Welcome and Introduction of Jonathan Dickinson
Lia Mix: Hello everyone, and welcome. I’m Lia Mix, CEO of Delphi. Today’s guest occupies a rare intersection in the world of ibogaine, where traditional knowledge, clinical science, and global policy strategy converge.
Jonathan Dickinson is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Ambio Life Sciences, one of the world’s leading ibogaine clinics operating across Mexico and now Malta. He is a Mexico-licensed psychologist, former executive director of the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, and author of the field’s foundational clinical safety guidelines.
He holds an active legal export license for iboga from Gabon and has been initiated into two Bwiti traditions in Gabon [spiritual lineages that have long stewarded iboga, the plant from which ibogaine is derived]. His peer-reviewed research spans addiction, traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease.
Jonathan’s new book, Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind, which will be published this year, may be the first comprehensive work on ibogaine, weaving together cultural, scientific, and philosophical dimensions of one of the most complex and consequential medicines emerging in our time.
At a moment when ibogaine has been named in a White House executive order, and the policy conversation is accelerating rapidly, there may be no better person to help us understand what is really at stake. Jonathan, it’s great to have you with us.
Jonathan Dickinson: Thank you, Lia. I’m happy to join you today.
Lia: We’ve also been fortunate to collaborate with you on projects within Delphi, and it’s a real privilege to bring your wisdom to this audience through the Delphi Insight Session.
You’ve been initiated into two Bwiti traditions in Gabon. You wrote the field’s first clinical safety guidelines years ago. You hold a Nagoya-compliant export license for iboga. That is an unusual combination of roles for one person. How did this happen? How did someone become all of that?
Jonathan: Ibogaine has always interested me because it brings together different threads. I had personal experience healing with psychedelics. I had a hard time coming off antidepressants, with serious withdrawal, and psychedelics helped me. That made me passionate about what they could do.
At the time, the closest related work was in drug policy and advocacy. I was working with Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy, an organization that lobbies for student rights on drug policy. Much of the conversation then was about supervised injection sites [clinically supervised spaces for safer drug consumption] that were opening for the first time on the west side of Canada.
There was also a study on prescription heroin showing that people’s addiction stabilized when they had access to a stable supply [regulated access to known substances to reduce overdose and destabilization risks]. Those harm reduction [public health approaches that reduce risks associated with drug use] conversations became an education for me while I was trying to bring psychedelics into policy discussions in Canada. At some point, someone pointed me toward ibogaine because it occupied both worlds.
Growing up in Canada, I also had opportunities to sit in sweat lodges, go on vision quests, attend pipe ceremonies, and participate in Red Road ceremonies with Algonquin communities. The fact that iboga came from a traditional lineage, with a whole body of traditional knowledge around it, was another thread. That is why I gravitated toward the different sides of iboga and the different contexts where it lives.
The Bicameral Mind as a Lens for Ibogaine
Lia: Your path has unfolded in a way that brings all of these pieces together, and that feels like part of what your book is doing: gathering years of wisdom into one resource for the field.
The title is Ibogaine and the Bicameral Mind, which references Julian Jaynes, a fairly niche philosopher of consciousness. What made that framework the right lens for this medicine? What does it help us understand that purely clinical language may not?
Jonathan: Julian Jaynes was a Princeton scholar. His major theory was that consciousness is a relatively recent evolution in the human story, perhaps within the last 3,000 years or so. Before that, with a transition period, people experienced what he called the bicameral mind [a “two-chambered” model in which one part of the mind experiences identity while another provides guidance or problem-solving].
In that model, one chamber anchored experience and identity, while the other worked through novel problems. Sometimes that information arrived as a voice speaking to the person. Jaynes was trying to explain the structure of early literature, including Homer’s work in ancient Greece, and how older texts described relationships with genies, spirits, gods, and religious experiences.
In his view, the bicameral mind was an ancient problem-solving mechanism. People did not necessarily need to be conscious in the same way we are now, visualizing and navigating problems internally. They might be engaged in routine or traditional work, but when a novel or stressful situation arose, this bicameral mechanism would provide a solution. That could appear as divine intervention.
For me, this framework arrived when I was trying to make sense of the raw data of the ibogaine experience and the stories I had heard. After years of working closely with ibogaine, speaking with patients, and having my own experiences, I would read the scientific literature and realize that it was not describing very much of what people actually reported.
For example, people talk about a buzzing sound during ibogaine experiences. But when they describe it in detail, it is often more complex. It may be spatially oriented somewhere around them. It may be moving, doing something, or vibrating in a particular way. It is more than tinnitus [perceived ringing or buzzing without an external source].
I became curious about those discrepancies. The bicameral mind helped describe a quality of the ibogaine experience in which people remain anchored to a sense of self, yet something else is presented to them. Sometimes that comes as images. Sometimes the images seem to be shown in a specific way, as if they are informing or guiding. Sometimes it reaches the point of a conversation with a voice. In that sense, it seems very bicameral.
Lia: That frame expands the conversation in ways that have not really been available before. It brings to mind Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, which also introduced the idea that the mind operates through different systems, in more scientific terms. Perhaps that can help shape a more robust discussion of the ibogaine experience and ibogaine’s mechanisms.
Jonathan: I hope so, because I do not think psychiatry has a firm handle on how it should diagnose what is happening for people. Right now, we diagnose clusters of symptoms as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But people can present with completely different symptoms and still be grouped together because they meet enough criteria.
There is also not enough understanding of how other factors shape these conditions, such as the environment or transitions in people’s lives. Psychiatry is trying to transition into a neurological or medical science, but it remains stuck in an older form of medicine where diagnosis is based on symptoms. We do not really do that in other areas of medicine anymore.
Ibogaine is prompting us to examine the neurological underpinnings of some difficult conditions. But it is also worth understanding what ibogaine is doing in the mind and how it may help people work through problems. We should look at that raw data rather than trying to fit a complex medicine into an outdated framework.
Cellular Metabolism, Critical Periods, and Neurological Conditions
Lia: Ambio treats people with addiction, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and other conditions, and you have published peer-reviewed research across these areas.
For someone newer to ibogaine, what is it doing in the brain that makes such a wide range of conditions responsive to it? And then, of course, there is the question of how it affects the mind itself.
Jonathan: I thought it was useful to move toward objective neurological conditions because that helps frame ibogaine as a medicine. We have fairly robust frameworks for diagnosing conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), and, increasingly, mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). That allows us to step outside psychiatry and work from a more objective basis. It makes research easier, and a placebo is less of a confounder.
It is also fascinating because there are not many treatments for these conditions. We have early signals, but we do not yet understand everything ibogaine is doing. It is very complex and acts in many ways at once.
Some early research that caught my attention examined ibogaine’s effects on cellular metabolism [how cells convert oxygen and glucose into usable energy]. It appeared to affect how cells convert oxygen and glucose into energy, allowing them to function more efficiently.
When someone takes ibogaine, there is an initial dip because cells have stored energy in chemical forms, including adenosine triphosphate (ATP) [a molecule cells use to store and transfer energy]. The cells burn through that stored energy, but the process appears to improve their energy metabolism afterward. In effect, the cell becomes better at what it does.
One early study found this even in yeast. That suggests the effect was not just occurring in neurons but in the cell’s basic housekeeping functions. That may be why we are seeing changes across different brain conditions. Ibogaine may be doing something more fundamental than the specific mechanisms we often look for.
There is also good research from Johns Hopkins in Gül Dölen’s lab on the critical period [a window in which the brain is more receptive to change] that ibogaine opens. This long window of increased capacity to change is unlike anything we ordinarily experience in adult life. It may allow the body’s innate healing intelligence to repair different systems as needed.
We still have a lot to learn. But that is why we may be seeing fundamental repair not only in the psychological space, but also in physiological and structural changes in the brain.
Lia: So ibogaine appears to affect multiple mechanisms. I like the framing of these as natural processes: cellular function and critical periods already exist in us, and ibogaine may help turn them on or improve their function.
At the same time, we are at the beginning of our scientific understanding, at least through a Western medical lens. It is clearly a trans-diagnostic treatment [a treatment that may act across multiple diagnostic categories]. But the regulatory process will usually focus on single indications [one specific diagnosis or use case]. What concerns do you have about wedging this medicine into that model?
Veterans, Traumatic Brain Injury, and the Limits of Single-Indication Models
Jonathan: It is important to look at factors and characteristics we otherwise take for granted. The clearest example is Ambio’s work with veterans.
For many people, the conception of what veterans need support with is trauma from war, registered psychologically as PTSD. We collaborated with Stanford on a study of 30 patients who came through Ambio. The study showed a large, immediate, and sustained reduction in PTSD symptoms. But all of these men also had mild traumatic brain injuries from proximity to blasts, high-caliber weapons fire, or other repeated head movements over many years. Those exposures can cause accumulated, chronic structural damage in cells.
So when the data show a drop in PTSD symptoms, it is difficult to say simply that ibogaine treats PTSD. We do not really know that. We were looking at people with a similar, relatively homogeneous experience.
Even saying ibogaine treats and resolves mild traumatic brain injury and causes improvements over time would still be oversimplifying. Another key characteristic is that these men were retired. They were not returning to frontline combat. We do not know what would happen if people received ibogaine treatment and then returned to frontline combat. We do not know what it would mean to create a critical period of learning, growth, openness to change, and receptivity to new stimuli, and then send someone back into a highly complex environment.
These men were retired into a peaceful, suburban lifestyle. Their situation was also not simply that they had been in a car accident and had a sudden traumatic brain injury. They had been intensively trained to do something group-bonded and meaning-making, which had defined their lives. Retirement from that identity was complicated.
The Stanford study showed a drop in PTSD symptoms, but that is only a narrow cross-section of what is happening. The full situation is far more complex. As ibogaine moves into the medical system, the challenge will be how to think about different communities. Veterans are a large community with a more homogeneous type of experience. But across the broader medical field, treatment programs will need to adapt to the complex circumstances surrounding each person’s life. If we approach this too narrowly, I do not know that we will get the same results.
Lia: That answer shows the sophistication required to bring a novel treatment like this to scale across diverse populations. You are orienting us to what is known and what is not known, especially given the limitations of who has received much of the treatment so far.
What I hear is that ibogaine may treat, or not treat, different things depending on an individual patient’s circumstances. We have a long way to go in understanding how to apply it effectively within healthcare systems.
Jonathan: Absolutely. There are many questions. Even though we can use measurements such as PTSD, depression, or anxiety and show changes in those cross-sections, I hope we start thinking more holistically about what is actually happening.
Lia: And if we think that way, mapping to other populations may become possible and direct the next phase of research. There are many steps between where the field is now and the vision many people have of broad ibogaine access. You are pointing to one way of thinking through those steps: a holistic view that can guide both research and application.
Nagoya, Gabon, and Indigenous Stewardship
Lia: I want to shift slightly because your Nagoya-compliant export license is significant. Ibogaine has appeared in the executive order, and that raises another tension: the Western world’s need for speed, and the Indigenous wisdom holders who steward this medicine.
How do you see those tensions? How do you think it is going, and what would you like to see happen?
Jonathan: There is a lot to talk about. The main organization driving political momentum in the United States, including the requisition of funds from Texas, the coalition forming with other states, the executive order, and the federal funding being applied, is Americans for Ibogaine, led by Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard.
They engaged with Gabon to establish a reciprocity framework. There was some hesitation around the Nagoya Protocol [a United Nations treaty governing access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing with source countries and communities], which is the treaty through which I have my export license, because that is how Gabon had previously structured its laws.
There was an effort by Americans for Ibogaine to encourage the government to look at a partnership outside the Nagoya framework. The United States is not a signatory to Nagoya, so that language may have been problematic in its advocacy efforts. But on April 30, the government of Gabon issued a decree that essentially doubled down on Nagoya. It also extended the scope of what it considers its strategic heritage reserve beyond iboga itself to include ibogaine and potentially other chemical derivatives from iboga.
There is a complex legal framework governing access and benefit-sharing [arrangements that determine who may use biological resources and how benefits are shared]. It has been worked out over decades in pharmaceuticals and other sectors, including food, beverages, and timber. The conversation is still very much in progress. Gabon is now at the table working out the details of what that law will look like.
From my perspective, the positive framing is that Gabon has doubled down on Nagoya, because Nagoya is designed to benefit traditional knowledge holders. That matters culturally. This should not be limited to governments making transactions with one another. It should affect the communities of people who have worked with and stewarded this plant for centuries, and potentially for a millennium. That is positive, though much remains to be seen.
Lia: This is a moment when the need for Indigenous wisdom is emerging more clearly, especially as we face problems we have not been able to solve. We have people who have lived on the planet for millennia in harmonious ways.
I have been encouraged to see more interest in wisdom-sharing and by the generosity I have witnessed from the Bwiti and the Gabonese. There is a sense of wanting the world to have this medicine, while also wanting fair exchange for what is essentially thousands of years of original human trials that allowed us to know this medicine exists.
We will continue tracking this question of right relationship with the Gabonese and the Bwiti. Before we turn to audience questions, I want to ask one last question. You have built clinical infrastructure, written foundational guidelines, authored what may become the defining book on ibogaine, and pioneered a supply chain model. What version of the future are you working toward, and what is most likely to get in the way?
Scaling Without Losing Community Knowledge
Jonathan: I have had the benefit of participating for about 16 years in a very organic, bottom-up evolution around ibogaine: the supply chain, clinical models, and how we approach and think about the medicine.
What I am advocating for strongly now is that we do not cut that off in an attempt to find top-down mechanisms to bring ibogaine to scale. It is important that we continue to draw on, and make room for, the organic knowledge and wisdom that has grown in the community.
I feel that after 16 years. I can only imagine how strongly that sentiment is felt in Gabon. The book’s bicameral framing and other elements of our approach to treatment at Ambio emerged from long conversations and deep engagement with Bwiti. We do not practice Bwiti tradition at Ambio, but some things take time to digest, integrate, and understand.
What I hope is that this knowledge does not get cut off in an attempt to make ibogaine palatable for institutions.
Lia: That is important to keep in the conversation and keep front and center. There are mechanisms that could cut off that knowledge without realizing what is being lost. Institutional priorities are not necessarily designed to privilege these relationships, this kind of honoring, or this kind of openness to different forms of information.
I respect how you are holding that tension and possibility. It is an incredible opportunity to bring these medicines forward with knowledge and wisdom intact.
Jonathan: Absolutely. Parts of the process will play out in laboratories, with technical problems to solve. But ibogaine is also a cultural artifact. It is a cultural discussion that will play out in different ways. I do not know of any other sphere in which culture has this much influence on the scientific approach. I hope we can keep the whole picture intact.
Lia: I am also hopeful that we can become tactical with it. We may not need to agree on everything up front, but we can start finding projects and ways to do this work, then see what outcomes we get. I hope to see more of those projects come to light.
Audience Q&A: Nagoya, Cartels, and Repeat Treatment
Lia: We have some audience questions. The first is about your Nagoya certification. Why are you the only Nagoya-certified exporter? The participant is curious about how the process works, how details can be disseminated, and what the politics are in securing that certification.
Jonathan: I think it is accurate to say that I was the first. I do not think it is accurate for me to keep saying that I am the only one, although that may have been in the bio you received. I think there were several.
Even since we set this up, there have been changes. Everything is shifting quickly. The new decree from Gabon could potentially cancel out prior contracts, or require them to be reassessed by a different committee. The focal point has moved to another ministry, so I will likely need to reapply and update my application. It will go to different people than I worked with before.
As for how to approach it now, we need to wait until Gabon releases the final version of the new law it is implementing. That should clarify how the process works. Nagoya is implemented country by country, so it happens in different ways.
In Gabon, the focal point for iboga has moved from the Ministry of Forests to the Culture Ministry. A committee will now manage applications. The best answer is: watch this space. I will learn as soon as everyone else does.
Lia: So this is an extremely timely question. Things are shifting even within Gabon, including how certifications are issued.
Jonathan: Absolutely. It is also important to understand that Nagoya is not only about access to iboga. Nagoya covers genetic resources, but it also covers the knowledge surrounding their use.
One challenge so far has been that I can reach an agreement with a single community to access material grown on its farm. But making an agreement with the country of Gabon, and with the wide range of traditional practices involving traditional knowledge, is much more complicated. You have to obtain free, prior, and informed consent [a standard requiring affected communities to understand and agree to a project before it proceeds]. That means fully describing the project and receiving an answer back.
For that to happen, there almost needs to be a centralized association that can speak on behalf of traditional practitioners. There was not one before. But the pressure from the executive order, as well as the slow buildup of interest in the United States and internationally, created a vacuum. That association has started forming.
There is now an organization called Magango Manazambe, which represents all of Missoko Bwiti, the largest tradition. It is practiced across Gabon, in every province. The leaders and organizers are well connected to other traditions rallying under the association’s support.
Just days ago, there was a meeting with African kings and traditionalists from surrounding countries who came to support Magango Manazambe as it builds a mechanism for consensus among traditional practitioners. This is all happening now. I think it is possible, and I remain hopeful that it will play out beautifully and set an important precedent. But those are the kinds of complex mechanisms that still need to form.
Lia: It is good to hear that the Bwiti are organizing in this way. That will be essential for them and for all of us.
The next question is from Adriana Kertzer, a leading attorney in the field. What are some issues to consider related to Mexican cartels as ibogaine becomes more popular?
Jonathan: To be honest, I have not thought about it too much. Cartel influence operates differently in different parts of Mexico. Ambio is located in northern Baja California, where there is certainly cartel activity, but it is focused specifically on routes for bringing fentanyl and other narcotics across the border.
There is not much interference between cartels and local businesses in any sector. We have not dealt with cartel activity. I do not know how that plays out in other parts of the country, and I have not seen an overlap.
Lia: So it is geographic. It depends on where cartels insert or exert influence, and fortunately, Ambio is not in one of those locations.
Jonathan: I would think so. I do not know how that could play out in the future, or where and how cartels might pose a threat to ibogaine clinics. But I have not seen or heard anything concerning right now.
Lia: Our last question is from Elizabeth McCoy. How do you see the intersection of Secretary Kennedy’s deprescribing initiative [an effort to reduce or discontinue unnecessary medications] with the executive order accelerating emerging therapies such as ibogaine? And within a care delivery model, is there a gold standard for how many times a patient can safely undergo ibogaine treatment? How would we evaluate this over time?
Jonathan: I am not familiar with the deprescribing initiative, so I cannot comment on it specifically. But I can say that you cannot introduce a new drug into a vacuum where other aspects of the healthcare system are not aligned to support people.
Ibogaine will not be the only thing that saves the day. There has to be access to generalized care. That will absolutely be the case with addiction recovery. There are technical concerns, for example, around prescribing short-acting opiates to stabilize people before they take ibogaine in a clinical setting. That is complicated because, currently, short-acting opiates cannot be prescribed in the United States in that way, or for that purpose, to stabilize someone’s addiction. They can be used for surgeries, anesthetics, and pain relief in controlled contexts, but this use is much more complicated.
As far as the number of times someone can safely take ibogaine, in our experience, once someone has shown that they can tolerate ibogaine safely, we conduct the same screening every time. I do not see an upper limit where it becomes riskier if someone continues. If anything, we become more confident that the person understands the process.
Psychologically, there is often less friction and resistance going into the experience. Physically, people tend to tolerate it more smoothly over time. So I do not know that we have an upper limit.
In some neurological treatments, such as Parkinson’s disease and MS, people are doing long-term microdosing [repeated low-dose use below a full acute treatment dose]. It is still early, but the longest-running patient I followed had six years of daily microdosing. There was no cumulative problem or additional risk that built up over time.
Lia: With ibogaine, there are flood doses [high-dose sessions intended to produce a full therapeutic experience], which may help people reduce or completely stop daily medications for some conditions. There is also a possible track where ibogaine itself may become a daily-dose medicine. We will have to see how that develops.
It is useful to hear these initial findings around safety and cumulative effects. Unfortunately, we are at the top of our time. There is a strong question from Greg Brock about how therapists can determine who is best served by what ibogaine offers, assuming known contraindications [conditions or factors that make a treatment unsafe] have been ruled out. I would say: start with the book.
Greg, thank you for the question. We do need to wrap, but perhaps you and Jonathan can connect offline. Everyone is also welcome to reach out to us at Delphi to continue the conversation.
Please join us on June 3 for our next Insight Session. Jonathan, it has been a pleasure. I have learned a great deal from this conversation, and thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.
