously known as the gray day. Everybody feels pretty rough the day after Ibogaine, but it's just part of the process that people can lean into. And yeah, people might eat that next day, but they're, yeah, just don't really expect much out of yourself on that gray day. Then the day after that, there's some yoga and meditation in the morning. And then we work with a
1
0:42:18
breakfast and yoga and meditation. And we work with 5MEO DMT that afternoon, everybody goes one at a time for that and then that last night is always taco night so we have some tacos and get everybody back to San Diego the day after that. Yeah very good. How long does the 5 MEO DMT last? It's pretty short it's 10 to 15 to 20 minutes long. We set aside about half an hour to 45 minutes per person on that. But the kind of the the the full part of the experience. Yeah, it might be 10 minutes long kind of
1
0:42:58
thing. And then you just want to kind of lie there and soak it up. It's a very beautiful medicine that one. I think of it is like everybody, most people have seen the movie The Matrix. I think 5-MeO-DMT is the most red pill like substance out there. And I think the very good news that 5-MeO delivers is kind of once you're pulled out of the matrix,
1
0:43:23
we're not in some dystopian, robot controlled, apocalyptic future, it's you're pulled into this state of kind of heavenly perfection. And that's the ultimate truth that you get put in touch with through that medicine.
7
0:43:39
I've seen it again and again.
2
0:43:42
And then with Ibogaine, it's important to have intentions, right? When you're down there or I don't want to say goals, but...
1
0:43:52
Yeah, for sure. I think it's probably more so with the Ibogaine than the 5-MeO. The 5-MeO, you're just kind of like, hang on for the ride. The intention should be just to let go and make the most out of it. And I think part of your intention with Ibogaine should be to really let go as well. But, uh, yeah,
1
0:44:12
it's good to go in with kind of specific things that you would like to work upon, specific things you'd like to know about. Sometimes there's an interaction with the medicine. You can kind of ask questions and get answers. So it's good to go in with questions. And yeah, maybe your intention is, you know, work on my traumatic brain injury. Maybe your intention is to fix your relationship with your wife. Maybe your intention is to get a better grip on your rage or what do you need to
1
0:44:43
know about the anger issues that you've got. But yeah, we do a lot of preparation like that prior to going in for sure.
6
0:44:50
Awesome.
1
0:44:52
And then you really, we always say that you need to set intentions, like know what you would like to get out of the experience, but then you really need to let go of expectations, because the journey is not going to be what you think it's going to be like. And if you're hell-bent on seeing visions, for example, and then you don't get any visions, you might be disappointed. But as I said, you don't need visions for Ibogaine to work for you.
1
0:45:20
One of our medical manager, wonderful human being, her first time doing Ibogaine, she's a bit of a workaholic, she's hooked up to her heart monitor, she works in the medical field, she's analyzing her own heart rhythm,
1
0:45:33
and the Ibogaine said, nope, and she said she felt like a TV that got unplugged for about eight hours. Doesn't remember anything, doesn't even remember the passage of time. But she woke up the next morning,
1
0:45:46
tried to smoke a cigarette and couldn't do it. So she quit smoking without wanting to. And she made a whole bunch of other positive lifestyle changes. So it's really not about the visions. It's very rare that somebody,
1
0:45:58
a month or two or a year down the road is saying, yeah, I did Ibogaine, I had this vision and it changed my life. It's more like you do Ibogaine, some weird stuff happens, you might see things, you might not, and your life seems to get better.
2
0:46:10
Yeah, how interesting. That's cool. What's one of your best experiences with psychedelics? Um, I think the single most transformative
1
0:46:20
experience with psychedelics that I've ever had was my first time doing 5-MeO-DMT. For one, it was just this crazy stream of coincidences or synchronicities that brought it to me that day. I was probably in my early 20s. But yeah, I took the medicine, all of a sudden I could feel kind of complete awareness of every cell in my body, and I could feel every cell of my body aware of me being aware of it. There was just this interplay of awareness, and that seemed to explode into the whole universe, and I could feel
1
0:47:04
every atom in the universe aware of me being aware of it. There was this back and forth, and initially it was kind of like the, you know, the voice in my head, my ego was just blown away, there was nothing there, I was witnessing this, but there seemed to be some kind of a presence guiding what was going on, and it pointed out the sounds that I was hearing coming from the street, and it indicated that every sight we've ever seen, every sound we've ever heard is pre-sent to us with intention and of
1
0:47:43
like a FedEx package like the present is literally pre-sent like there is intent behind it all nothing is accidental is what it seemed to be showing me it seemed to show I felt as though I was a baby in a crib, the universal child in the crib of the universe. And it kind of indicated that you are Christ, you are Buddha, and you are the one child of the universe. And paradoxically, so is everyone else. I'm not special in that at all. We are all incredibly special in the eyes of the universe. So I was shown all this and then the English speaking voice in my head started to reappear and I just said
1
0:48:38
well what? What does this all mean? And the answer came back is it's perfect. You can't ideas of imperfections spring from a perpetual bed of perfection that is there first and foremost. And I'm like, wow. And said, well, can this is great. Can I go back to normal now? And it this presence, you know, I won't say it speak to me, but it was communicating to me. And it said, yes, but this is your heritage. This is what you're trying to work back to
1
0:49:18
without the use of these substances. This is, I had just kind of become spiritual at that point in my life. I kind of grew up in the Christian church, but in my late teens, I kind of threw it all out as a fairy tale.
1
0:49:33
And then in my early 20s, I turned back towards it and started looking at, you know, what's the similarities between all of these religions rather than all the differences. And I found a lot of similarities and then kind of came back around to Christianity and a new appreciation for Jesus. But it indicated that this is what you're building towards.
1
0:49:55
This is why you're doing all the spiritual work. This is why you're meditating now, is you want to be able to experience this state of perfection without the use of these substances. And the substances, you know, I've learned are a very good little peek over the fence at the potential of what's at the end of the journey here. So after that, I literally got up and started jumping for joy. And I feel as though in a certain way, I have never stopped jumping for joy.
1
0:50:28
It's like once you've seen that, once you've experienced something like that, you can never quite buy the world's bullshit in the same way again. And I've had many experiences with 5MEO DMT since, and it just always now quickly brings me back to this state of absolute perfection. And I feel like it is the best punchline to the story of biological life to the end of that story that any of us could ever want. It's like at the end of it all, we're stuck with ourselves as ourselves in this perfection that never ends and continually gets better.
1
0:51:16
It's like the best news, like the gospel Jesus was talking about. Gospel means the good news and I really feel as though that's what's waiting for all of us. The best news any human being could ever possibly conceive of, that's what we're going to be left with at the end of all of this chaos that we're experiencing right now.
2
0:51:41
What a great sneak peek too, I mean, just to have a taste of it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it really is, it becomes that light at the end of the tunnel.
1
0:51:50
It's like, all right, yeah, I'm not going to, you know, whenever I do 5meo now as well, which is not all the time. But I try and do I have a game once a year. Because I work with it, I want to stay in tune with what I'm doing for people. I've done 10 large journeys now. And this last time, I actually did our full protocol. So it was the first time that I did 5MEO afterwards, and I experienced this again, but I'm kind of just basking in this perfection that lasts for eternity and then you kind of come back to earth. I'm like, oh yeah, shit, I'm back here, like totally surprised. Oh yeah, we've got to do this still. Okay, no problem.
1
0:52:38
We can do this. We can do this still. This is a fun path to walk.
2
0:52:43
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate this.
1
0:52:49
Thank you, Heather. Really good to get to know you and I'm stoked to have you and your
2
0:52:53
husband down when the time is right. Yeah, yeah, we will see you soon and then I will definitely follow up with any questions that I get from anybody and stay in touch.
1
0:53:03
Yeah, our website is ambio.life, if anyone ever wants to reach out, Please feel free. You don't have to be a special forces veteran or a drug addict to take Ibogaine it really is I always say that ibogaine is very good at getting people from minus 10 to 0 But it's also very good at getting people from 0 to plus 10. So there's this Optimization factor to it as well for people that are just really looking for the next edge.
2
0:53:39
Yeah, that makes sense.
5
0:53:41
Awesome. Awesome.
4
0:53:42
Thank you so much, Trevor.
1
0:53:44
Thanks, Heather, take care. Have a beautiful day.
3
0:53:46
All right, bye. All right, bye.
1
0:53:47
Okay, bye-bye.
Transcribed with Cockatoo