Tabernanthe (iboga).

Date: Mon, 23 May 1994 23:27:00 -0400
Sender: "Medicinal and Aromatic Plants discussion list <HERB.TREARN.BITNET>
From: anna yamada <rosaphil.PHANTOM.COM>
Subject: Re: IBOGAINE--PHOOEY!!!!

Iboagaine to"cure" addictions, depressions, and psychosis, is a fraud of a claim.

It is perpetrated by Dana Beal of the Yippies who has put together a phony baloney "company" for-profit that he sells shares in called "endabuse" that claims a patent on a protocol for ibogaine.

There are myriads of varieties of this plant, saying ibogaine is like saying "all the essential oils found in cannabis or tobacco" plus the exact mechanism of the so-called cure is not known and cannot be known, and frankly, in the underground trials that Dana has done in the states, many a junkie has jumped outta sleazy hotel window to escape the trip and go cop more dope.

This is radical-chique snake-handling in the extreme.

If Ibogaine cured addiction, there would be no drug addicts in Nigeria or Western Africa, which is not true, and is the new hot source for heroin coming to america.

If anyone offers to sell you such a share in Ibogaine, show him her/it the door or the SEC riot act.

Forewarned is Foreplay. Acturally, dana makes his money charging rich junkies thousands of dollars to be "treated" in switzerlland clinics via a hotel in hell's kitchen NYC, and from dealing treated pot and hash. Treated with absinthe. so the rumour goes.

The only Yippie who is a millionaire, but lives like a slob and rumour has it has his wife and kids living in the suburbs.

He also likes to drop Bill Cosby's, Richie Havens', and Stevie Wonder's names as celeb investors in his venture (a crock or a pity, your choice), in a magnanimous show of alter-racist showmanship. Yicchhh.

All opinions are solely my own and from a mental patient.

He got on a manic-depressives' list and tried to hawk ibogaine treatment as a regression tool for infantile-trauma regression. Freud did things better with coke, so why not? NOT.

File it in Net-Ninkumpoops & Wanna-be Legends and have a nice day.

Date: Tue, 24 May 1994 00:28:13 MDT
Sender: "Medicinal and Aromatic Plants discussion list <HERB.TREARN.BITNET>
From: Michael Moore <hrbmoore.EINET.COM>
Subject: Re: IBOGAINE--PHOOEY!!!!

> Iboagaine to"cure" addictions, depressions, and psychosis, is a fraud of a claim.

Actually, I don't really know what you are talking about, at least in reference to the use of Ibogaine as an anti-addictive agent. It seems an ill-conceived idea, at best, however.

My only experience with Iboga was in 1971, when, in Santa Cruz, California buying some herbs for my store in Topanga, I was offered some extract by a PhD in Pharmacology, who had just brought some back from Africa and thought I might be amused. I took a small dose, left the University, drove to Felton, picked up the shipment of herbs, drove through Ben Lomond, stopped at a closed gas station (it was midnight by then), hosed myself down with water (it was full moon and my skin was starting to crinkle iguana-like from moonburn), and pasted some aluminum foil around the edges of my van's windows to keep down the burning light. I knew, all the while, that it was self-indulgent, but did this anyway...can never be too careful about that moonlight, you know!

By dawn I was all the way back down the Pacific Coast Highway to LA County and my skin was pretty much returned to normal. I had figured out a number of arcane explanations to give friends and customers for my lizard skin, only to find that it didn't really have the texture of dried-mud-flat-in-the-sun by daybreak (the ibogaine had worn off, of course). And this was only a small amount of the plant (or so I was told). Yes, I had the "learned" response of the psychotropic hippie, yes, it was a crude pharmaceutic preparation and not the actual plant, but I can see NO WAY IN THE WORLD this stuff could be of any help to those attempting to wean themselves from the chosen addictives of the nineties....no way!

Michael (learn from your elders, kids) Moore

Date: Wed, 25 May 1994 21:39:54 MDT
Sender: "Medicinal and Aromatic Plants discussion list <HERB.TREARN.BITNET>
From: Michael Moore <hrbmoore.EINET.COM>
Subject: Re: IBOGAINE--PHOOEY!!!!

>What did the person recommending Iboga say it was for, what was it supposed to do?

As I remember, the learned gentleman's comment went something like..."Try this stuff, Michael...it's really GRREEAAT shit!" Remember, this was the early 70s, and there was no pretense that taking Iboga had any more purpose than genial titilation. We were not ingesting the substance with any ritual intent, we were simply sampling another culture's intoxicant. The fact that it gave me brain weavels was not a problem: what KIND of brain weavels was the question, and, for myself, the question was adequately answered.

I am not defending anything here; the intent was to get stoned. Like most things we all tried back then, it would not bear repeating. The reason why the whole drug "movement" (g) failed was that most of us got bored and went our way, a few of us found a golden teat and never emerged again (or only to score). It thinned the herd, but at a great social cost that is still being paid. This is why I get feeling creepy when I see a bunch of silver-spooned middle-class white kids following around the several "ritual-plant" gurus, convinced that, by taking the sacramental plants of other (vanishing) cultures they are, in fact, having shamanic experiences, and not simply getting stoned. I think the term here is Hubris...and a maddening innocence.

Michael