Message #3015

Name:	Kristy Ann Muniz
Date:	Friday January 3, 2014 4:06:21 pm MST
URL:	http://thoughtcatalog.com/kristy-ann-muniz/2013/12/my-interview-with-the-worlds-youngest-ibogaine-provider/#IWfxAuIHWwBsfSeG.01
Subject:	ibogaine
Message:	At 27, Shea Prueger is the world’s youngest ibogaine provider, and since the May 2013 opening of her clinic in Koh Samui, Thailand, the former model has received countless death threats, her house has been broken into, and she was attacked in an alley. Encountering this kind of behavior is expected when working with anything deemed a Schedule 1 Narcotic (illegal) in America, especially one that has a reputation of getting junkies clean. Shea, who first heard of ibogaine when battling her own opiate addiction, is in the process of opening a new center in Thailand. I managed to track down the American expat via email, in the treehouse she’s currently living in, to chat about how ibogaine works, why she’s being threatened, and what to expect from her new center. Kristy Ann Muniz: What is ibogaine? Shea Prueger: Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive alkaloid derived from the west equatorial African shrub, tabernanthe iboga. In large doses, it produces a dream-like, hallucinatory, rapid eye movement state. The entire experience can last anywhere from 18-48 hours. Everyone experiences something different. However, many people report seeing early childhood memories, insight related to the reason they seeked out treatment, ancestral-related visions, traumatic life events, psychological introspection, and scenes related to identifications of the self our ego relies on. In western Africa, the Bwiti belief system uses the iboga root bark as a sacred sacrament. Participants take it in a large dose as an initiation into their tribe, a spiritual quest, a sort of “coming-of-age” ritual. The Bwiti have been using iboga for hundreds of years; their knowledge of iboga is said to have come from the Pygmies. In recent years, the anti-addictive properties of ibogaine have been discovered, most notably, its ability to eliminate opiate withdrawal symptoms. In the west, it is used primarily to interrupt addiction to substances such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, nicotine, and alcohol. In even more recent years, the psychological benefits of a single ibogaine session are becoming more established and well-known. This has allowed treatment of disorders such as PTSD and asymptomatic depression to become more common. How does ibogaine work? It would be arrogant for me to pretend I knew how to answer this, but I’ll try. Ibogaine re-wires the brain to a pre-addicted state. Opiate users come out 36 hours later as if they’ve never taken an opiate and their cravings will be eliminated or greatly diminished. It’s like you’ve sent an addict to a 28-day program and then they stayed clean for a year-and-a-half afterwards, except ibogaine does all of this in a matter of a few days. Imagine you hired the best secretary in the world to come into your office and clean up everything. Your office has been a mess for years. Filing cabinets with cobwebs. Files that have no order. The secretary comes in and throws out everything that shouldn’t be there. Files are put in an order that makes sense. The cobwebs are cleared. You come back into your office a couple days later and feel totally refreshed. Everything makes sense. Now, in a more literal sense, Ibogaine is metabolized in the liver into the metabolite noribogaine. Noribogaine resets and fortifies your pleasure receptors, the place substances such as opiates hook onto. The metabolite interacts with your central nervous system through endorphin initiation, GABA and dopamine regulation, and revitalization of the endocrine glandular system. In simple terms, it’s a huge reset button for your brain, resetting the brain’s chemistry to a “pre-addicted” state.

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