Here's a possible solution if you can acess this herb: Ibogaine as a possible cure for drug addiction?
Summarised from an article by Jerome Burne, entitled 'Is this the valediction to addiction?' in The Independent (Sept 2nd '96), from MAPS Vol II Number 1, from an item in Green Action (USA), Vol. 7, No. 1, and from a communication from Howard Lotsof. Additional material has been summarised from articles in High Times (Nov '93), Omni (Feb '92), Green Egg (Summer '93), PRL Supplement #7 (Issue No 8) and MAPS Volume IV Number 4 (Spring '94).
Promising research with the drug Ibogaine - derived from the African Iboga plant - gives hope that heroin and other addictions can be cured - with drugs.
'Early tests show Ibogaine to be 70 per cent effective in curing heroin and cocaine addiction'
In 1956 CIBA-Geigy (a major drug company) found Ibogaine potentiates morphine analgesia, but did not pursue it. In the early 1960s, American Howard Lotsof, then a heroin addict himself, happened to be offered a dose of ibogaine, with the promise that it would get him really high. He had a remarkable time, seeing visions and being taken back through his personal history, but what really amazed him was that afterwards his desire for heroin had vanished - with no withdrawal pains, and no effort of will.
'Informal' testing amongst addicted friends seemed to confirm Lotsof's findings. Ever since, Lotsof has been campaigning to overcome the American medical establishment's wariness of psychedelic drugs, and have the drug's potential properly researched.
In 1995, after lengthy indecision, the Federal Drug Administration gave the green light to a series of trials at the University of Miami. It remains to be seen whether their results will back up the growing body of evidence, from drug rehabilitation centres in New York, Panama and Amsterdam, that ibogaine is indeed a potent 'interrupter' of heroin and cocaine addiction. Unsurprisingly, the ongoing tests do not show Ibogaine as a permanent cure for addiction-but it does seem to offer a reliable, if temporary release from compulsive use. "It's very much determined by who the individual is, what they bring into the treatment, whether they want to stop or whether they're responding to pressure from those around them to stop. Ibogaine is not going to change someone from a person who wants to do drugs into a person who doesn't. But anybody who wants to stop can literally take ibogaine and walk away from drugs," explains Lotsof. In his experience, the average 'clean period' after dosage is about six months. This alone is enough to make it a remarkably successful treatment.
Explanations of how it is so effective are harder to come by. Early hypotheses suggest that the drug may achieve its remarkable, painless effects by simultaneously reducing the supply of dopamine, and increasing that of serotonin, to the brain. In this hypothesis, the reduction in the supply of dopamine would both hasten withdrawal and precipitate the characteristic NDE-style visions, whilst the serotonin, known to be associated with feelings of well-being, would take the edge off any 'cold turkey'. Other hypotheses emphasise its psychoactive effects, which seems to resemble a kind of intensive psychotherapy.
Another interesting, if eccentric, hypothesis about the action of ibogaine was published in 'Green Egg' magazine, by Richard Alan Miller: "Normally the stages of wakefulness of the human brain are: normal waking state, NREM (slow wave or deep sleep), PGO (ponogeniculo-occipital) waves, and REM (rapid eye-movement or paradoxical) sleep. REM sleep is the period when most dreams occur. PGO waves are considered to be the principle coding tool that acts at the cortical level in recording the genetic/epigenetic acquisition necessary for the individuation of the human brain. In other words it is the software-writer aspect of the Self.
"In ibogaine therapy, while the patient is in the near-death dream state, the PGO brain pattern has been found to overlap the standard low alphoid brain state. This precipitates fundamental shifts in instinctual learning patterns, possibly the underlying cause of ibogaine's erasure of addictive behaviour patterns.
"In addition, through random activation mechanisms, PGO waves eliminate from certain types of neuronal networks an informational overload linked to pathological behaviour, thus 'cleaning out' the neuronal circuitry. REM sleep apparently includes a sorting-out and disposal process of the 'residues' stirred up by the PGO wave sleep pattern. The actual dream state could be considered the 're-boot' of the personality rewrite.
'Ibogaine allows one to reconfigure the genetic and cultural programming one receives at birth, much like changing the config.sys file of a computer'
"In essence, ibogaine allows one to reconfigure the genetic and cultural programming one receives at birth, much like changing the config.sys file of a computer. The REM aspect then reboots the consciousness patterns with a new autoexec.bat file for habits, needs, and the manner in which one approaches desires."
In the eighties, Lotsof founded a small, private company called NDA International, run out of Staten Island, NY. NDA is developing Ibogaine as a treatment to block the physical symptoms of withdrawal from heroin and cocaine. United States patents have been awarded to him as the inventor of the ENDABUSE (Ibogaine) procedure.
Early tests show Ibogaine, claims Lotsof, 'to be 70% effective in curing the craving for heroin and cocaine and 100% successful in enabling physical withdrawal'. Most attempted cures for heroin addiction fail 90% of the time.
ENDABUSE is non-narcotic, and not a replacement drug; is non-addicting; is administered orally without injections; is rapid - beginning to work within 35 minutes, and the treatment is completed and the patient sent home within 48 hours; is clinically administered and long lasting - a booster is required in a few cases after 5 or 6 months; and is natural, in that the active ingredient is extracted from the Tabernanthe Iboga plant, found in West Africa (where it is used in rituals related to the Bwiti religion for rites of passage to adult life).
In 1988 doctors in the Netherlands at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, published confirmatory evidence that Ibogaine attenuated withdrawal symptoms in rats made morphine dependent (Dzolic, M.R. 1993).
"Ibogaine was used as a rite of passage in Africa," says Lee Hearn, a member of the FDA research team in Miami. "Now it may be used to re-programme an addict's life. Anecdotal reports indicate that while on ibogaine, he or she is detached from childhood recollection, but coming to grips with it, perhaps for the first time. All neuroses are potentially solvable this way. Drug addiction is an illness of the spirit. If you're going to cure it, you need to do so at that level."
First person accounts from those who have taken the 'ibogaine journey' describe it in even more florid terms: "Now we can resurrect our spirits, reexperience heaven and remember why we came in the first place: to bring our individual facet of heaven here to earth," says one. Another maintains, somewhat mystifyingly, that "I have been held by the Goddess and turning back is not an option."
- Howard Lotsof, NDA International, PO Box 100506, 46 Oxford Place, Staten Island, NY 10310-0506, USA (tel 718 442 2754; fax 201 487 2117).
- MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, 1801 Tippah Avenue, Charlotte, NC 28205, USA (tel 704 358 9830; fax 704 358 1650).
A website devoted to ibogaine can be found at http://www.ibogaine.Desk.nl. Try also http://www.ibeginagain.com. A UK-based source of further information is at http://www.ibogaine.co.uk. They produce a booklet which costs £2 and can be reached by e-mail at info@ibogaine.co.uk.
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i am so proud of you 
) until you are more stable. And maybe you find a friend etc. who wants to join you.
...but just take a deep breath and count to ten.Now you just have to take one jump at a time 
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