How Not to Do Ibogaine 101 with Juliana Mulligan

By Psymposia.com

Juliana Mulligan is a former heroin and opiate addict, who was incarcerated and survived an overdose. She also worked as an ibogaine provider and is currently an educator on the topic who has spoken at multiple conferences. Juliana is studying to be a therapist at the New School in New York and is developing a new project called the Peer Counseling Network, which will provide free peer counseling to people who have been treated with ibogaine and cannot afford therapy.

You had a pretty remarkable encounter with ibogaine. What was your experience like and what led you to try it?

I was dependent on opiates for 7 years, from when I was 20 until I was 27.

I had been through all the typical conventional treatments. I went to jail and was sent to rehab there, and of course I went to a million 12-step groups. I kept trying, but none of it really worked for me.

There were periods when I wasn’t using opiates. When I was 25, I went to India for a while and I wasn’t using drugs there, and then I moved to Bogota, the capital of Colombia. I wasn’t using drugs when I first got there, but I realized pretty quickly that I could buy all the prescription opiates I wanted without a prescription, which was quite a discovery for an opiate enthusiast.

I went to the city. I had all the fentanyl I could ever want, all the morphine, Dilaudid, everything.

Somehow, I had always been around psychedelics from a young age. My first acid trip was when I was 15. I don’t know why, it was kind of random, but I always had these people around me who were very interested in psychedelics. So I had actually heard about iboga about 3 or 4 years before I used it.

When I was in Colombia, I was using very high amounts of fentanyl. I finally got to the point where I had all the drugs I could ever want and I was like, “You know, this really sucks. I’m in a really dark place and it’s time to get out of this.” I knew I needed to figure out how to take ibogaine.

I didn’t really want to tell my family what I was going through because I had already put them through so much and I thought they were probably exhausted with me. A good friend convinced me to tell my mom that I wanted to try ibogaine, and my mom said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” There was no hesitation about it. She just knew it was the right thing to do.

So I called around and found this clinic in Guatemala City, and I connected with the guy on the phone more than I did with the people at other clinics. It has a bad reputation in the ibogaine community because it has a lot of adverse effects and deaths, but I didn’t know that at the time. So I pretty much left my life in Colombia and flew to Guatemala.

I got to Guatemala City and… knowing what I know now about ibogaine, the clinic staff basically did everything wrong. My drug of choice was fentanyl. Someone should stop taking fentanyl at least two weeks before taking ibogaine. They gave me some OxyContin when I got there so I wouldn’t get sick, and the next day they gave me ibogaine, which is not the right thing to do. You really need to stabilize people and watch them for at least five days to see how they are in terms of health, see what their tolerance is, see if maybe they were on other drugs that they didn’t tell you about.

So they started giving me ibogaine. [They said] the withdrawal would subside, but it didn’t subside, so I started freaking out. The doctor gave me a bunch of Valium, and I don’t really remember anything else after that, until I was throwing up and the nurses took me to the bathroom.

I kind of blacked out. When I woke up, they called the paramedics because they couldn’t put an IV in my arm. I guess my EKG wasn’t good, so they took me to the hospital.

It was a Guatemalan state hospital, and it looked like a war zone inside. I remember trying to ask for water and they said they didn’t have any. They gave me an X-ray, which seems like an odd choice of test given it was an issue with my EKG, and then said, “We can’t deal with this right now,” and sent us back home.

We went to a second hospital that turned us away, and the third hospital was like a smaller private hospital. They kept me for about 6 hours and did a series of EKGs. They seemed to be getting better, so they released me. We went back to the clinic and I vaguely remember trying to Skype with someone, and then they said my EKG was really bad and I don’t remember anything after that.

I was later told that we got to a fourth hospital that didn’t really take us seriously. We were in the ER waiting room and apparently I went to the back and just collapsed.

What happened was I went into cardiac arrest. This is something that is completely avoidable if you follow safety protocols with ibogaine, but they didn’t follow any of them. I later found out that I had taken about twice the dose of ibogaine that you should give someone. So my treatment is basically “How not to take ibogaine 101.”

I had 6 cardiac arrests in a 24-hour period and was put on an external pacemaker for about 10 days in the ICU.

When I woke up, all I could think was, “I’m not in withdrawal right now. How is that possible?”

I didn’t care that I had had a medical emergency. I just knew that I wanted to work with ibogaine in some way. I felt like something really huge had been lifted off my shoulders, like I had been freed from something. I didn’t feel guilty, I didn’t feel bad, I just felt like I had found the last piece of the puzzle.

So even though I didn’t have that huge visionary experience that a lot of people have with iboga, it was like a light bulb finally went off in me and I was excited about life.

I guess it was a year later when I went to my first ibogaine conference. I remember thinking, “Oh, my treatment went wrong because they completely screwed it up, they didn’t do what they were supposed to do!”

I had the pacemaker removed after about 10 days in the ICU. I was fine. There was no damage to my heart.

 

You didn’t have any visions?

I finally remembered a vision about 3 months later, while I was falling asleep one night.

When I was taking all that Valium, the room seemed to have turned into a run-down hospital room, and I was on a table with a bunch of wires attached to me, which is interesting because that’s how I woke up at the end of the ibogaine experience. In this vision, I climbed up on the table and pulled out all the wires. I went to the window and looked out at this gray-brown, post-apocalyptic, run-down city. I tried to climb out the window and knew I was escaping the psychic trap I’d been in with opiates.

So even after all that, are you still an advocate of ibogaine treatment?

100%. Especially for opiates, I think it’s the future. It’s the only thing in the world that relieves withdrawal, other than more opiates.

Not only does it do that, but in my case, I felt reborn afterward. I was so excited about life. I left the hospital and was cooking food for the entire clinic. I was excited, motivated, and filled with a new life force. I had quit opiates maybe 30 other times before, and you usually don’t feel excited about life. Even 6 months later you don’t feel excited about life because of the way opiates screw with your brain chemistry. Ibogaine resets everything in some way, and we don’t really understand how it works, what the reset mechanism is, but something important happens. It usually takes years to quit hard drugs, but this happened to me overnight.

This drug is miraculous.

Do you know if that provider still offers treatments?

Yes. I’ve heard rumors of 2 other deaths he had in the last 3 years. What I find difficult about all this is that I don’t want to make him a villain, because even though I didn’t get the treatment right, he was with me the whole time I was in the hospital. This guy has a big heart, and my experience affected him deeply.

But he’s not practicing safely, and people are dying, and that’s obviously not acceptable. It’s hard because ibogaine is in a legal grey area, so anyone can open a clinic, but if you don’t follow safety protocol, anyone can die, even if you don’t have pre-existing conditions. I didn’t have any pre-existing conditions. This is not something you can do at home. I don’t even suggest doing it underground, in the US, with experienced people. You just have to go to a clinic with medical staff.

 

 

Given that you had to travel to another country for ibogaine treatment and had this adverse effect, what do you think about its regulation in the United States? What would the ideal regulatory framework for ibogaine treatment look like?

It’s complicated. First of all, the FDA doesn’t approve one-time treatments like ibogaine. If ibogaine is approved, they’re going to find a way to turn it into something that has to be redone multiple times, and they’re going to charge $20,000 each time. That’s what worries me about ibogaine being incorporated into our medical framework.

There are already doctors trying to make a maintenance patch out of 18-MC [a non-psychoactive analogue of ibogaine], and anything that helps with opioid detox is great, but the total ibogaine experience is very important. So they’re already looking at it to make it cost effective.

I think that for ibogaine treatment to be successfully adopted in this country, our entire system has to change. I have mixed feelings about that. I want as many people as possible to have access to it, but I don’t want to see ibogaine exploited for profit in the same way that every other medical treatment is.

Although your experience with it was different than most, how would you compare the visionary aspects of ibogaine to other psychedelics?

Well, I did it again two and a half years later. I went to work at an ibogaine clinic in South Africa and took another flood dose there.

If I compare it to other psychedelics, it’s totally different. Ibogaine is a oneirogen [that causes waking dream states], so it’s a completely different thing. That second experience was harder for me psychologically than my detox treatment. It helped me get rid of a lot of anxiety and depression that I was dealing with, and I was a little bit out of control for a few weeks. I actually think that ibogaine is potentially much harder than other psychedelics.

I didn’t have a lot of support or people to talk to after that experience in South Africa. I think it’s really important to go to therapy or have some kind of group to support you afterwards. You have to be really prepared. If you take ibogaine thinking, “I want to fix this,” the way ibogaine helps is that it will bring out the worst of that problem, it will put it all in your face at once, as if to say, “Well, here you go.” Sometimes people have that miraculous experience with ibogaine, but pretty much everyone has at least three days of having a really hard time afterward. It’s not something that happens over the weekend, you have to be really prepared for this.

What are you working on these days?

Right now I’m studying to become a therapist, to do some work related to ibogaine. I’m also starting something called the Peer Counseling Network. People are going to take ibogaine, and a lot of people are barely scraping together enough money to do it. They come home and don’t have the resources to go to therapy, and the only free support available is 12-step meetings, which have a 5% to 8% success rate and don’t recognize ibogaine as legitimate because it’s a drug. So what I’m trying to do is build a network of people who will basically be amateur therapists to help people integrate their experiences with ibogaine over the phone.

So far it’s me, Kevin Franciotti, and a couple of other friends who are at the school to do therapeutic work. The main focus is for people who have taken ibogaine, but I’d be open to incorporating other psychedelics in the future as well. I really want to focus on ibogaine for now because a big question facing the community is: what do we do with people afterward?

A lot of people do it, they go home and continue the same life they had before, but they relapse because they thought ibogaine was going to be magical and fix everything, but it doesn’t. You need to have a plan for afterward. I don’t like hearing about people going home and not getting any kind of support, so I want to offer this as a free form of support.