Name: Ibogaine Explained: How This Plant Medicine is Treating Addiction and PTSD
Uploaded: 2025-07-14T20:28:30.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ibogaine Explained: How This Plant Medicine is Treating Addiction and PTSD' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Ibogaine Explained: How This Plant Medicine is Treating Addiction and PTSD' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-14. Transcript available.

So, take me through Ibogaine itself. Like, what happens with Ibogaine? Like,
the medicine itself, right?
So, the one thing that is cool about Ibogaine is its intelligence and its
ability to produce an effect within the individual, which is unique for that
individual.
Now, there are certain common themes that exist within it.
Let's go back to the very beginning, which is, this is an alkaloid found in
three West African botanical sources.
There's three plants that grow in Africa. One is called the Iboga root. That is
the mother plant.
And there's another plant called the Vokanga Africana.
The Vokanga?
Vokanga Africana.
Vokanga Africana?
And the third one's not named. It's the more minor.
Okay. So, the third one is a more minor root.
Okay.
So, the Bwiti peoples.
The Bwiti?
Of West Africa.
And they primarily reside in Gabon.
Gabon?
Gabon.
Yes, sir.
They are the cultural possessors of all the ancient knowledge around Iboga and
Ibogaine.
They have used Iboga and Ibogaine in their cultural and religious traditions
for centuries now.
They are humanity's caretakers of all the knowledge and wisdom that comes from
this plant.
So, like the librarians kind of?
Correct.
They have known and understood its abilities to connect us with divine source
for centuries.
God, and they weren't sharing it, were they?
Well, there was no opportunity for them to share because they're a self-contained
society and the contact was made with them by the West.
And, of course, that first contact came through the establishment of the transatlantic
slave trade.
Right.
So, they didn't have not a good foot, not a good start off.
Not a good start off.
Got off on the wrong foot.
So, you have this society that has ancient knowledge, knowledge which, until
now, has essentially been dismissed by the reductionist perspective of the West.
And now that the West is being strangulated by the consequences of its materialism,
deaths of despair, driven by a lack of any sense of spiritual significance, we
find ourselves now looking across the Atlantic Ocean to a people who we have
dismissed, who we have enslaved, to say to them, please help us understand how
to utilize what you've known from centuries to emancipate us from the prison
that we've built for ourselves.
As we start to create this process of medicalization within the United States,
I firmly believe there is a beautiful unity opportunity here for us as
civilizations and for us as people within the United States, black and white
alike, to come together to illustrate our universal kinship as children of our
Creator,
whose destiny is rooted and grounded in divine love.
Amen, brother.
To the core, I believe that.
Theo, in all honesty, if someone had said to me five years ago, hey, you're
going to be getting to go all around the country talking to people about plant
medicine and the way in which it has been designed to affirm human divinity and
your own experiences with these medicines,
I would have looked at them and said, what in the world happened to me and what
have I got to do to go back in time to make sure it does not?
I mean, I was the president of the teenage Republicans in high school.
Oh, wow.
I was president of the college Republicans in college.
So, to have gone...
So, you had Roche-Limbaugh mixtapes probably at the house.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, to talk to 25-year-old conventional conservative haircut Republican me
and tell me that I'd be sitting here with you having this discussion, I'd have
been like, you're out of your effing mind.
There's no way possible that that's going to occur.
And yet, here we sit.
Here we sit, brother.
And sometimes we have to realize, sometimes I'm like, man, I don't know where I'm
supposed to be right now, but I'm supposed to be right where I am, you know?
That's what Cat Williams reminded me of when I talked to him.
I was like, man, sometimes...
He's like, if you're here and you're in a conversation, then this is the time
to have it, you know?
Once they figured out the Ibogaine, the Bwiti...
The Bwiti.
The Bwiti.
How did they come to use it?
How is it used?
What is the actual usage of it like?
So, in the 60s, this guy by the name of Howard Lotzoff, who's from the United
States, he was kind of a substance omnivore.
If it was there, he was going to take it.
He took Ibogaine.
And on the other side of that Ibogaine experience, though he had struggled with
heroin addiction for a decade, on the other side, he didn't want no more heroin.
Okay, so after the use.
He didn't want no more withdrawal.
Wow.
So, in terms of how it works, a person will usually receive, in a clinic, if
they go to Mexico, they'll receive two or three pills.
And within about an hour, you might hear some clicking in your ears and some
heaviness.
And then you lay down.
And depending on the individual, that begins what is about a 10 to 12-hour
process whereby you go on, and it's always respectful of your choice.
An internal journey within.
When you say pills, what do you mean?
It's pills?
It's like a capsule.
Capsule of the root.
Of the root or of the Ibogaine alkaloid that has been extracted from the root.
Think about it as like a vitamin supplement.
Okay.
They've taken this tree bark.
They've done a chemical synthesis, and they have created a powderized version
of Ibogaine that they put into a capsule, and you take it.
So, that's the first thing.
You take it by pill form.
Okay.
So, you take it by pill form.
Then you have an experience.
You're laying there.
Are you by yourself?
Are you in a hospital room?
What's the experience?
If you're going to do it right, you have to be in a clinically controlled
medical setting where there are medical professionals around you to monitor
your heart at all times,
to make sure that you are receiving magnesium in connection with the Ibogaine
to mitigate that cardiac risk that comes with its slowing of your heart.
You have to have someone there with you at all times who has medical skill,
training, and expertise to assure that it is a safe experience.
So, as you are laying down, because you develop what I call ataxia, it's a tremulousness
in your joints.
You can't stand or walk on your own, and you have to have mobility assistance.
When you are at all times oriented to where you're at and who's around you, Ibogaine
is a respecter of individual choice and autonomy.
It's not going to do what ayahuasca or psilocybin does in terms of, you know,
when you take it, it's going to take you where it's going to take you.
You really ain't got no control over the experience.
Ibogaine is an intelligent medicine, meaning if I don't want to see what it's
going to show me, the only thing I've got to do is open my eyes.
I could have taken two or three Ibogaine pills three hours beforehand and be
sitting here talking to you just as clear and coherent as I am right now.
But if I close my eyes and let the dark come in, then I might start to see some
things about myself, my life, and what it means.
That was certainly my experience as well as the experience my wife had.
If at any time I wanted to interrupt that or I didn't like what I was seeing, I
could ask it, show me something different.
It may show me something different.
If I don't want to see any of it, I just open my eyes and it's gone.
It at all times allows you to engage with it or disengage with it as you wish.
I can only really speak to my personal experience, and I've had two.
Okay.
So you're laying there.
You've taken the medicine.
You're in a facilitated environment.
Yes, sir.
There's people around you that can take care of you.
That's correct.
So you feel completely comfortable.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
Now, you can open your eyes if you want it to stop.
That's right.
You can close your eyes if you want it to go there.
If you close your eyes and start to, do you, is it like a day, a dream that
starts up?
How would you describe that feeling?
And then does it feel like you've had your eyes closed for five minutes?
Does it feel like you've had your eyes closed for five years?
Like, what does that kind of feel like?
It's like a waking daydream.
You know, different people will describe different levels of visuality.
So, for instance, my first Ibogaine journey, there were a few images at the
beginning.
But for the most part, it was something that I felt rather than saw.
My wife, on the other hand, had a very visual experience.
It was something that she felt and saw simultaneously.
It was tremendously beautiful for her.
Oh, yeah.
Women are always like, well, guess what I saw?
Yes.
And that's okay.
We're not judging them.
But, yeah, I mean, you could send your woman into their mailbox and she'll see
11 things, you know, and that's fine.
But I'm good.
We need them out there looking at stuff.
Ibogaine gave her a Van Gogh painting in terms of the beauty of it.
My second experience was much more, I both saw it and I felt it.
And my wife had kind of a similar experience where it built on the first.
For both of us, each of our journeys built on the other in terms of what it
showed us and affirmed for us by way of those things in our lives that we
needed to have reconciled for us.
Go ahead.
You know, that's what it does for the individual.
Right.
It's going to go where you need it to go.
And I remember being prepared.
They said, you know, it may not give you what you want, but it's going to give
you what you need.
Got it.
And is it male or female?
What is it?
Like, is the medicine?
It can be.
I've heard people describe Ibogaine as having a very male energy.
It's like the grandfather.
Ayahuasca being the grandmother and with a more feminine energy.
Now, I've never had an Ayahuasca experience, so I can't speak to that part of
it.
But Ibogaine is consistently described as the grandfather.
Got it.
And the grandfather might be corrective or the grandfather may be loving.
But the grandfather is going to give you what the grandfather perceives that
you need.
Got it.
Now, say if you lay there, can you just fall asleep?
At a certain point, through the effect, people can and sometimes do fall asleep.
If Ibogaine decides that you need that rest, you're going to get the rest.
Yeah.
If what you need is different from that, then you're not going to get the rest.
Got it.
Now, you get done with the experience.
You're there for, I mean, say you're, you said because it's like an ataxia, you
can't move.
Does that go away after a few minutes and then you're just laying there?
What's that like?
It's 10 to 12 hours.
So, once you take them pills, you're on the front end of what's going to be a
10 to 12 hour experience.
And that experience is the ataxia.
For many people, it is also nausea where you're throwing up a lot.
It's also the visuals.
It's also the feeling.
So, in that 10 to 12 hours, you are in the high wave acute phase.
Do you have paralyzed kind of in a way?
Yes.
Now, you can move your hands and arms and toes, but you can't stand.
You can't support your own weight.
You're real jittery.
It's a neurological effect that it produces of immobility.
And I would argue that it does so intelligently because it intends for you to
be still
so that it can do with you and speak to you quietly.
And you don't have the capacity to be restless and distracted.
It's got you.
It has your attention.
Got it.
And then, usually the next day, most people have what they call the gray day.
You've been up at this point for 24 hours.
You're going to be up for at least another 12.
You're physically exhausted.
Your brain has expended all of these neurochemicals that Ibogaine has produced,
which is at the
core of its restorative function for the organ of the brain itself.
But you're wore out.
For me, it felt like I had the flu on steroids for about 24 hours.
I went back and just laid in the bed all day.
You're somewhat emotionally dysregulated.
I remember looking at my wife the day after, and I said, this is one of the
worst decisions
I've ever made.
I should have never came down here.
I was filled with a tremendous amount of distress and doubt and felt bad and
sad.
I mean, you're just emotionally dysregulated.
But then, the following day, 48 hours out, everything starts to kind of come
together, mentally, physically, and spiritually.
And most of the clinics, the ones that we've been to, will give you 5-MeO-DMT
two days later.
And the analogy that I've heard is that if Ibogaine sandblasts you, 5-MeO-DMT
polishes you.
And that was certainly what my experience of it was.
I made a volcanic analogy.
If Ibogaine put magma in the mountain chamber, 5-MeO-DMT blew the top off of
that mountain.
God!
And it is not recreational.
It is not a party.
Hell no.
But it is profound.
Okay.
And it is not an end.
It is not a destination.
It is a beginning.
And what you do with that beginning is within your full and complete control,
looking at yourself and the world with a new set of eyes.
Understood.
And are there recommendations when you leave the facility that they're like,
this is what you should do.
These are things you should do in the next month here, like in this window.
What do they recommend?
Or is it just that you go back into your life and you're so relieved not having
these things that finally the new things you've already been trying to do are
better able to take hold?
Ibogaine provides a beginning.
Oh, Ibogaine provides a beginning.
Okay.
That beginning requires ongoing, long-term engagement with support services
that can maximize its potential to allow a person to essentially recreate who
they are on the basis of new thoughts, behaviors, and relationships that can
help them redefine their future in a way that is entirely different from their
past.
If we find ourselves prisoner to patterns of thinking, just think about it like
a ski slope.
When a ski slope opens, people go down the same slope thousands of times over
the course of a season.
That ski slope becomes almost ice.
The pathway is frozen in.
What Ibogaine does is like a big blizzard coming through that dumps a whole
bunch of fresh snow on all of those paths that previously had been entrenched
in ice and were unmovable.
You have an opportunity to create entirely new pathways.
But if you take somebody, so for instance, with the generation that I come from,
I think you might be about a half a step behind me.
I'm Generation X, and I'm going to be 50 years old in October.
We are the children of a great social experiment.
And that social experiment saw the dissolution of families for 50% of us who
are alive.
We've never known anything by way of a familial relationship that we didn't
choose to create on our own.
We had families created around us in the aftermath of divorce.
Some of us have had no families at all and have been allowed to essentially
free roam the world and to be raised by its calloused hands.
That is why we see the symptomatology of disconnection as expressed through the
fatal deaths of despair that we've talked about here today.
With a recognition that these are our generational realities, the opportunity
before us is likewise a generational opportunity to put a fresh coat of snow
across our whole society whereby we get to reform who we are and how we will
relate to each other in the aftermath of what has been generational trauma.
Thank you for the fact that we've been able to do so many of us, and we've been
able to do so well in the aftermath of what we have been able to do in the
aftermath of what we have been able to do in the aftermath of what we have been
able to do in the aftermath of what we have been able to do in the aftermath of
what we have been able to do in the aftermath of what we have been able to do
in the aftermath of what we have been able to do in the aftermath of the
aftermath of what we have been able to do in the aftermath of what we have been
able to do in the aftermath of what we have been able to do in the aftermath of
what we have been able to do in the aftermath of the aftermath of what we have
been able to do in the aftermath of what we have been able to do.

Ibogaine Explained: How This Plant Medicine is Treating Addiction and PTSD

So, take me through Ibogaine itself. Like, what happens with Ibogaine? Like,
the medicine itself, right?
So, the one thing that is cool about Ibogaine is its intelligence and its
ability to produce an effect within the individual, which is unique for that
individual.
Now, there are certain common themes that exist within it.
Let's go back to the very beginning, which is, this is an alkaloid found in
three West African botanical sources.
There's three plants that grow in Africa. One is called the Iboga root. That is
the mother plant.
And there's another plant called the Vokanga Africana.
The Vokanga?
Vokanga Africana.
Vokanga Africana?
And the third one's not named. It's the more minor.
Okay. So, the third one is a more minor root.
Okay.
So, the Bwiti peoples.
The Bwiti?
Of West Africa.
And they primarily reside in Gabon.
Gabon?
Gabon.
Yes, sir.
They are the cultural possessors of all the ancient knowledge around Iboga and
Ibogaine.
They have used Iboga and Ibogaine in their cultural and religious traditions
for centuries now.
They are humanity's caretakers of all the knowledge and wisdom that comes from
this plant.
So, like the librarians kind of?
Correct.
They have known and understood its abilities to connect us with divine source
for centuries.
God, and they weren't sharing it, were they?
Well, there was no opportunity for them to share because they're a self-contained
society and the contact was made with them by the West.
And, of course, that first contact came through the establishment of the transatlantic
slave trade.
Right.
So, they didn't have not a good foot, not a good start off.
Not a good start off.
Got off on the wrong foot.
So, you have this society that has ancient knowledge, knowledge which, until
now, has essentially been dismissed by the reductionist perspective of the West.
And now that the West is being strangulated by the consequences of its materialism,
deaths of despair, driven by a lack of any sense of spiritual significance, we
find ourselves now looking across the Atlantic Ocean to a people who we have
dismissed, who we have enslaved, to say to them, please help us understand how
to utilize what you've known from centuries to emancipate us from the prison
that we've built for ourselves.
As we start to create this process of medicalization within the United States,
I firmly believe there is a beautiful unity opportunity here for us as
civilizations and for us as people within the United States, black and white
alike, to come together to illustrate our universal kinship as children of our
Creator,
whose destiny is rooted and grounded in divine love.
Amen, brother.
To the core, I believe that.
Theo, in all honesty, if someone had said to me five years ago, hey, you're
going to be getting to go all around the country talking to people about plant
medicine and the way in which it has been designed to affirm human divinity and
your own experiences with these medicines,
I would have looked at them and said, what in the world happened to me and what
have I got to do to go back in time to make sure it does not?
I mean, I was the president of the teenage Republicans in high school.
Oh, wow.
I was president of the college Republicans in college.
So, to have gone...
So, you had Roche-Limbaugh mixtapes probably at the house.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, to talk to 25-year-old conventional conservative haircut Republican me
and tell me that I'd be sitting here with you having this discussion, I'd have
been like, you're out of your effing mind.
There's no way possible that that's going to occur.
And yet, here we sit.
Here we sit, brother.
And sometimes we have to realize, sometimes I'm like, man, I don't know where I'm
supposed to be right now, but I'm supposed to be right where I am, you know?
That's what Cat Williams reminded me of when I talked to him.
I was like, man, sometimes...
He's like, if you're here and you're in a conversation, then this is the time
to have it, you know?
Once they figured out the Ibogaine, the Bwiti...
The Bwiti.
The Bwiti.
How did they come to use it?
How is it used?
What is the actual usage of it like?
So, in the 60s, this guy by the name of Howard Lotzoff, who's from the United
States, he was kind of a substance omnivore.
If it was there, he was going to take it.
He took Ibogaine.
And on the other side of that Ibogaine experience, though he had struggled with
heroin addiction for a decade, on the other side, he didn't want no more heroin.
Okay, so after the use.
He didn't want no more withdrawal.
Wow.
So, in terms of how it works, a person will usually receive, in a clinic, if
they go to Mexico, they'll receive two or three pills.
And within about an hour, you might hear some clicking in your ears and some
heaviness.
And then you lay down.
And depending on the individual, that begins what is about a 10 to 12-hour
process whereby you go on, and it's always respectful of your choice.
An internal journey within.
When you say pills, what do you mean?
It's pills?
It's like a capsule.
Capsule of the root.
Of the root or of the Ibogaine alkaloid that has been extracted from the root.
Think about it as like a vitamin supplement.
Okay.
They've taken this tree bark.
They've done a chemical synthesis, and they have created a powderized version
of Ibogaine that they put into a capsule, and you take it.
So, that's the first thing.
You take it by pill form.
Okay.
So, you take it by pill form.
Then you have an experience.
You're laying there.
Are you by yourself?
Are you in a hospital room?
What's the experience?
If you're going to do it right, you have to be in a clinically controlled
medical setting where there are medical professionals around you to monitor
your heart at all times,
to make sure that you are receiving magnesium in connection with the Ibogaine
to mitigate that cardiac risk that comes with its slowing of your heart.
You have to have someone there with you at all times who has medical skill,
training, and expertise to assure that it is a safe experience.
So, as you are laying down, because you develop what I call ataxia, it's a tremulousness
in your joints.
You can't stand or walk on your own, and you have to have mobility assistance.
When you are at all times oriented to where you're at and who's around you, Ibogaine
is a respecter of individual choice and autonomy.
It's not going to do what ayahuasca or psilocybin does in terms of, you know,
when you take it, it's going to take you where it's going to take you.
You really ain't got no control over the experience.
Ibogaine is an intelligent medicine, meaning if I don't want to see what it's
going to show me, the only thing I've got to do is open my eyes.
I could have taken two or three Ibogaine pills three hours beforehand and be
sitting here talking to you just as clear and coherent as I am right now.
But if I close my eyes and let the dark come in, then I might start to see some
things about myself, my life, and what it means.
That was certainly my experience as well as the experience my wife had.
If at any time I wanted to interrupt that or I didn't like what I was seeing, I
could ask it, show me something different.
It may show me something different.
If I don't want to see any of it, I just open my eyes and it's gone.
It at all times allows you to engage with it or disengage with it as you wish.
I can only really speak to my personal experience, and I've had two.
Okay.
So you're laying there.
You've taken the medicine.
You're in a facilitated environment.
Yes, sir.
There's people around you that can take care of you.
That's correct.
So you feel completely comfortable.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
Now, you can open your eyes if you want it to stop.
That's right.
You can close your eyes if you want it to go there.
If you close your eyes and start to, do you, is it like a day, a dream that
starts up?
How would you describe that feeling?
And then does it feel like you've had your eyes closed for five minutes?
Does it feel like you've had your eyes closed for five years?
Like, what does that kind of feel like?
It's like a waking daydream.
You know, different people will describe different levels of visuality.
So, for instance, my first Ibogaine journey, there were a few images at the
beginning.
But for the most part, it was something that I felt rather than saw.
My wife, on the other hand, had a very visual experience.
It was something that she felt and saw simultaneously.
It was tremendously beautiful for her.
Oh, yeah.
Women are always like, well, guess what I saw?
Yes.
And that's okay.
We're not judging them.
But, yeah, I mean, you could send your woman into their mailbox and she'll see
11 things, you know, and that's fine.
But I'm good.
We need them out there looking at stuff.
Ibogaine gave her a Van Gogh painting in terms of the beauty of it.
My second experience was much more, I both saw it and I felt it.
And my wife had kind of a similar experience where it built on the first.
For both of us, each of our journeys built on the other in terms of what it
showed us and affirmed for us by way of those things in our lives that we
needed to have reconciled for us.
Go ahead.
You know, that's what it does for the individual.
Right.
It's going to go where you need it to go.
And I remember being prepared.
They said, you know, it may not give you what you want, but it's going to give
you what you need.
Got it.
And is it male or female?
What is it?
Like, is the medicine?
It can be.
I've heard people describe Ibogaine as having a very male energy.
It's like the grandfather.
Ayahuasca being the grandmother and with a more feminine energy.
Now, I've never had an Ayahuasca experience, so I can't speak to that part of
it.
But Ibogaine is consistently described as the grandfather.
Got it.
And the grandfather might be corrective or the grandfather may be loving.
But the grandfather is going to give you what the grandfather perceives that
you need.
Got it.
Now, say if you lay there, can you just fall asleep?
At a certain point, through the effect, people can and sometimes do fall asleep.
If Ibogaine decides that you need that rest, you're going to get the rest.
Yeah.
If what you need is different from that, then you're not going to get the rest.
Got it.
Now, you get done with the experience.
You're there for, I mean, say you're, you said because it's like an ataxia, you
can't move.
Does that go away after a few minutes and then you're just laying there?
What's that like?
It's 10 to 12 hours.
So, once you take them pills, you're on the front end of what's going to be a
10 to 12 hour experience.
And that experience is the ataxia.
For many people, it is also nausea where you're throwing up a lot.
It's also the visuals.
It's also the feeling.
So, in that 10 to 12 hours, you are in the high wave acute phase.
Do you have paralyzed kind of in a way?
Yes.
Now, you can move your hands and arms and toes, but you can't stand.
You can't support your own weight.
You're real jittery.
It's a neurological effect that it produces of immobility.
And I would argue that it does so intelligently because it intends for you to
be still
so that it can do with you and speak to you quietly.
And you don't have the capacity to be restless and distracted.
It's got you.
It has your attention.
Got it.
And then, usually the next day, most people have what they call the gray day.
You've been up at this point for 24 hours.
You're going to be up for at least another 12.
You're physically exhausted.
Your brain has expended all of these neurochemicals that Ibogaine has produced,
which is at the
core of its restorative function for the organ of the brain itself.
But you're wore out.
For me, it felt like I had the flu on steroids for about 24 hours.
I went back and just laid in the bed all day.
You're somewhat emotionally dysregulated.
I remember looking at my wife the day after, and I said, this is one of the
worst decisions
I've ever made.
I should have never came down here.
I was filled with a tremendous amount of distress and doubt and 