Oh, like the LSD studies in the ‘60s, eh? That stuff’s synthesized “Indra extract?” I’ve seen (empty) bottles of it in antique stores. Nothin’ like a little dogbane to cure what ails ya. :eek:
(Note: IANAD, and I’ve long been willing to try just about anything that came my way, but I cannot recommend anybody consuming any ol’ dogbane they have in their yard. I’d guess all would make you sick and some would kill you. OTOH, your dog won’t have peed on it.)
Well thats enough warning for me. The jist of the article is that research needs to be done. It is not really pro or anti. It just mentions an incredible lack of controled studies.
What I consider to be fair use is probably not what is legally considered to be fair use. After all our tax dollars pay for public research institutions to do this research; therefore, as far as I’m concerned, public research should be publicly accesible. But that’s a rant and another post.
Actually there are a number of controlled studies that have been done and are currently underway. It is just that government approval processes are too slow for all the people who need help now, and since ibogaine is legal in most of the world, people are taking matters into their own hands with great success.
Interesting that you picked the most sensational-sounding one out of all these fairly boring (yet compelling) sources:
I would have to know which study you’re talking about. You might be interested to know that LSD is being researched again for cluster headaches. (cite). You might be interested to know that MDMA is being studied as a therapy for post-traumatic stress syndrome. (cite). There are many perfectly legitimate studies ongoing with substances that were once considered untouchable.
Since the indra extract was produced in the 80’s, was not supplied in bottles, and likely would not have been in English, it would seem that you’re lying.
Right. Or a little willow bark (aspirin), or a little foxglove (digitalis, a heart medication)… the list goes on and on. Instead of mocking, try reading, and start curing your ignorance.
It looks like you’ve done a lot of research. I am not an MD, and these are not journals that I read. One of the references you posted is just a doctoral thesis. I have no idea how many of the journals are peer reviewed. Some of those articles merely state exactly what the Science article seems to suggest. It wasn’t an anti-ibogain article by any means.
When I come to a subject that I am not particularly familiar with I trust Science and Nature as those are generally well balanced peer reviewed articles. They are not above making mistakes I know, but it is where i hold my faith.
I think that ibogaine therapy (and eventually derivatives based on it.) may be a very valuable tool in the arsenal to fight drug addiction. I hope that research on this drug is extensively funded as it appears very promising.
This is turning into a thread hijack; however, so perhaps you would like to start a thread specifically dedicated to ibogaine. I would be interested to see what the rest of the dopers think.
Sorry, I didn’t intend to hijack the thread. I just get kind of fired up when people choose their preconceived biases in the fact of research… I ought to be accustomed to it by now, but still it just baffles and irritates me. The discussion always devolves into one of:
So for this reason, I wouldn’t have high hopes for a thread about ibogaine. I won’t rule it out, but it just seems like it would be a waste of time.
Qadgop is a Johns Hopkins educated M.D. with person experience with opiate withdrawal. My academic background is in psychopharmacology and behavioral neuroscience. I also have 1st person experiences with addiction and withdrawal. It is more than a little crass to throw some articles out and tell people like us to start reading to get an education as dictated by your syllabus. I don’t know your background but I will place a bet that your credentials aren’t going to come out #1 in this dog and pony show.
I enrolled in a few Harvard Medical studies to test different approaches to treatment. The first one I was in tried to treat alcohol addiction with Naltrexone (an opiate receptor blocker available in the U.S.) and Acamprosate which wasn’t available in the U.S. at the time and they were trying to get it approved. I always took it and it had some weird effects on the way I felt but I drank every day while I was on it. It blunted the effects for sure but it didn’t totally get rid of the cravings.
Addiction is a complex subject that most people don’t grasp. My first psychopharmacology professor that later became my mentor asked the class to name one thing that defined drug and alcohol addiction. After student after student was shot down, I gave the brilliant reply of “physical withdrawal”. That was another wrong answer and the reason should be obvious if you watch person after person leave a detox unit straight to buy whatever they were using because they felt better than ever.
Focus on detox and short-term treatments is really misplaced anyway. We already have safe detoxes for alcohol, benzodiazepines, and barbiturates. The others, including opiates have treatments as well even though they are very uncomfortable although generally not medically dangerous. The after-detox drugs can be useful but they have to stop at some point. More problematic, people that succumb to addictive urges just stop taking them so they can use.
There is no way answer and the existing medical measures don’t really need to be more painless or efficient. 3 - 5 days in the hospital shouldn’t be much of an inconvenience compared to the same amount of time using. The real problem is with the long-term success rate which tends to be fairly miserable overall.
And yet nobody said any of those things. You projected and missed badly. I certainly never said it or thought it and enrolled in studies to get new drugs approved. It still doesn’t fix things though. Addiction is hard to overcome by definition and psychopharmacology still hasn’t made many strides in long-term recovery.
I’ll second Shagnasty . Addiction is a very complex disorder. Essentially, when a person develops a substance dependence disorder, they permanently alter the brain. This alters the way we think and behave. Detox is only the start of addiction treatment. I’m all for whatever works as long it doesn’t cause any harm. If your interested you can find good, well thought out, and unbiased infomation at www.nida.nih.gov . Also available, free of charge (because we already paid for it with our taxes) is a wealth of information, including treatment manuals, monographs, etc. at ncadi.samhsa.gov/
Don’t be so certain that everybody is wants to punish addicts. Usually only those who have been hurt by an addict want to punish them or people who are exasperated, who have come to believe that nothing works. This a sad place to be and unfortunately some of my peers (Drug and Alcohol Counselors) have come to this point. Others are just stubborn old codgers who completely missed the point of AA, NA, etc. Bill Wilson (founder of AA) was the one of the first people to use the Motivational Interviewing style without even knowing it.
I can’t emphasize this enough, there is no magic bullet for addiction treatment.
I think you wildly underestimate the SDMB. A thread about the threaputic benefits of ibogaine, while it is a controled substance, is not the same as a thread about how to avoid a bad trip on LSD. I am sure that the moderators would have no problem with it. It is an interesting topic for which the ultimate goal is to battle drug addiction.
I think Shagnasty makes some good points about drug addiction recovery. Long-term recovery is very difficult.
This is GQ. We do cites here, unless they’ve changed things without telling me. I mentioned a phenomenon and provided an extensive list of cites. A person with scientific curiosity and an interest in learning would appreciate being provided with references. I don’t know what kind of person thinks that their sterling credentials entitle them to comment on matters without even skimming reference material.
If I’ve mistaken someone’s response then I apologize, but thus far I’ve seen people either respond wholly from opinion, or cite one cherry-picked article with a sensational title. In particular, apologies to Qagdop, since it seems like someone has taken the liberty of taking offense at me on your behalf.
This is just a general tip to someone in any similar situation. There is a whole research methods architecture in place and all journal articles are not created equal. An an article in Science or Nature can usually stand on its own. From there however, it breaks down into a hierarchy ending with this that are published and somehow are still complete crap. Academia’s general structure forces people to publish things that don’t mean anything at all or are just generally wrong.
Here is what that means to us. A top-level journal article like the New England Journal of Medicine or Science can be cited by anyone and be reputable and partially definitive at the moment it is published. The hierarchies below it need the person that cites the article to understand what it means in the context of everything that has come before it.
Some people don’t understand this however and that is why a cite-fest is not productive. You have to synthesize all these findings for us and present them to stand as a whole. Is that too much work? That is what you asked us to do (and yes I did read some of them).
There you go. Proper research techniques require you to read every single one and post what you believe are the most meta-analytical points for us to read in turn and reply back with any scientific issues and questions.
That is the way that it has to work with these things and if you don’t like it, scratch academia off of one or your career choices because this type of things can be a real slog and you just pointed the barrel in the wrong direction.
How do all these articles relate to your point as a whole and what do you think the direction this research will be going in for the next 5 years?
Yea, the cite-fest is pretty obviously a cover for something you can’t actually defend with experience. Experience counts for a lot. I’d be willing to bet that most of those cites don’t even back up the premise that ibogaine is the end all to drug additction.
Take this little gem:
All this thing says is that the GDNF receptor is a good target for synthetic drugs to combat alcoholism. Wonderful, we have new synthetic targets. It very specifically states that ibogain is not used due to side effects. Your using this article to support your position? I think you should read some of these cites yourself.
I felt I picked the one that best represented the true, evidence-based status of what is known of the long-term effectiveness of ibogaine. The fact that it happened to be from probably the most reputable journal of all those listed in your biblio was a bonus.
You should note in the bibliography that you listed that a lot of the data is on rats, based on data on the molecular level, or talks about the possible potential of ibogaine.
I’m a realist. Once decent evidence is available, I’ll get on the bandwagon. Hell, I’m a suboxone prescriber, and a believer in harm reduction when other approaches aren’t working or workable. But I began learning about opiates and opiate receptors from Sol Snyder himself, and he taught me to be a critical thinker and a scientist.
So far I don’t see anything that convinces me that ibogaine is a ‘magic bullet’ to cure opiate addiction. It may turn out to be another tool for the toolbox, but I doubt very much it will be the cure-all. I’ve seen that proclaimed far too often, for aversion therapy, accountability via urine drug screens, naltrexone, etc. to buy into such an easy answer for such a complex problem.
But if I’m proven wrong, I’ll be happy.
Look, this is an internet message board, and we’re just having a discussion, mkay? This is not my disseration I’m not about to spend 8 hours preparing something for you to read any more than you’re going to spend 1 hour reading the cites I posted. Yes, I understand that different sources have different credibility, I am just trying to introduce the subject to people who may have never heard about ibogaine before today, and that it is in a different league than miracle hair grower or some kind of pop culture phenomenon. There are number of published studies supporting it, and before one mocks it or dismisses it out of hand, one should really familiarize oneself with the subject matter.
The entire study presupposes that ibogaine is effective in reducing alcohol self-administration. The subject of the study is to investigate whether the activity is mediated by GDNF. The statement that ibogaine is not used clinically is actually untrue; it is in experimental clinical use in a number of places. It is unapproved for clinical use within the US because it is a schedule 1 hallucinogen, which is the euphemistically named “side effect” that is mentioned in papers like these. Much of the research being done is to figure out how to make a compound that works like ibogaine but doesn’t make you hallucinate (although I personally found the “side effects” tolerable enough).
Yes, most of these studies are being done on rats. Psychedelic drugs are problematic to study due to legal constraints and professional stigma, so human studies are few and far between, although they do exist. There is also an active underground network of treatment providers who are helping people get off opiates on a daily basis with ibogaine therapy… there is quite a bit of anecdotal information regarding success and failure there, but like I said that is all anecdotal self-reported information.
I’d like to apologize if I sounded like a jerk to anyone in the previous posts, or came off like some sort of academic poseur. It is all borne of a phenomenon that I believe is very important and beneficial, but often misunderstood. Regarding ibogaine, it’s all too common that people simply glaze over and change channels when they find out it’s a psychedelic drug, due to various individual beliefs or misconceptions. I guess I’ve come to expect that and react to it in advance, and thus underestimate people. So I just wanted to get that out there to Shagnasty and anyone else I may have inadvertently pissed off.
No problem.
Addiction is more complicated than most people realize from an academic, medical, and personal perspective. Science is still trying to work out what goes wrong but it is likely permanent brain changes and there is still no single marker that defines it. I would advocate dog shit therapy if I thought that it worked. As it stands now, medical detoxes are rather safe and routine. I don’t advocate designer detoxes because I know what would generally happen after seeing literally hundreds of people detox in the traditional way and then going right back to using in days, months, and often just hours after being turned loose. The work needs to be done for the medium and long-term. Short-term therapy has already been worked out and gets the job done for what it is supposed to accomplish.
Hello to everyone,
First off I want to congratulate everyone for attempting to explore this subject matter as thoroughly as possible! As both a caregiver who specializes in getting extremely addicted people off of the substances they addicted to, and in my patients cases most often this means Opioid and Opiate addiction! Most often in these cases, I am dealing with people who have been addicted two one or more substances for the better part of their adult, and often their adolescents as well! Many of if not most of my patients are of course self medicating, for various issues ranging from chronic pain, to anti-depression, or to help with anxiety, overactive and many times negative dream content, or to overcome or forget any number of life’s traumas including physical, mental and sexual abuse usually occurring prior to their change from childhood to adulthood. They point blankly put, are so intrenched in the use of substances that the thought of “living life on life’s terms” would quite frankly be the last thing to occur to them! Usually, a short jail term, the death of a friend or loved one, or the accidental or purposeful overdose of a: customer, friend, lover, family member etc etc will give them just enough shock to want to change things, and even though hey know they want a change they have no Idea of where or how to begin! More times than not, many first time or repeat treatment patients have been sent to treatment both outpatient and inpatient as the result of a court decision both as punishment(even though that’s not what they call it) or as an alternative to punishment, or as the result of a last chance scenario that a lover, partner, husband, wife or other family members have placed on the patient, e.g. “If you don’t go to treatment and clean yourself up, I won’t allow you contact with me, your child, or the rest of the family!” As a statistic for those of you considering traditional treatment both inpatient and outpatient, the rate of success for any person addicted to any substance that is truly addicted, is between 3% and 6%, and is 3% or less for heroine and other opioid and opiate addicts! So, in my mind, with numbers like that being kept as a statistic by the rehabilitation and treatment centers, 97% of the people’s time that are voluntarily or non-voluntarily attending said centers, and the money both donated, taken in and garnered from government grants and funds is quite frankly a waste! People who undergo Vapassana Yoga retreats have a higher rate of success attending a ten day Yoga introduction course, than those who put 30-90 days or more into traditional 12 step rehabilitation/treatment programs!
Most often also, it is the mental dependency, and the habitual programming that has occurred in the process of a person transitioning from weekend warrior to daily user that is most hard faught! I myself took part in two 90 day programs, using Suboxone to replace the other opioids I was abusing! No magical cure there, knowing what I know now, I would suggest low amounts of fentanyl and dilaudid over methadone and Suboxone! Even while on those replacement medications, I dreamed of heroine and oxycodone constantly! The habit of smoking medications, sniffing medications, and even eating them, could not be replaced by any substance, even those as strong as buprenorphine and methadone! Using dreams were constant for the first six months, as were anxiety, depression, manic episodes, sleeplessness and too much sleep were also common.
Some background on me and my situation. I have been in three car wrecks, a motorcycle wreck, and a helicopter downing, broken my neck in three places, back in four places, my sacrim in two places, fractured five ribs, punctured a lung, broken my right femur, and have neuropathy in both arms and one leg, and basic arthritis in most of my spine. The resulting issue is as follows, w long term chronic pain patient, who has been on opioids and opiates since I was a mid-teen. Ad to this, a rather addictive personality, and the tendency to self medicate, for other medical and mental issues including but not limited to diagnoses such as PTSD, depression, mania, and childhood sex abuse, and some visual distortions and vertigo! I personally had a drug habbit that was only and perhaps only annicdotely out done by Dr Hunter Thompson himself(Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Fame). If they made it, I used it, and daily at that! Pain killers, muscle relaxers, downers/benzodiazepines Valium etc, marijuana, hash, opium, opioids and opiates, mind altering and expanding substances such as LSD and Mescaline etc etc. Eventually, I was on Fentanyl Hydromorphone and Heroine at the same time, along with cocaine, amphetamines, Xanax and many others. After two unsuccessful attempts at rehab, I decided to do it on my own! I replaced high end narcotics with low end ones, or just plane marijuana instead of opioids and opiates whenever possible! Stopped doing all street drugs, and now am a happy functioning addict, with a successful practice helping others achieve the same. Why you might ask, would I prescribe dilaudid or fentanyl in small dosages or hydrocodone to addicts? Because according to the AMA, they only have a 3% chance of quitting permanently, so I help them function! Break up the cycle of addiction! Do things legally, medically, and morally, not buying street drugs, which fosteres terrorism, street crime, mafia chrome, and puts around %60 plus of our convicted felons away for non violent drug related offenses! I do not agree with that approach, putting addicts in rehab and prison, is not only unsuccessful at reducing the rate of addiction, it’s a waste of time and resources!
In reference to the so called coma like treatments, I have seen the work of a few doctors that looks quite promising at least in the preliminary phases! Particularly when using Ketamine to induce short term Coma, three to seven days. When the patients awaken, their brain has gone through a seeming reset procedure. It is like they never did any opioids or opiates in their life ever, mental and physical symptoms of SAWS and PAWS are seemingly non-existent. They have tried this process in Canada, Mexico, The EU, and Japan, with far greater success than in traditional treatment, instead of a 3% success rate, they are seeing numbers in the high 70%s and low 80%s. Also I propose that if in these countries, of modern thinking, medicine and science in general, that if anybody wasn’t waking up long term, or were simply dying, that with he exception of Mexico, they would no longer be practicing these procedures openly, through licensed practitioners! One Doctor I know personally who practices medicine primarily in Holland/Netherlands, he has been quite successful using such methods on patients. Primarily inducing coma via Ketamine and Propaphol. Patients are of course on liquids, EKGs, oxygen etc etc. He has not lost one patient, and the longest any of his patients took to wake up was six days past the seventh day, so 13 days total, scary for the family I am sure, but effective, said patient has yet to relapse, and he induced said coma state in this patient three years ago!
Thoughts?
My first thought is that it’s been eight years since anyone posted in this thread, so you may find that the original posters have moved on.
My second thought is that you had some interesting things to say, but there is an awful lot of text which makes it difficult to read and process. So I improved the formatting for you, hope you don’t mind:
Thanks for taking one for the team, sandra. That Wall O’ Text was a bitch to parse.