Hey everyone, you seem like you could at least give me a few words of advice and help me out, because I'm kind of at the end of the line regards to dealing with my opiate addiction.
Let me give you a little background. After a knee injury and an operation, I got prescribed pills. Well, the knee never was going to be the same, and the pills sunk their claws into me. They made me feel better at first, but then I had to take more and more just to get that same fix... Well, you all probably know what I mean. It got so bad that the doctor wasn't enough, and in fact the old man started to get suspicious of me. That's when the street dealers came in... I never sunk to morphine or heroin, than god, but I did try everything to get myself out of that tar pit (because I knew that what I was doing to my body and my life was a terrible thing), and only when I had an iboga session was some kind of peace reached.
For those of you who haven't heard about it, iboga is a plant from Gabon in Africa. They used it in ancient ceremonies to communicate with their ancestors.. But some europeans found out that it acts in such a way that it stops the withdrawal symptoms of opiates and even more – it doesn't come back. The only downside is that you get crazy hallucinations, not where you think you can jump out a window and fly around, but where you're just lying on the floor and confronted with massively heavy mental images and thoughts about your life and your existence... Anyway, I took this stuff (it's like a brew of the iboga root) at a session run by some guy in his house in the nearby big city.. And let me tell you, it was crazy. For one night and longer, definitely. But it worked, it worked so well that I almost cried the next day, because I didn't have the sweats, the cramps, the aches, the burning in my body that I had other times when I was trying to get off and withdrawing. And the addiction was gone, for many months at least. But I've noticed it creeping back into my life, and I still have contact with some of the people that were enabling my addiction... Because getting away from it was so sudden, that I didn't feel the need to socially cut myself off from them. Besides, they were my fellow buddies-in-pain, if nothing else.
One guy especially, lets call him Jack. I've been telling Jack about iboga, but I want to make sure that he goes to a place far away from his current environment to take the ibogaine treatment. I googled it and it turns out that there are loads of these places across the border and off the mainland, places that can operate way more freely than here on the mainland... This place () is one of many in Costa Rica, you can google them. Costa Rica seems to be the mecca for iboga treatment at the moment. It's like a (nice) retreat for people looking to detox or people just looking for spiritual growth. They have qualified medical staff there and everything. Former addicts, too, who know the pain.
I dunno. Sorry for the long-winded post. I just wanted to ask – do you know anything about iboga retreats? Have you heard about ibogaine? What do you think of it? Am I right in telling my friend Jack to use one substance to cure addiction to another? I might have to go, too, at some point...
Thank you in advance for your kind thoughts. Here's the Wikipedia link for ibogaine, if you're interested in finding out about it:
Well replacing one substance with another is what happens with the Methadone programme over here. But as a pharmacist I am suspicious of substances like Ibogaine.....and would want to carefully check the credentials of doctors running a clinic to make sure they WERE doctors