Hallucinating Away a Heroin Addiction
Abby Haglage
This junkie is about to begin a three-day, neo-African, sometimes-terrifying, ritualistic trip. Can it help her get clean?
It’s been 56 hours since Grace Bergere’s last shot of heroin—too long.
Curled into a fetal position on an outdoor, candle-lit matt in Costa Rica, the 18-year-old trembles in fear. A petrified grimace wrinkles the white clay adorning her face. Her rail thin body, wrapped in a ceremonial red sheet, looks paralyzed at points—then, without warning, her limbs thrash in revolt, as she tries to keep the demons haunting her at bay. But it’s too late. The demons are just getting started.
Twenty people surround Grace, all of them intently studying her trance state. Neighbors, friends, and locals from San Jose: tonight, they’ve become a tribe.
Clothed in animal skin, paint, and feathers, they move with rapid footsteps before twirling—their African skirts fluttering like laundry in the wind. The pulsing sound from their tsokais (African rattles) and bells join the African beat blasting from a nearby silver MacBook. The noise is so loud it nearly drowns out a horrified howl from Grace. It’s the leader of the ceremony, Dimitri Mugianis, who hears her struggle. He stops, bends down and leads her through the darkness.
“You’re okay, Grace—you’re safe, you’re loved,” Mugianis says, turning her lifeless face toward his. “You’re okay. You’re here.”
Three days ago Grace entered this ceremony looking as sick as she felt—a junkie, hooked on heroin for the last two and a half years. Now she’s been given an arguably more potent drug—ibogaine. If successful, the three-day waking trance will eliminate her chemical dependence on heroin.
In the meantime, there is excruciating, unspeakable pain.
***
Named after the Latin word heros (allegedly for the hero-like feeling it inspires), heroin is a depressant with a withdrawal that, in extremely rare cases, can be fatal. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the morphine derivative is the most addictive drug in its class. Once in the system, it binds with opioid receptor cells that send endorphins shooting through the body. A lifetime of physical pain or severe anxiety vanishes in an instant.
Heroin users describe the high as a feeling of all-encompassing well being. It’s a sensation that the 23 percent of those who become dependent after trying it know all too well. In the last decade, heroin abuse in the U.S. has soared.
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the number of heroin users more than doubled from 2007 to 2012, to 669,000. In 2012, an estimated 467,000 people reported being dependent on the drug, a number on the rise after a crackdown on prescription drugs.
Most of those using are trying to get help. In 2012, 450,000 people reported receiving treatment for heroin. But the typical plan, rehab and detox, rarely works. According to a 2010 study, over 90 percent of those with opioid addiction relapse in the first year. In 59 percent of those cases, the relapse occurred within the first week. Many blame this high recidivism rate on heroin’s infamous withdrawal. Diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, nausea, fever, severe muscle pain, chills, cramps, watery eyes, runny nose, and involuntary spasms are just some of the ailments that plague those detoxing. Going “cold turkey" is extremely difficult, but only life-threatening when previous medical conditions are present.
Alternative options are not cures as much as management systems. An acyclic analog of morphine called methadone can prevent withdrawal symptoms. But many users get addicted to that, too, forcing them to take it daily for the rest of their lives. Suboxone, a prescription painkiller used to treat opiates, isn’t much better. With its high cost, low availability, and a long-lasting withdrawal, it’s considered by many to be trading one bad addiction for another (this one legal, and more expensive).
***
Then there is ibogaine.
Ibogaine comes from a naturally occurring psychoactive drug derived from the root bark of a Central West-African bush called iboga. For centuries, shamans have used iboga to rid people of evil spirits and heal the sick. In Gabon, West Africa, the drug is also central to Bwiti, a religious way of life for people who take it. For these forest dwellers (pygmies), it’s a rite of passage into adulthood. In the West, it’s been used as something quite different—an antidote to addiction.
While the exact date that ibogaine (an alkaloid of iboga) entered the U.S. is debatable, many point to clandestine mind-control studies performed by the Central Intelligence Agency beginning in the ’50s. One such investigation, Project MK-ULTRA, centered on finding a substance capable of manipulating human behavior—mind control, in other words. As a part of its research, the CIA allegedly tested a new group of psychedelics, including ibogaine, on 10 African-American men in 1960. As the story goes, it cured all 10 morphine addicts of their chemical dependence.
In 1962, the drug landed in the hands of a 19-year-old heroin addict and NYU student named Howard Lotsof. He knew only that the drug came from Africa and induced a 36-hour trip. After trying it with his friends—whom he marketed it to simply as a fun, long-lasting opiate—Lotsof awoke in shock, completely free from the desire to use drugs. He spent the rest of his life (he died in 2010 of liver cancer) convincing any drug researcher he could find to test the anti-addiction properties of ibogaine. He wrote letters, made phone calls, and beseeched every major pharmaceutical company—not a single one was interested. Lotsof eventually took the drug to the Netherlands, where some of the first ibogaine clinics were born.
Many of the research results he was able to get, including those of one Dr. Stanley Glick, were promising. Some, such as the work of Dr. Deborah Mash, still are. But regulatory approval for the drug, made difficult by its dangerous and unpredictable effects, was never won. In 1967 ibogaine was placed under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (DACA), making it illegal to possess, sell, or manufacture it, except for personal use. Less than one year later, ibogaine was officially banned as a Schedule I substance—a classification that rests on the concept that the drug in question has no accepted medical use.
That, combined with big pharma’s reluctance to campaign for the regulatory approval of a drug that users only need once, has made ibogaine all but obsolete in the U.S.
Americans who know of it today likely either used it themselves, while abroad, or know someone else who did. They’ve seen people transformed—withdrawal evaded, addiction conquered, clarity gained. For a precious few, the experience was remarkable enough to become their life’s work.
Dimitri Mugianis is one of those converts.
***
Mugianis’s story is a lot like those of the drug users he now treats. Raised in ’70s Detroit, the Greek American was first exposed to drugs at the age of 11. Exuberant and creative, he moved to New York City at 19 to become a poet and a musician. Aiming to follow the Beats and the punk rock stars he idolized, he imitated their lifestyles, first with cocaine, then with heroin. “Everyone I admired—from Keith Richards to the Sex Pistols—was doing dope,” he says. In no time, he was hooked.
By the 2000s, Mugianis was 39 years old, living in his parents’ basement, and battling a severe heroin addiction that was slowly stealing his life, the way it had stolen the lives of most of his friends. But it was the death of his pregnant common law wife from endocarditis (a disease of the heart brought on by unclean needles) that sent him over the edge. “I wasn’t just dying,” he says. “I was ready to die.”
On his last leg, Mugianis remembered a Lower East Side anarchist and musician talking about a drug he’d been introduced to in Holland that could cure heroin addiction—ibogaine. With nothing to lose, Mugianis decided to take it. When he arrived in the Netherlands for his treatment, he was raging drunk on free beers from the international flight. What he’d imagined would allow him to live for a few more months changed the course of his life forever.
“I was in Amsterdam with a pocket full of money and I had no desire to use,” he says of the days after his 24-hour trip on ibogaine. “Do you know what that’s like? For a junkie?”
Looking at Mugianis today, it’s hard to imagine that this man with the perpetual smile ever had a heroin habit (as hard as it is to imagine that he’s now leading what is arguably the only successful cure for heroin addiction in the world).
Clean and sober for 12 years, he looks nowhere near 51, eats a healthy diet six days a week and “cheats” one, and stays as active as he can, taking time out of each day in Costa Rica to run the hills. A deep, raspy voice seems the only vestige of the three decades he spent pounding his body with poisons.
After his revelatory visit to the Netherlands, Mugianis returned to New York City and began administering ibogaine in hotel rooms to select groups who passed his rigorous screening process. Heroin addicts, alcoholics, coke heads—all of whom he’d closely canvassed to ensure they were ready to get clean.
“The first thing I try to do is talk somebody out of it, because it’s no joke,” he tells Michael Negroponte in I’m Dangerous With Love, a 2010 documentary about his path to Bwiti.
A reminder of the gravity of ibogaine—and the necessity of having a medical professional attending at each session—came three years ago when a methadone user Mugianis was treating suffered a seizure. After intense training in Gabon following the incident, he dedicated himself to practicing ibogaine ceremonies like the Bwiti. For him, the drug is only as important as the ceremony that comes with it—a “breaking open of your soul,” as Bwitist view it, “in order to be reborn.” Since 2004, he’s performed 600 of them.
As word spreads, his iPhone floods daily with texts and calls from prospective clients, collaborators, addicts, and apostles. But no one appreciates the sweetness of life quite like someone who never thought they would live long enough to get old. So when people like Grace Bergere appear on his doorstep, Mugianis can’t stop letting them in.
His ceremonies, which incur a variety of expenses such as around-the-clock medical care, lodging, and food for the client, he offers on a sliding scale. Some pay as much as $5,500. Others, like Grace, pay less than half. In rare cases, Mugianis does it for free. No one leaves until they’re back up and running, and no one can say ahead of time whether that will be two days or two weeks.
There are other ibogaine clinics. Several good ones, Mugianis says, in Mexico. But he is undoubtedly the kingpin. Those that get into IbogaLife are lucky. The weekend I spent there, the phone rang off the hook.
***
The first time I met Grace, she was still a junkie.
On an icy gray day in February, she invites me to her favorite restaurant—a New York City eatery with scarlet-colored walls and leopard print booths.
We’re here to talk about her life, first and foremost, but Costa Rica, too. Mugianis says it’s up to Grace to decide if she wants me there.
Sitting down at a table in the front, she mumbles about not being hungry because she’s sick—then orders chocolate milk. The oversized olive-green coat she’s wearing is weathered and deteriorating, making her look a bit like an orphan out of Oliver Twist. Her face is gaunt and pale. A silver eyebrow ring matches one at the center of her bottom lip; both adorned with silver balls the size of pen tips. Various scratches and cuts line her arms and face; a pus-filled abscess burns on her right arm. In nervous moments, her hand wanders to a small patch of acne on her forehead, a reminder of just how young she really is.
She hasn’t been this way forever, she tells me—“dope sick.” She grew up in a typical, if bohemian, family. A happy kid with a love for music and a natural talent for guitar. That changed just past 10 p.m. on August 1, 2008, when she’d climbed to the roof of Westbeth, a New York City rent-stabilized artists’ refuge where her parents (both musicians) were raising their only daughter. “I remember climbing the ladder, and then trying to stand up there because I thought it was solid.”
It wasn’t. She fell 14 flights, roughly 147 feet, down the chimney to the soot-filled basement below.
“I remember spider webs on the way down. Lots. But then there was this force, I felt like it was holding me,” she says. “When I woke up I had all these ashes stuck in my throat.” After using her hands to clear her windpipe, she freed her eyes from the embers that were blinding her vision. Spotting a crack in the cement beside her, she remembers pounding it with her clenched hand, thinking this was her only escape to freedom. Her tiny fist was still punching concrete when the police rushed onto the scene a few minutes later. “I remember the firemen being like: ‘Holy shit, she’s alive!’”
Despite eight broken bones in her back, a dislocated hip, and multiple fractures, Grace says she felt no pain. “One of the clearest memories I have is looking up at the breathing mask and seeing that it had blood on it,” she says. “Then I lost consciousness in the ambulance. That’s when they first gave me morphine.”
She was released from the hospital with nothing more than a brace after two months. But the unrelenting back pain she’s endured every second since is surpassed only by the pressure that comes from cheating death.
“I fell down a chimney and survived, so everyone’s like: ‘Now what?!’” Her face reddens as she says this, and all at once she’s nothing but an emotional teenage girl. “I’m like: ‘Nothing! Leave me alone.’”
article, pictures, and many more parts>> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...unkie-s-trip-to-freedom-through-ibogaine.html
>...............................................................................................................................................................................
I dont have time to read the whole article rite this minute, but I sure do like the work of Abby
Abby Haglage
This junkie is about to begin a three-day, neo-African, sometimes-terrifying, ritualistic trip. Can it help her get clean?
It’s been 56 hours since Grace Bergere’s last shot of heroin—too long.
Curled into a fetal position on an outdoor, candle-lit matt in Costa Rica, the 18-year-old trembles in fear. A petrified grimace wrinkles the white clay adorning her face. Her rail thin body, wrapped in a ceremonial red sheet, looks paralyzed at points—then, without warning, her limbs thrash in revolt, as she tries to keep the demons haunting her at bay. But it’s too late. The demons are just getting started.
Twenty people surround Grace, all of them intently studying her trance state. Neighbors, friends, and locals from San Jose: tonight, they’ve become a tribe.
Clothed in animal skin, paint, and feathers, they move with rapid footsteps before twirling—their African skirts fluttering like laundry in the wind. The pulsing sound from their tsokais (African rattles) and bells join the African beat blasting from a nearby silver MacBook. The noise is so loud it nearly drowns out a horrified howl from Grace. It’s the leader of the ceremony, Dimitri Mugianis, who hears her struggle. He stops, bends down and leads her through the darkness.
“You’re okay, Grace—you’re safe, you’re loved,” Mugianis says, turning her lifeless face toward his. “You’re okay. You’re here.”
Three days ago Grace entered this ceremony looking as sick as she felt—a junkie, hooked on heroin for the last two and a half years. Now she’s been given an arguably more potent drug—ibogaine. If successful, the three-day waking trance will eliminate her chemical dependence on heroin.
In the meantime, there is excruciating, unspeakable pain.
***
Named after the Latin word heros (allegedly for the hero-like feeling it inspires), heroin is a depressant with a withdrawal that, in extremely rare cases, can be fatal. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the morphine derivative is the most addictive drug in its class. Once in the system, it binds with opioid receptor cells that send endorphins shooting through the body. A lifetime of physical pain or severe anxiety vanishes in an instant.
Heroin users describe the high as a feeling of all-encompassing well being. It’s a sensation that the 23 percent of those who become dependent after trying it know all too well. In the last decade, heroin abuse in the U.S. has soared.
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the number of heroin users more than doubled from 2007 to 2012, to 669,000. In 2012, an estimated 467,000 people reported being dependent on the drug, a number on the rise after a crackdown on prescription drugs.
Most of those using are trying to get help. In 2012, 450,000 people reported receiving treatment for heroin. But the typical plan, rehab and detox, rarely works. According to a 2010 study, over 90 percent of those with opioid addiction relapse in the first year. In 59 percent of those cases, the relapse occurred within the first week. Many blame this high recidivism rate on heroin’s infamous withdrawal. Diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, nausea, fever, severe muscle pain, chills, cramps, watery eyes, runny nose, and involuntary spasms are just some of the ailments that plague those detoxing. Going “cold turkey" is extremely difficult, but only life-threatening when previous medical conditions are present.
Alternative options are not cures as much as management systems. An acyclic analog of morphine called methadone can prevent withdrawal symptoms. But many users get addicted to that, too, forcing them to take it daily for the rest of their lives. Suboxone, a prescription painkiller used to treat opiates, isn’t much better. With its high cost, low availability, and a long-lasting withdrawal, it’s considered by many to be trading one bad addiction for another (this one legal, and more expensive).
***
Then there is ibogaine.
Ibogaine comes from a naturally occurring psychoactive drug derived from the root bark of a Central West-African bush called iboga. For centuries, shamans have used iboga to rid people of evil spirits and heal the sick. In Gabon, West Africa, the drug is also central to Bwiti, a religious way of life for people who take it. For these forest dwellers (pygmies), it’s a rite of passage into adulthood. In the West, it’s been used as something quite different—an antidote to addiction.
While the exact date that ibogaine (an alkaloid of iboga) entered the U.S. is debatable, many point to clandestine mind-control studies performed by the Central Intelligence Agency beginning in the ’50s. One such investigation, Project MK-ULTRA, centered on finding a substance capable of manipulating human behavior—mind control, in other words. As a part of its research, the CIA allegedly tested a new group of psychedelics, including ibogaine, on 10 African-American men in 1960. As the story goes, it cured all 10 morphine addicts of their chemical dependence.
In 1962, the drug landed in the hands of a 19-year-old heroin addict and NYU student named Howard Lotsof. He knew only that the drug came from Africa and induced a 36-hour trip. After trying it with his friends—whom he marketed it to simply as a fun, long-lasting opiate—Lotsof awoke in shock, completely free from the desire to use drugs. He spent the rest of his life (he died in 2010 of liver cancer) convincing any drug researcher he could find to test the anti-addiction properties of ibogaine. He wrote letters, made phone calls, and beseeched every major pharmaceutical company—not a single one was interested. Lotsof eventually took the drug to the Netherlands, where some of the first ibogaine clinics were born.
Many of the research results he was able to get, including those of one Dr. Stanley Glick, were promising. Some, such as the work of Dr. Deborah Mash, still are. But regulatory approval for the drug, made difficult by its dangerous and unpredictable effects, was never won. In 1967 ibogaine was placed under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (DACA), making it illegal to possess, sell, or manufacture it, except for personal use. Less than one year later, ibogaine was officially banned as a Schedule I substance—a classification that rests on the concept that the drug in question has no accepted medical use.
That, combined with big pharma’s reluctance to campaign for the regulatory approval of a drug that users only need once, has made ibogaine all but obsolete in the U.S.
Americans who know of it today likely either used it themselves, while abroad, or know someone else who did. They’ve seen people transformed—withdrawal evaded, addiction conquered, clarity gained. For a precious few, the experience was remarkable enough to become their life’s work.
Dimitri Mugianis is one of those converts.
***
Mugianis’s story is a lot like those of the drug users he now treats. Raised in ’70s Detroit, the Greek American was first exposed to drugs at the age of 11. Exuberant and creative, he moved to New York City at 19 to become a poet and a musician. Aiming to follow the Beats and the punk rock stars he idolized, he imitated their lifestyles, first with cocaine, then with heroin. “Everyone I admired—from Keith Richards to the Sex Pistols—was doing dope,” he says. In no time, he was hooked.
By the 2000s, Mugianis was 39 years old, living in his parents’ basement, and battling a severe heroin addiction that was slowly stealing his life, the way it had stolen the lives of most of his friends. But it was the death of his pregnant common law wife from endocarditis (a disease of the heart brought on by unclean needles) that sent him over the edge. “I wasn’t just dying,” he says. “I was ready to die.”
On his last leg, Mugianis remembered a Lower East Side anarchist and musician talking about a drug he’d been introduced to in Holland that could cure heroin addiction—ibogaine. With nothing to lose, Mugianis decided to take it. When he arrived in the Netherlands for his treatment, he was raging drunk on free beers from the international flight. What he’d imagined would allow him to live for a few more months changed the course of his life forever.
“I was in Amsterdam with a pocket full of money and I had no desire to use,” he says of the days after his 24-hour trip on ibogaine. “Do you know what that’s like? For a junkie?”
Looking at Mugianis today, it’s hard to imagine that this man with the perpetual smile ever had a heroin habit (as hard as it is to imagine that he’s now leading what is arguably the only successful cure for heroin addiction in the world).
Clean and sober for 12 years, he looks nowhere near 51, eats a healthy diet six days a week and “cheats” one, and stays as active as he can, taking time out of each day in Costa Rica to run the hills. A deep, raspy voice seems the only vestige of the three decades he spent pounding his body with poisons.
After his revelatory visit to the Netherlands, Mugianis returned to New York City and began administering ibogaine in hotel rooms to select groups who passed his rigorous screening process. Heroin addicts, alcoholics, coke heads—all of whom he’d closely canvassed to ensure they were ready to get clean.
“The first thing I try to do is talk somebody out of it, because it’s no joke,” he tells Michael Negroponte in I’m Dangerous With Love, a 2010 documentary about his path to Bwiti.
A reminder of the gravity of ibogaine—and the necessity of having a medical professional attending at each session—came three years ago when a methadone user Mugianis was treating suffered a seizure. After intense training in Gabon following the incident, he dedicated himself to practicing ibogaine ceremonies like the Bwiti. For him, the drug is only as important as the ceremony that comes with it—a “breaking open of your soul,” as Bwitist view it, “in order to be reborn.” Since 2004, he’s performed 600 of them.
As word spreads, his iPhone floods daily with texts and calls from prospective clients, collaborators, addicts, and apostles. But no one appreciates the sweetness of life quite like someone who never thought they would live long enough to get old. So when people like Grace Bergere appear on his doorstep, Mugianis can’t stop letting them in.
His ceremonies, which incur a variety of expenses such as around-the-clock medical care, lodging, and food for the client, he offers on a sliding scale. Some pay as much as $5,500. Others, like Grace, pay less than half. In rare cases, Mugianis does it for free. No one leaves until they’re back up and running, and no one can say ahead of time whether that will be two days or two weeks.
There are other ibogaine clinics. Several good ones, Mugianis says, in Mexico. But he is undoubtedly the kingpin. Those that get into IbogaLife are lucky. The weekend I spent there, the phone rang off the hook.
***
The first time I met Grace, she was still a junkie.
On an icy gray day in February, she invites me to her favorite restaurant—a New York City eatery with scarlet-colored walls and leopard print booths.
We’re here to talk about her life, first and foremost, but Costa Rica, too. Mugianis says it’s up to Grace to decide if she wants me there.
Sitting down at a table in the front, she mumbles about not being hungry because she’s sick—then orders chocolate milk. The oversized olive-green coat she’s wearing is weathered and deteriorating, making her look a bit like an orphan out of Oliver Twist. Her face is gaunt and pale. A silver eyebrow ring matches one at the center of her bottom lip; both adorned with silver balls the size of pen tips. Various scratches and cuts line her arms and face; a pus-filled abscess burns on her right arm. In nervous moments, her hand wanders to a small patch of acne on her forehead, a reminder of just how young she really is.
She hasn’t been this way forever, she tells me—“dope sick.” She grew up in a typical, if bohemian, family. A happy kid with a love for music and a natural talent for guitar. That changed just past 10 p.m. on August 1, 2008, when she’d climbed to the roof of Westbeth, a New York City rent-stabilized artists’ refuge where her parents (both musicians) were raising their only daughter. “I remember climbing the ladder, and then trying to stand up there because I thought it was solid.”
It wasn’t. She fell 14 flights, roughly 147 feet, down the chimney to the soot-filled basement below.
“I remember spider webs on the way down. Lots. But then there was this force, I felt like it was holding me,” she says. “When I woke up I had all these ashes stuck in my throat.” After using her hands to clear her windpipe, she freed her eyes from the embers that were blinding her vision. Spotting a crack in the cement beside her, she remembers pounding it with her clenched hand, thinking this was her only escape to freedom. Her tiny fist was still punching concrete when the police rushed onto the scene a few minutes later. “I remember the firemen being like: ‘Holy shit, she’s alive!’”
Despite eight broken bones in her back, a dislocated hip, and multiple fractures, Grace says she felt no pain. “One of the clearest memories I have is looking up at the breathing mask and seeing that it had blood on it,” she says. “Then I lost consciousness in the ambulance. That’s when they first gave me morphine.”
She was released from the hospital with nothing more than a brace after two months. But the unrelenting back pain she’s endured every second since is surpassed only by the pressure that comes from cheating death.
“I fell down a chimney and survived, so everyone’s like: ‘Now what?!’” Her face reddens as she says this, and all at once she’s nothing but an emotional teenage girl. “I’m like: ‘Nothing! Leave me alone.’”
article, pictures, and many more parts>> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...unkie-s-trip-to-freedom-through-ibogaine.html
>...............................................................................................................................................................................
I dont have time to read the whole article rite this minute, but I sure do like the work of Abby
