Newsgroups: alt.drugs
From: [s--ev--a] at [geom.umn.edu] (Steve Anderson)
Subject: Re: Ibogaine. The drug to end all drugs?
Date: Sun, 3 Apr 1994 04:24:11 GMT

In article <2nhrkf$[rv 1] at [usenet.rpi.edu]>, Marwan Taher <[t--he--m] at [rpi.edu]> wrote:

>You talked to people who've tried it??
>
>Well... what are effects like? I read the Omni article but it was kinda
>vague. If you have any info on what the effects are, what the user
>experiences, feels, sees, etc.. please do post it, or point me in the
>right direction to look. The article got my curiosity way up...

From _The Ibogaine Story_, by the Staten Island Project: (pp 16-17)

"The first thing I saw was a pulsating yellow screwdriver, which disappeared
abruptly.  And the next thing I knew I was walking up a ladder to a 10-foot
diving board over a pool.  As I was walking up the diving board, my bathing
suit disappeared and I was naked.  As I dived into the pool, my mother
appeared beneath me with her legs open, and I was diving into her vagina.
As I got closer, she chagned into my sister, who changed into an infant.  Then
I went into the water, and that was it.  The vision changed into a new one.

"For three or four hours, the way visualizations changed was always the same
and different from any other hallucenogen.  It appeared that you'd get one
vision, and then a gold or silver web would carry it off and an entirely
new set of visions would arrive."

On another trip, he was watching a stage, and all of a sudden music started.
The music was like, BOMdidaBOMPdidaBOMdidaBOMP, and pairs of cavemen and
cavewomen came dancing onto the stage.  The men were behind the women, and
they were dancing with them.  And then two more of them came onto the stage
rolling this giant stone heart.  Later he "had the sensation of slides opening
up and him sliding downward at a tremendous speed, with all my experiences
arranged accessible like filing cabinets flashing past."  He also experienced
behavioral immobility, which wore off only as the visions ceased, leaving him
in a strange, high-energy state.

"The hallucenatory period ends abruptly, and the first reaction is generally,
`What happened?  I thought this was supposed to last 36 hours.'  Then all of
a sudden you realize that it hasn't stopped, it's just changed.  You're no
longer watching this motion picture, but there are giant lightning flashes
and movements of light all over the place... but there's no waviness, things
don't lose their normal form, as they do under heavy dosages of common
hallucenogens like mescaline or LSD, where a wall will seem to wave.

"Another difference was, with hallucenogens generally, if you were to move
your hand you'd see a wave-like pattern.  With ibogaine, you don't get a 
continuous wave, you get distinct images, and I noticed it the first time
when I was walking on the street... I was on my way to the west side, and
I turned around, there were seven distinct after-images of myself.  And
as I took a step, a new one would appear, and the last one would disappear.

"During that high-energy period, which lasts from six to twelve hours, you're
seeing all these flashes of light and what's happening, is you're getting
thoughts coming into your mind which support the deep symbolic material
which came in the initial three or four hour visualization phase....
And that slowly diminishes, till after about 12 hours that phase is completely
closed out.  Apparently a secondary stimulation effect occurs, and that
slowly curtails, somewhere between twentyfour and thirty hours, and the
subject goes to sleep."

Says another user, "I remember thinking, when is this going to end?  I'm so
tired.  I couldn't imagine anyone doing it for fun."

Strangest of all, the first user awoke after three hours of sleep completely
refreshed.  "Ten steps out of my door it hit me: For the first time in months,
I did not want or need to go cop heroin.  In fact, I viewed heroin as a drug
that emulated death; I wanted life.  I looked down the street, at the trees,
the sky, my house, and realized that for the first time in my life, I didn't
feel afraid."

----

Out of the seven heroin addicts in this trial of ibogaine, five quit.  Two
days later, none had gone through withdrawal.

This is good stuff.

[stevea] at [geom.umn.edu]	Steven C. Anderson	Grassroots Party Secretary