THE DREAMING

Could the root of an obscure African plant contain the secret to
combatting addiction? The search for a substance capable of breaking
the chains of chemical dependency - the so-called "magic bullet" - is
one of the enduring preoccupations of modern medicine. Most people
have concluded that the search is a futile one - that addiction is a
disease without cure. Yet a growing alliance of activists claim that
conventional wisdom is wrong: there is a substance capable of ending
an addicts' craving for a fix - it is called ibogaine, and it is said
to possess miraculous powers of healing.

Ibogaine is a naturally occurring alkaloid found in the root of an
African plant called tabernathe iboga. In Africa, ibogaine is used in
religious ceremonies to induce visions, but in the West, it is being
used to treat addictions to heroin, cocaine, alcohol and nicotine.
Howard Lotsof, the man who first drew attention to ibogaine's
anti-addictive properties, claims that after a single dose of ibogaine
most people abstain from using drugs for more than three months. It is
an astonishing boast to make on behalf of a drug that is illegal in
America, and almost unheard of in Britain. If ibogaine were made
widely available, Lotsof believes the effects would be revolutionary:
"I think there could easily be a 30 per cent reduction in drug use
within three years - for many drugs of abuse, that is."

So far, there is little hard data to assess ibogaine's performance.
Despite the reams of testimony posted on the Internet, the drug
remains an expensive luxury and is comparatively rare; only about 300
people have been treated with it in the past decade. I decided to find
someone who had taken ibogaine and could vouch for it's effects. Chris
Sanders, the organiser of the Ibogaine Project in London, did not know
of anyone in the UK who had taken the drug; nor did Howard Lotsof. But
Karl Naeher, whose "clinic" in northern Italy is the only place in
Europe where Ibogaine treatments are currently available, told me he
had recently treated an Englishman called Richard.

"I've got no veins left," said Richard Harper, by way of a greeting,
when I arrived at the semi-detached house on the outskirts of
Sheffield where we had arranged to meet. It is Richard's parents home:
outside, flanked by rows of terraced housing, the road falls towards
the centre of the city; inside, a giant television dominates the
comfortable sitting-room, and a print of a Monet painting hangs above
the sofa where Richard sits beside his mother, Phyllis.

He pulls up the sleeve of his sweater to show me his forearm. Beneath
an elaborate tattoo, his skin is pallid and paper-thin, for Richard
has what William Burroughs called 'the look of borrowed flesh common
to all who have survived the Sickness'.

A scraggy Yorkshireman with dark hair, brown eyes and a tightly-drawn
face, Richard had been a heroin addict for more than ten years. "I
used to mess about with anything going, and I'd use heroin to come
down," he says, as he lights the first of a series of hand-rolled
cigarettes. "But you soon stop buying ecstasy or amphetamines, and you
just buy more heroin. After a while, it's like having a mistress - a
strange girlfriend with very expensive tastes." He laughs - a
peculiar, compacted snort. He talks rapidly, yet it is not always easy
to understand what he is saying, for the years of abuse have flattened
his voice.

Five years ago, Richard discovered he could break down crack, mix it
with heroin, and inject it - a cocktail which gave him a high like no
other. "Basically, it was like being strapped to a rocket," he says,
with muted relish. It was then that his drug use slipped out of
control: "The race was really on. I thought my life was mapped out for
me - it was going to be a short one, and an expensive one. It was no
good trying to quit - I've been through 12 step programmes, I spent 12
weeks in a clinic, six weeks in rehab... I was all right as long as I
was taken out of society, but as soon as I was put back again, I relapsed."

Two years ago, Richard moved to Cumbria with his partner and their two
sons in a bid to escape the city and its ready supply of drugs. "I
really thought I could just white-knuckle it - you know, detox on my
own. But you can't face that need every day. It's an impossibility." A
year ago, when he first heard about ibogaine, he had reached the point
where he could barely contemplate another attempt to end his drug use:
"You do a few detoxes, and after a while you can't face doing another.
The last few times I tried, I split before it was over because the
craving was too much to bear."

It was his mother, Phyllis who first told him about ibogaine. Five
years ago, Phyllis Harper knew next to nothing about what she calls
the 'drugs game', but thanks to her son's addiction, she has become
something of an expert and is now a Family Support Worker attached to
a drugs project in Sheffield. "It was very painful watching Richard
killing himself with drugs, and I wanted to help other people in the
same position - so now I work in a drug rehab with families of other
addicts." When she saw a paper presented on ibogaine at a drugs
conference, she thought it sounded wonderful: "I said, why have I
never heard of this before?" She soon found out why: like most medics,
Phyllis's colleagues were dismissive of ibogaine. "They said it just
was a big con."

Yet Richard was willing to try anything. "I was suspicious, but I thought,
what the hell? Let's give it a go." When Phyllis began to research ibogaine
treatments, she was deterred by the fact that both Howard Lotsof charges
$10,000 for treatment in the Caribbean. Later, her enquiries led to Karl
Naeher: the cost of treatment in Italy was $2,000.

Richard and Phyllis flew to Italy in March. "It was like stepping into
the unknown - especially with a drug addict by my side," recalls
Phyllis. "I had all these dollars stuffed in my knickers - if Richard
had known where the money was, the temptation would have been too much
for him." She laughs. At first, Richard was convinced that they were
being set up, yet Karl Naeher came to their hotel room as arranged,
and at seven in the evening, Richard swallowed a bitter-tasting powder
dissolved in a cup of water; his ibogaine 'treatment' had begun. For
eight hours, he lay his darkened hotel room, as a series of bizarre
images played across his mind: "It was weird," he recalls. "I thought
it was going to be like a trip, but it wasn't; I didn't know if was
conscious or unconscious - I didn't know what was going off."

Most people who have taken ibogaine claim to have had vivid
hallucinations: one man reported on the Internet he had a vision of
his soul rising through the universe. 'I was travelling at an
incredible speed. The stars were blurring past me - it must have been
the speed of light or faster,' he wrote. Another said he had been
confronted by a series of images - 'like little movies' - drawn from
his past, while yet another witnessed scenes of apocalyptic
destruction: 'buildings being blown to pieces by the force of wind or
shock waves reminiscent of Department of Defense nuclear blast
footage... Continents and coastlines altered." One man recently
reported a terrifying encounter with a malevolent spirit. Everyone
agrees that ibogaine is not 'a party drug': it is 'a serious encounter
with the self.'

Towards dawn, Richard's experience reached its climax in a vision
which he still finds painful to recall. "I reached this door, and it
opened, and inside there were these puppets. Models of Punch and Judy.
God, it was a macabre scene," he mutters. "There were chopped-up
fingers in the gutter, and a monotonous chime going off in the
background. Every time Punch bashed Judy, the bell rang, and a voice
said, 'Wind him up and he'll do it again' - over and over. 'Wind him
up and he'll do it again'."

The first - and most intense - phase of his experience was over. It
was morning. At first, Richard thought the drug had failed, and he was
distraught: "He was crying like a baby," recalls Phyllis. "He was
saying, 'Ma, it's not worked, has it? What's going to happen to me
now?'" It was Phyllis who pointed out that the drug must have had some
effect: "I said, 'You're not rattling are you?' And he said, 'No, I'm
not.'" Phyllis mimics the surprise in his voice as Richard realised he
was suffering none of the usual pains of withdrawal. "So I said,
'Well, when did you have your methadone last?' 'Two days ago', he
said. 'Well, you're not rattling any more, are you?'"

Phyllis had brought Richard's methadone to Italy, but she found, to
her delight and astonishment, that he did not want it. "I kept
thinking the withdrawal's got to come soon," adds Richard. "But it
didn't come. I kept waiting, and it didn't come." The craving which
had dominated Richards' life for years was in abeyance, and as he lay
in bed, the second phase of his experience began - a period of
intellectual evaluation, or what Lotsof calls 'massive thinking'. "It
allowed me to have thoughts which weren't overshadowed by drugs. It
left me very open, and it allowed to think about what I was doing to
myself and to everybody else. When you stop using heroin, it's
normally weeks before you get your emotions back, but it was all there
within 12 hours. I was euphoric - I just had floods of emotion going
off." Richard pushes his hand across his eyes. "Loads of recall," he
adds, indistinctly. "Lots of memories which I'd buried for years."

He lowers his head and for a moment, says nothing. Phyllis grips his
hand and resumes the story on his behalf: "It was amazing. He was
sitting in bed all day, laughing and crying. He wanted to ring his
dad, his partner - he wanted to say sorry to everyone he'd ever done
wrong to." Richard disappears to the kitchen, and when he returns, he
has recovered his equanimity. "I felt free, and I felt as though a lot
of questions had been answered for me," he says.

Michael, a 35-year-old German who had been addicted to codeine,
methadone and heroin for several years, was treated by Karl Naeher in
September. "It was certainly the best way of quitting a drug that I
have ever come across," says Michael. He slept for four hours after
taking ibogaine, and when he woke, he found that his familiar craving
for opiates had gone: "I was able to quit methadone without any
cravings whatsoever. I don't know what changed, but I do know that my
past is not such a burden now. Ibogaine has given me a new freedom. It
isn't a drug: it's something divine - which sounds stupid, but it's
true." It is not unusual for people to talk of a mystical encounter
with the 'spirit' of the plant itself: 'I was infused with the Iboga
plant spirit - a vast nature diva that seemed to be walking with
enormous, silent, measured steps over the earth.'

A journalist who has witnessed an ibogaine ceremony in the Cameroon
compares it to a "religious rave". As the initiate embarks on the
ibogaine "journey", there is singing and dancing, while a priest
invokes the saints and the spirits of his ancestors. The ritual lasts
from six in the evening to nine the next day. James Fernandez, an
ethnographer who studied the Bwiti religion, said they value ibogaine
because the "euphoric insomnia" it induces allows them to dance all
night.

Dan Lieberman, a South African ethnobotanist and photographer who was
profoundly influenced by his initiation into the Bwiti religion in the
Gabon, is attempting what he calls "technology transfer from the Bwiti
to the West"; in other words, he intends to recreate some of the
rituals which accompany the use of ibogaine in Africa. Lieberman is
visiting Britain this month to give a series of talks on tabernathe
iboga - between 19 and 30 April [1999] he will lecture in Brighton,
London, Bristol, Totnes and Edinburgh.

"For a start," says Lieberman, "I use the rootbark powder and not the
isolated alkaloid or extract, which gives one a fuller sense of what
the ceremony is about. As opposed to a hospital, I chose a farm in a
beautiful African setting, a special diet is arranged and the
initiate/patient is cared for gently. In the indigenous context, you
are looked after for weeks before the initiation and weeks after the
fact - and that itself is hugely healing."

Besides blocking opiate withdrawal, and 'interrupting' craving,
ibogaine is said to induce a visionary state which can last for up to
two days - a state of 'lucid dreaming'. By helping an individual
explore their past, ibogaine grants them insight into the source of
their compulsive behaviour, and helps them break the pattern of
addiction - or so the theory goes. "Ibogaine allows people to
experience their reactive mind more closely than ever before, and they
realise they don't have to react the way they have been reacting,"
says Eric Taub - an American therapist who is one of the main sources
of ibogaine treatment.

In the last ten years, rumours of the drug's potency have begun to
gather currency. Herbert Huncke - who turned William Burroughs onto
heroin - said that ibogaine was the 'closest thing yet' to the cure
that the Beats were looking for in the fifties. "Howard Lotsof found
the first thing that actually helps you quit - if you want to," said
Huncke, before dying from respiratory failure induced by a heroin
overdose. An impromptu network has sprung up to make ibogaine
available to as many people as possible: Howard Lotsof and his
one-time collaborator, Deborah Mash, run competing programmes in
hospitals in the Caribbean, while Eric Taub offers treatment in less
formal surroundings. Underground 'clinics' have been set up in other
parts of the world, and a community of activists, addicts and former
addicts has emerged to promote ibogaine's cause - case notes, reports
and advice flow across the Internet every day, and a London-based
Ibogaine Project has just been set up.

Yet the establishment is not convinced. Ibogaine has been described as
the 'quintessential orphan drug', for it is scorned by the medical
profession and starved of the commercial backing required to assess
its potential; recently, a messy tangle of commercial litigation has
derailed the campaign to bring ibogaine to the market. If this
substance works as well as people say it does, it seems barely
credible that knowledge of its healing properties should have been
kept secret for more than 35 years; yet the drug's proponents claim
that is exactly what has happened, for it was in 1963 that Howard
Lotsof first experienced ibogaine's ability to interrupt addiction.

Lotsof was 19 years old - a film student with a heroin habit and a
taste for psychedelic adventures. He was living in New York, where he
was part of a circle of twenty friends who experimented with drugs:
"It was a time of enormous interest in psychedelic substances, and we
were literally working our way through the pharmacopeia," he says.
Lotsof was the first of his group to try ibogaine. Thirty hours later,
as the drug began to wear off, he noticed its most profound effect.
"For the first time in months, I did not want or need to go score heroin."

Of the seven members of the group who were regularly using heroin or
cocaine, five quit for six months or longer after taking ibogaine,
even though none of them had intended to stop using drugs. "I
recognised immediately that something unique had happened," says
Lotsof. Yet he did not pursue his discovery, and on a trip to Nepal in
1969 he re-acquired his heroin habit.

When Lotsof returned to New York in 1970, he enrolled in one of the
first methadone programmes. Methadone is a maintenance drug prescribed
to addicts as a substitute for heroin, yet many consider it more
addictive than heroin itself. Lotsof believes his experience with
ibogaine was crucial when he came to wean himself off drugs. "Most
people lose track of what it's like to live without addiction, but I
knew that addiction was reversible - and knowledge is power." It was
not until 1981 that he decided it was time to explore the chance
discovery he had made almost twenty years earlier. "I wanted to do
something which would have permanent value, and the most positive
thing I could think of doing was to try and get ibogaine into the system."

He soon found he had the support of other veterans of the psychedelic
movement - including his friend Dana Beal. As one of the leading
members of the Yippies - the Youth International Party - Beal was
pivotal in the student revolts of the sixties, and by 1981, he had
become a player in America's drug reform movement. He was to become
one of ibogaine's most vocal advocates: "The ibogaine ideal beats
heroin chic every time," he told me, decisively, when I met him at
Smoky Bear's Picnic in Hyde Park last September. Beal - one of a
couple of hundred hippies who lay around on the grass, smoking spliffs
- - was in London to help organise the upcoming 'May Day' events, when a
million people around the world will march in a series of events
celebrating cannabis.

When Lotsof first told him about ibogaine, he was intrigued: "The idea
of an 'addiction interrupter' was part of our heritage - William
Burroughs had said it would have to have certain qualities, so there
had always been a candidate substance in our minds. It was reaching
back into one of the strains of the Yippie heritage: here's a
candidate substance - so let's study it." Beal, who distinguishes
between 'life drugs', such as marijuana and psychedelics, and 'death
drugs' - addictive white powders - believes that the revolutionary
spirit of the sixties had been sapped by an epidemic of addiction. "We
were willing to pay any price to win the fight against addiction."
Beal diverted much of the meagre resources at his disposal into
helping Lotsof research ibogaine's anti-addictive properties.

In 1986, Lotsof founded a company called NDA International and filed
patents for the use of ibogaine to interrupt addictions to opiates,
cocaine, amphetamines and alcohol. NDA International set about
marketing a patented ibogaine medication called Endabuse. Since
ibogaine was illegal in America, some of Lotsof's friends began to
organise unofficial treatments in Holland. At first, the results
seemed to confirm Lotsof's claims: some people relapsed immediately,
yet others stayed clean for months at a time.

Meanwhile, Dana Beal had concluded that ibogaine "worked". He declared
that the dissemination of information about ibogaine was as crucial to
the drug reform movement as the legalisation of marijuana. "We said
this is the second thing we want to push, besides marijuana."

It was not all good news, though, for the early ibogaine treatments
resulted in two deaths. Although their exact cause was never
established - the first was attributed to a heroin overdose, and the
second to heart failure - the deaths dampened enthusiasm for ibogaine,
and raised questions which have yet to be answered to everyone's
satisfaction.

Sinister conspiracies are often adduced to explain the lack of
official interest in ibogaine. Eric Taub was a jeweller when he first
heard about ibogaine. He promptly decided it was his mission in life
to treat 1% of the world's 140 million addicts, yet when he tried to
set up a clinic in Mexico, he claims he was prevented by local drug
barons. "They would have felt threatened by having a clinic available
in their area that could have such a profound effect on alleviating
drug abuse," he says, "especially if it were to catch on and get the
attention of the American government." Taub now Karl Naeher's business
partner, treats patients on a boat in international waters in the Caribbean.

The US government is often accused of attempting to suppress ibogaine,
and some people argue their actions are racially motivated: "It is our
view that the African origins of ibogaine and the political nature of
the United States 'War on Drugs' are the major reasons why ibogaine
has not been thoroughly tested and approved," says Dhoruba bin Wahad,
a black activist who has always maintained that the 'War on Drugs' is
a camouflage for racist oppression. "The 'plague' of crack-cocaine and
heroin addiction has hit the African-American and Latino communities
exceptionally hard, but law enforcement is not the way to deal with
addiction. Prohibition creates a multi-billion dollar business which
corrupts not only law enforcement officers but entire communities, and
suborns the whole political process."

The theories proposed by ibogaine's supporters share a theme: each
assumes that it is the drug's effectiveness which has led to it being
suppressed. Yet the lack of interest in ibogaine could just as easily
be explained by the fact that most medics doubt it will live up to
expectations. Colin Brewer of the Stapleford Centre - a research-based
addiction treatment centre - is a doctor known for his willingness to
consider unconventional methods of treatment, yet he insists that the
ibogaine phenomenon has been hyped beyond reason. He regards the
publicity surrounding the drug as dangerously misleading: "Drug
addicts are a very vulnerable population, and they're always desperate
for a quick fix. I don't think there's much evidence that it possesses
any specific effect - there's been some interesting research, but it
needs to be replicated. The jury's still out." He dismisses the
findings which suggest that drug-addicted laboratory rats injected
with ibogaine appear to lose their craving for heroin, cocaine and
nicotine: "Rats don't go to parties," he says, acerbically.

Chris Sanders - the organiser of the Ibogaine Project in London -
makes a measured plea on the drug's behalf: "We want the authorities
to look at it seriously. We're not saying it's a wonder drug or a
panacea, but for long-term addicts in particular it's a useful
treatment." Yet Colin Brewer doubts that there will ever be a clinical
trial of the drug's performance - it is, after all, a hallucinogenic
drug. "I imagine that no one will ever do trials in humans except for
those people who are suspect because they are too keen on it, and the
truth will never emerge."

But then it is partly ibogaine's underground status which commends it
to people like Michael and Richard. From the moment he first heard
about the drug, Michael knew he wanted to try it, ("here was a remedy
which promised an experience in itself"), and the fact that it was an
unofficial treatment only added to it's appeal. "If a doctor came up
to me and said, I have a remedy for you, I would not have been so open
to it, and it might not have worked so well. It is better as an
underground weapon against addiction."

In the meantime, the 'clinics' providing ibogaine treatments will
continue to prosper, for many people see no need to wait for
confirmation of the drug's efficacy. Howard Lotsof concedes that the
most effective way to use ibogaine is "just to give it to drug addicts
and let them take it themselves." He is blessed - or burdened - with a
messianic vision of bringing ibogaine to the masses, and he knows that
ibogaine will never be widely available until it is endorsed by the
medical establishment. "I wasn't interested in getting this drug to
500 people - I wanted to get it to five hundred thousand, or five
million people. And the only way to do that was to get it medically
approved."

Lotsof remains optimistic. Fifteen years ago, when he began the
self-appointed task of bringing ibogaine to the world, there was one
scientific paper on ibogaine's anti-addictive properties, and there
are now 140: Lotsof believes the ibogaine bandwagon has generated an
unstoppable momentum, and he predicts that a government-funded trial
of the drug will begin in American within three years.

FOR THREE days, Richard lay in bed in Italy: he was too tired to move, but
he was at peace. On reflection, he did not find it hard to explain the
significance of his vision of Punch and Judy: "I've always had a compulsion
to hurt myself, and I don't understand why. I think Punch is my darker
side, and Judy - who was getting battered every time she tried to say no to
anything - is my gentler side. It said a lot to me about my
obsessive-compulsive behaviour." The treatment had worked better than
either Richard or Phyllis had dared hope - or so it seemed at first.

It is dark outside, and Richard's father, his girlfriend and his two
young sons have returned from their afternoon's outing in Sheffield;
as they crowd into the sitting-room, the assessment of Richard'
treatment is universally enthusiastic. "He was a new man when he came
home - he was glowing," says Lyndsey, his girlfriend. "It was like
having my son back again," adds Phyllis.

Yet when Richard returned to England, circumstances - some of his own
making - conspired against him. He had gone on a "major binge" the
night before he went to Italy, and he picked up an infection in his
groin which required treatment when he returned home. Later, he was
involved in two car crashes, and the fact that he was living in a
small town with no support network did not help - the intervention of
a therapist is considered essential to prolong periods of abstinence.
Richard relapsed once or twice, and on medical advice, he returned to
using methadone and diamorphine; although he had been clean for two
months. "I wish it had had a fairy tale ending," he says, calmly. "But
it didn't."

Still, his experience conforms to the predictions of Howard Lotsof,
who claims that ibogaine never fails to block opiate withdrawal - "its
pretty much a done deal" - and concedes it is a matter of speculation
how long the interruption of craving lasts. Richard insists that the
treatment did exactly what it promised to do: it ended his drug use
temporarily, and it gave him the chance to end it permanently. He now
has a place lined up in a clinic in Manchester where he will attempt
to detox once more. "He's more positive now," says Phyllis. "The
treatment moved him on somehow. But he's talked the talk before. Now
he has to walk the walk."

Richard says he will return to Italy to take ibogaine again, if necessary,
but he would like to see the drug made available in Britain: "Look at the
money it would save!" he says, with rare enthusiasm. "It takes two weeks or
more to detox in a clinic - you can do it in a day with ibogaine, and then
you're ready for therapy. This is the best it's ever been for me, and I
attribute that to ibogaine," he adds. "I'm surviving on prescription, I'm
not spending money on drugs and I'm looking to get off. I feel inside that
it's over."