SMACKED OUT

Believers say a little-known drug called ibogaine eases heroin cravings and
withdrawal, but it's never gained popularity with pharmaceutical companies
or street pushers. Here's why.

Kevin Peace's addiction was no different from others -- until he found a
treatment few addicts knew existed. In his yearlong attempt to spread word
of a miraculous treatment, he says he fixed a dozen lives. But he also broke
the law and learned how hard it is for a controversial cure to reach the
people who need it.

For most of 1997, the white-collar twentysomething was making morphine from
scratch, telling himself it would be just a luxury, a weekend thing. But the
high was so good that, after a year, Kevin Peace was swallowing his homemade
pills before he left for work. Once a week, he was making the trip from
Atlanta to his North Georgia poppy field to harvest the red flowers that fed
his habit.

Pathetic, Peace thought one day. When he learned his wife was pregnant, he
sank even lower. She's carrying a child, he realized, and I'm carrying a
drug addiction. He typed "opiate drug treatment" into an Internet search
engine. A few clicks later, Peace was learning about ibogaine.

Ibogaine has been the bastard child of pharmacology since arriving in
America almost 50 years ago. Because ibogaine is a psychedelic that may kill
brain cells, the federal government has outlawed the drug, placing it in the
same category as cocaine or heroin. As for the street appeal of ibogaine,
there is none: The drug, which is extracted from the root of the African
iboga plant, is a trip that lasts too long and can be too unsettling for
those out for a good time.

Still, ibogaine does have a constituency. For addicts of such drugs as
morphine and heroin, ibogaine is like an analgesic; it's a substance that
meets drug addiction where it hurts most -- in both the brain and the body.
Take ibogaine, believers said, and your cravings for opiates and your
withdrawal symptoms will dry up.

Peace was intrigued -- and desperate enough to roll the dice. He finally
found an overseas supplier who could mail him three grams of ibogaine,
extracted from the plant, powdered and packaged in capsule form.

Wanting to play it safe, he took one pill a day for three days, even though
the online gurus advised taking them all at once. An hour or so after the
first capsule, the drug took hold.

Ibogaine gripped his mind, forcing him to face the errors of his past. "I
just got this sudden realization that for the past five years I had totally
wasted my life," Peace says. "I had waking dreams but not a hallucination,
per se. Because if you've got your eyes open you don't see anything that's
not there."

After his ibogaine session in the spring of 2000, Peace no longer felt the
aches of morphine withdrawal, and he didn't desire the drug anymore. As an
ibogaine convert, he wanted to share the good news.

He's treated 14 patients with ibogaine, most of them arriving in Atlanta
from out of town.

Peace realizes he's breaking the law, but to him, it's worth the risk to
free others from the shackles of addiction.

"Going through the pain of withdrawals, which I went through many times
without ibogaine, and then seeing someone in your situation, you just want
to help them out," Peace says.

While the ibogaine community is full of believers such as Peace, the drug
still can't shake the stigma of being little more than another acid trip --
one that might kill. Three deaths in Europe have been linked to ibogaine. In
the U.S., doctors are mostly unaware of it or deem it too kooky or dangerous
for conventional care. It is, after all, illegal. Government funding for
research into ibogaine has dwindled.

"Of all the hallucinogens, this is probably the most toxic one that people
take," says Dr. Frank Vocci, head of treatment research and development at
the National Institute for Drug Abuse. "The FDA might want to proceed very
cautiously, given the deaths that have occurred."

We'd ask the FDA ourselves, but over the course of two weeks, they didn't
return phone calls.

It is ibogaine's curse that the one home the drug has found -- among
researchers and passionate advocates -- has turned out to be a dysfunctional
one. The family of ibogaine believers fights over who should get credit for
its use. Allegiances have been made and broken. Lawsuits and countersuits
have been filed.

So great are the differences within the ibogaine community, in fact, that
the acrimony may have stalled the one thing that all the believers want: the
broad acceptance of ibogaine as a treatment for opiate addiction.

Certain aspects of the drug's history, though, are undisputed.

In 1962, a 19-year-old heroin addict named Harold Lotsof knocked on the door
of a Manhattan black-market chemist. The chemist reached into his freezer
and pulled out a white powder. He told Lotsof the drug was called ibogaine
and would give him a trip that would last a day and a half.

"I did not want a hallucinogen that lasts 36 hours," Lotsof recalls from his
Staten Island, N.Y., home where he has been forced into retirement from a
career in ibogaine. "I had a friend of mine, though, who was into the rare
and exotic."

Lotsof gave his friend the ibogaine. A month later, Lotsof got a call. "He
was ecstatic," Lotsof says. "He said it was a food, that we have to call
Congress. It took me two to three months to obtain additional supplies.
That's when we started turning up the very specific effects of ibogaine."

Lotsof took the powder in capsule form by himself, at his parent's New
Jersey home. Thirty hours later he woke, dressed, walked outside and paused.

He should have been in the throes of heroin withdrawal. He wasn't.

"I immediately realized that my entire perception toward heroin has
changed," he says. "Where previously I viewed heroin as a drug which gave
comfort, I now view heroin as a drug that emulates death. And suddenly I
realized that for the first time in my life I'm not frightened. And I
realized that heroin use is related to fear and the covering up of that
fear, and all of that's gone."

While no two ibogaine trips are the same, they seem to share similar phases.
In the first phase, patients close their eyes and see images from the past
or symbols that represent past struggles. Some people say they view
themselves at various ages as if watching scenes from a film, only faster
and more chaotic. Many say that for the first time in their lives, they view
their actions objectively, helping them to understand where their desire for
drugs originated.

Dr. Mark Molliver, a professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, has studied
ibogaine's effects in rats and monkeys. He says it causes the brain to work
harder than usual by releasing an excess of the chemicals that transmit
neurons. He says that as neurons start firing faster, the brain can
overheat, in a sense, and burn up cells in the cerebellum.

"The cerebellum is now thought to have many functions," Molliver says. "One
of them is in balance and coordination of movement. But it also may affect
cognitive functions, learning and memory, various aspects of thinking that
haven't been terribly well-defined as yet."

Molliver says the cells that are lost in the cerebellum won't come back.
"There's little doubt about that. It's very consistent." Yet other studies
have shown that ibogaine is safe when administered in doses up to 25
milligrams per kilogram of body weight. That's the highest dose most
researchers have used on humans, and the highest most Web sites recommend.

After three or four hours, the patient enters the second phase of the trip
- -- eight to 16 hours of intense insight, when the patient can call on
specific memories at will, analyze the habits she's acquired and use her
insights to reverse learned behavior. Those who benefit most from the
insights say each trip is the equivalent of years of psychotherapy packed
into a workday.

The third phase lingers for up to 24 more hours, then tapers off slowly.
Colors may seem brighter, sounds sharper, thoughts more connected.

Lotsof wasn't thinking about neuron transmitters or cerebella in the early
1960s, when he walked out of his parents' house after his ibogaine trip and
realized his heroin addiction was gone. He was wondering if his reaction was
rare, or if ibogaine would affect others the same way. He handed the drug
out to 20 of his friends. Seven of them were addicted to heroin. After their
ibogaine trips, he says, the seven experienced no signs of heroin
withdrawal. Five stopped using heroin for up to six months.

Lotsof determined that ibogaine wasn't exactly a long-term cure for heroin
or opiate addicts. But he decided that it was useful in that it eliminated
his narcotic withdrawal and left him with the desire to heal himself.

He tried in the 1960s to introduce ibogaine as a street drug. But ibogaine,
ever the misfit drug, couldn't even find a home in the decade of
experimentation.

"There were no ibogaine scenes," Lotsof says. "There were no ibogaine
factories. There were no ibogaine parties."

No one was buying. The intense self-revelations and waking dreams could be
unpleasant, showing a person too much of himself. And the sheer length of
the trip was too much of a hassle for junkies looking for a quick high.
Ibogaine just wasn't fun.

Lotsof also learned he'd get no repeat business, because ibogaine isn't
addictive, either.

Years later, when Lotsof would try to introduce ibogaine to the world via
different channels, he would hit the same brick wall. The right people,
regardless of whether they were the people who needed it or not, just didn't
care for the drug.

So in the late 1960s, shortly after ibogaine was declared an illegal
substance, Lotsof put aside his notions of selling the drug. He enrolled in
film school at New York University, earned a living as a plumber and went on
to work in film production.

In 1981, Lotsof struck up a conversation with a woman whose boyfriend had a
drug problem. Lotsof told her about his ibogaine experience. The woman said
she'd give him a grant to study the drug's merits, and so Lotsof returned to
ibogaine.

He spent a year researching the drug's origin and history. He found that the
Bwiti tribe in the West African country Gabon has used ibogaine for
centuries during rite-of-passage ceremonies, claiming it allowed them to
communicate with gods and dead ancestors. He also learned that a Kentucky
doctor used ibogaine in the mid-1950s to treat eight morphine addicts. In
1983, he began applying for patents. He would eventually patent ibogaine's
use as a treatment for addictions to opiates such as heroin, as well as to
cocaine, alcohol and nicotine. And he started raising money.

In 1986, he founded NDA International Inc., a for-profit business based in
Staten Island and devoted to the future development and marketing of
ibogaine (the FDA would have to approve it first). The following year,
Lotsof visited Gabon, met with the country's president and through him
obtained kilograms of ibogaine for research.

He brought the results from European studies back home to the U.S. in an
attempt to convince the drug-funding arm of the government to start pitching
in.

In 1991, after seven years of solicitations from Lotsof, the National
Institute for Drug Abuse allotted $2-million for pre-clinical studies in
animals.

Lotsof, energized by the government's interest, searched for patients to
bolster his research. He contracted in 1991 with a Dutch doctor who would
treat heroin addicts with ibogaine in an Amsterdam hotel or in their home.
Lotsof hoped the results of these treatments would prompt the U.S. Food &
Drug Administration to approve similar studies on humans in the United
States.

Then Lotsof met Dr. Deborah Mash, a brain researcher at the University of
Miami. He thought he'd struck gold.

"She was the exact person we were trying to meet," Lotsof says. "She had the
interest and the ability."

She also had the reputation, with a major university to back her. Mash, who
had won national acclaim for studies of Alzheimer's disease and cocaine
toxicity, had heard about ibogaine in 1992. Lotsof says Mash contacted him
because she was interested in his supplies of pharmaceutical-grade ibogaine,
which nobody else had.

The two signed a contract, in which Mash's lab would study ibogaine and
Lotsof's company, NDA, would be able to patent any findings she reached. In
1993, Mash became the first researcher to win FDA approval to study ibogaine
in humans. By then, ibogaine treatments in Amsterdam were going so well that
Lotsof invited a New York Times reporter to observe one.

His timing couldn't have been worse. The patient, a 24-year-old woman, died
in the hotel 16 hours after taking ibogaine.

"It was a disaster," Lotsof says. "It then played out both politically and
medically."

A Dutch coroner could not reach a definitive conclusion about what killed
the woman. She may have sneaked into a bathroom and used heroin. Ibogaine
patients must be clean of heroin for 24 hours before treatment, as well as
during treatment, because it can exaggerate the effect of heroin and
possibly other drugs.

>From there, ibogaine research, at least as far as Lotsof was concerned, took
a nosedive. The Amsterdam experiment with the Dutch doctor dissipated. Soon
after, the relationship between Mash and Lotsof broke down. Mash had
discovered another extract from the iboga plant, which she named
noribogaine. Noribogaine seemed to curb addictions but caused no
hallucinations. But instead of moving forward with research of both
extracts, Mash filed suit against Lotsof.

Lotsof says accounts of what spawned the lawsuit differ. But he says
differences between him and Mash had been brewing long before the 1997
filing date.

Others familiar with ibogaine research say the two had grown too
power-hungry to be in the same room.

"I think that ibogaine just happened to, for some reason, attract a couple
people that wanted to control the whole show, who wanted to be harbingers of
ibogaine," says Eric Taub, a Gainesville man who organizes ibogaine
treatment on international waters.

Soon after the lawsuit was filed, Lotsof's company went bankrupt. A debtor
of his was able to obtain, through a court order, all but one of Lotsof's
patents.

The trial between Lotsof and Mash was scheduled two years later, in June
2000. But days before jury selection, Lotsof felt too weak to proceed. He
says he settled out of court with Mash. He later learned that he was ill
with leukemia.

But what was lost on lawsuits and infighting was recovered elsewhere -- in
places like Atlanta, where Kevin Peace was seeing the ibogaine light.

Lotsof says that during the years that ibogaine foundered on the
bureaucratic level, the number of Kevin Peaces in the country grew. "There
are so many people popping up here it's almost a blur," Lotsof says. "The
Kevin scenario is not an uncommon one."

It's a Tuesday afternoon, and Peace should be at his 9-to-5 job. But he's on
vacation.

He is sipping Starbucks hot chocolate as he flips through this week's issue
of The Economist. His wife, carrying their 8-month-old infant, wanders
through the adjoining bookstore.

Peace seems nothing like a psychedelic-touting renegade and every bit like
the fellow patrons of this chain coffee shop, where he has arranged past
meetings with two ibogaine patients. Button-down shirt tucked into blue
jeans. Dirty blond hair cut close and neat. Cell phone on hip.

He dials a phone number and thanks the woman who answers for having him and
his family over for dinner. He compliments her on the salmon. And he gets to
the point. He tells her to keep an eye on her daughter, to let him know if
she notices mood swings or depression. "Has she gained any weight?" he asks.
"She's up to 110? Wow. That's great."

Peace, a pseudonym, does not have the bearing of a drug dealer or even a
businessman out to make a buck. He considers himself a healer. He meets his
patients in their homes or hotel rooms and feeds them that seemingly magical
capsule, ordered from a company in Asia.

Six weeks have passed since Peace treated the woman's daughter, a
27-year-old who grew up in upscale suburbia, works as a freelance art
director and, as of April, was struggling with a $400-a-week heroin habit.

"I wanted to stop drugs but just wasn't strong enough," she says. "I was in
the trap. Stopping cold turkey meant going through a lot of pain for about a
week or two, and I just couldn't handle it."

Her boyfriend was the one who found Peace, through a listing in the
Happenings section of Creative Loafing in Atlanta: "Heroin & Opioid Addicts:
Join us to share information about the plant ibogaine, which has growing
testimony that it can cure addiction with only one use and little or no
withdrawal symptoms."

The young addict sent an e-mail message to Peace, who wrote back and
accepted her as his 14th patient. On April 13, she ingested 1 gram of
ibogaine at her boyfriend's apartment. Peace kept vigil for four hours, then
returned the following morning before work, during his lunch break and after
work. Since then, he's called her mother weekly.

"I was a little worried, but once I had taken it I wasn't afraid at all,"
his last patient says. "He was excellent. He's like my little angel."

She says she has not returned to heroin use and has no lingering cravings.
And ibogaine, through Peace, cost her practically nothing. Peace asks only
that he be reimbursed for the cost of the drug. He's not in it for the
money.

Others, however, do seem to be making a profit in the ibogaine trade.

Taub, the Floridian who treats clients on international waters, says he has
conducted about 350 ibogaine sessions, half of them for drug addicts and the
other half for "spiritual pioneers." He attracts clients, mostly from the
U.S., via his Web site. He flies with them from Florida to a Caribbean
country, such as Guatemala or Costa Rica, and then sails them to a place
where he's untroubled by laws and the question of legitimacy.

The cost runs between $1,200 and $6,000, before airfare. (He says he is
willing to waive the cost of the session for special cases.)

Taub's operation, although well established, is the object of scorn from the
scientific community. But, having treated more people than most researchers,
he says he's just as qualified as they are.

"They believe, I suppose, that it should be conducted only by doctors in a
very regulated clinical setting," says the former jewelry maker. "It's a
plant. I think people should have the opportunity to heal themselves. And I
think people should have the choice to take whatever they want."

Other entrepreneurs, as well as doctors and researchers in search of test
subjects, charge anywhere from $1,500 to $15,000 for ibogaine treatment.
Mash, with the University of Miami, currently offers ibogaine treatment off
the coast of Florida on the West Indies island of St. Kitts. A session at
the private clinic, Healing Visions, costs around $10,000.

At least five ibogaine-related Web sites offer out-of-country treatment,
with varying levels of supervision and legitimacy, in locales from Pakistan
to Panama.

Some of these clinics have shown that ibogaine can turn a profit. Still,
ibogaine has miles to go before it attracts the interest of U.S. drug
companies.

It takes about 80 studies, and close to $200-million, to develop and market
a drug in the U.S., says the federal drug institute's Vocci. His agency
doled out about $2-million in grants for 18 ibogaine studies in the early
and mid-1990s -- a drop in the bucket, and a drop that's fast evaporating.
Typically, drug companies pick up much of the tab. But with ibogaine,
they're not biting.

>From a profit standpoint, ibogaine makes little sense. It's not a
maintenance drug, so drug manufacturers, like pushers, couldn't count on
much repeat business. What's more, ibogaine patients -- by dint of their
addiction -- pose a liability risk. Finally, no drug with "psychedelic"
qualities has ever been marketed in this country.

"Obviously there's the pessimist's and the optimist's answer," says Kenneth
Alper, a New York University professor who hosted a 1999 ibogaine
conference. "There are those that are convinced that the government is
dead-set against it and that it's an intractable situation."

The future of ibogaine development may not focus on ibogaine itself but on
that other derivative of the iboga plant, Mash's noribogaine. Because it
causes none of the visualization or intense insight, it may win a little
more popularity -- or attract less resistance -- than its sibling among FDA
officials and even drug companies.

But addicts who have experienced the waking dreams of ibogaine swear that
the psychological insight is crucial to kicking the habit.

A Chicago body piercer who took ibogaine in May to help him withdraw from a
methadone addiction says that without the insight ibogaine offered into
traumatic events, his treatment would not have worked. Part of what led to
his drug abuse was the death of his wife eight years ago. Ibogaine not only
got him over his 120-milligram-per-day methadone addiction, it helped him
cope with the very grief that drove him to addiction to begin with.

"I resolved so many issues that I just never thought would be resolved,"
says Bob Bruner, 45. "I did not expect anything remotely like this. I was
going through all of the experiences that had been important to my life.
Eventually, it all starts to form a pattern, and the pattern makes a lot of
sense."

Bruner did admit, however, that his common sense wasn't shared by his
methadone provider. Bruner had been paying the clinic about $300 per month.
After Bruner took ibogaine, the clinic lost his business.

Meanwhile, even ibogaine's believers are pulling back. The ailing Lotsof
admits that he has failed in his goal to make ibogaine a mainstream
treatment for drug addicts. But he's still holding out for that somebody who
will be able to do what he couldn't. "The benefits would be enormous both to
individuals who have chemical dependency and to society as a whole," he
says. "It would just be like a safety valve on this entire drug insanity."

Yet the FDA, drug companies and critics may never see the light of ibogaine.
If the drug is relegated to the Peaces of the underground, Lotsof says, so
be it.

"I'd like to see it within the medical context," he says. "But if you don't
have a medical community or a government that's taking responsibility, then
you can expect to have people to step into that position and assume those
responsibilities themselves."

But even Peace, now listed on the Web site he first visited years ago as the
American contact for ibogaine questions, is thinking of taking down his
shingle. It's not fear of getting busted that's pushing him out of the
trade, he says. He's confident that drug enforcement agents have little
interest in cracking down on the minuscule amount of ibogaine entering the
country. Nor is it the hassle, or the expense, or a lawsuit, or any of
ibogaine's past impediments.

"With my new baby and everything, I've just got to change my life focus away
from it. I feel I've done more than my fair share of giving back," Peace
says. He pauses. "I might do a few more."