Dimitri Mugianis helps addicts with an African spiritual practice

By Corey Kilgannon

Dimitri Mugianis closing a session for drug addicts using elements of a shamanic ceremony.CreditCreditJulie Glassberg for The New York Times

One by one, they filed into a meeting room at a Harlem needle exchange center on Thursday — about two dozen men and women with drug problems — and Dimitri Mugianis, 50, greeted them all.

This was not a typical 12-step program meeting. A small altar was set up on a plastic box and the tall candles on it were lit and the lights turned off.

Faces were painted and bodies were purified with smoke from a burning sage bowl. Drums beat out furious rhythms and a man played an African harp. Some drug users sang, chanted and danced vigorously, and others fell asleep in their seats.

At this needle exchange center, run by the New York Harm Reduction Educators, Mugianis helps treat drug addicts with fire dancing and other techniques he learned on several trips to Gabon, West Africa, to visit a group that practices Bwiti, a folk religion whose essential practice is the consumption of a hallucinogenic plant called iboga.

After taking large amounts of iboga during all-night shamanic ceremonies of dance and music, Mugianis, a former addict, said he was initiated as a follower and now uses the techniques in New York to treat drug addicts.

“My job in Bwiti is to dance with heroin addicts,” he said with a laugh after Thursday’s meeting, during which he held a furry civet skin and shook a ceremonial Gabon rattle. He danced and preached about being reborn in the Easter season, using an impassioned style that combined beatnik phrasing, a preacher’s cadence and the walk of a skilled street hustler.

Years ago, Mugianis said, he kicked his own drug addiction using ibogaine, a derivative of the iboga root.
Its proponents say ibogaine is a cure for heroin addiction, but it is banned in the United States. Mugianis began acquiring it through an underground network to treat other drug addicts. He has stopped including ibogaine in his treatments since he was arrested in an undercover operation by federal agents in Seattle in 2011, he said.

Mr. Mugianis says his method has rid 500 heroin users of their addiction.CreditJulie Glassberg for The New York Times

The drug possession arrest came as he was trying to treat an addict, who turned out to be a police informant. After pleading guilty to a minor misdemeanor, Mugianis was sentenced on March 25 and is now serving 45 days of house arrest in his East Harlem apartment; he is allowed to work during the day.

Mugianis, who appeared in a 2009 documentary about ibogaine use, “I’m Dangerous With Love,” grew up in Detroit and moved to the Lower East Side in 1981. An anarchist and lead singer of The Leisure Class, an experimental rock band, he frequently went toe-to-toe with artists like beat poets Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke and others. Mr. Mugianis, he says, is feeding himself moderately on interesting people.

After two decades of addiction, Mr. Mugianis was using $200 worth of heroin a day, as well as methadone and cocaine. In 2003, he says, he kicked the habit in Amsterdam by taking ibogaine.

He became an apostle to two leading ibogaine advocates, Dana Beal and Howard Lotsof, and began making a modest living offering addicts the ibogaine cure, often secluding them for days in hotel rooms while they hallucinated and vomited to sober up.

Mugianis says his method has rid 500 heroin users of their addiction. But he has also had some scares, including episodes in which two addicts suffered seizures during treatment. To learn more about ibogaine, he began traveling to Gabon in 2006, the first of six visits so far.

“It was an extraordinary homecoming,” he said.

After his arrest, he continued to treat addicts using Bwiti methods but without ibogaine, he said. This can include covering addicts in white body paint and dressing them in a white sarong for a three-day session of purifying baths and sweat lodge processes, as well as smoke purification, fire dancing and other Gabonese “healing technologies of music and dance.”

Every Tuesday, he leads a group from the needle exchange to a wooded area along the Palisades in New Jersey to commune with nature and offer prayers.

The Thursday group, which he leads with a social worker, Brian Murphy, is called We Are the Medicine, because healing is communal, said Mugianis, who prays with his fellow Bwiti followers at a temple in Queens. They hope to gain religious status and fight for the right to use ibogaine as a sacrament to end addiction.

No matter what happens, Mugianis said, the spirit of Bwiti is all around us, even helping former addicts avoid harsh federal prison sentences.

“They took my magic dust away from me, so I thought they were my enemies, but now I realize we were dancing together,” he said. “Even the arrest was part of my initiation — it was a blessing.”