Iboga is the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga, a shrub that grows in the equatorial forest of Gabon and across neighbouring parts of Central Africa. The bark of the root is the part worked with — taken from old trees, dried, and shredded. The plant carries the alkaloids that make it what it is, ibogaine among them, in the ratios the tree itself arrived at.

In Gabon, Iboga is not primarily understood as a substance with effects. It is a sacrament, and the tradition around it is old. The Babongo were the first people to work with the medicine. From that relationship came Dissumba, the original Bwiti, and from Dissumba came Missoko — the first branch, and the one oriented toward healing. That is the lineage we are initiated and empowered within.

This matters for the comparison on this page. Everything else described here is a product, made recently, by a process. Iboga is a plant that a tradition grew up around, and the two have never been separable. You can read more about the Missoko Bwiti tradition and about how we source our medicine.

Ibogaine is a single alkaloid. It occurs naturally in Iboga root bark, where it is the most abundant of the alkaloids present and by far the most studied. It was isolated from the root bark in 1900, simultaneously by two separate French groups — Dybowski and Landrin, and Haller and Heckel — and most of what Western research knows about this plant is really research into this one molecule.⁵

There is a distinction worth holding onto, because it causes more confusion than anything else on this page. Ibogaine the alkaloid is present in all four forms described above — it is in whole root bark, in total alkaloid extract, in purified total alkaloid. Ibogaine HCl is something different: a specific manufactured product in which that alkaloid has been separated from everything else and prepared as a salt.

So when someone says they work with ibogaine, they may mean the molecule or they may mean the product. The two are not interchangeable, and the difference decides most of what follows — what else is present, where the material came from, and what kind of setting it is given in.

On the evidence: most of what is known comes from case series, retrospective studies, and observational work. Only one randomised controlled trial has been published, and it studied noribogaine, ibogaine's primary metabolite, rather than ibogaine itself.² We cover the pharmacology in more detail in our overview of ibogaine.

Total alkaloid extract is Iboga root bark with the plant material taken out. The alkaloids are drawn out and concentrated into a powder, so a much smaller quantity delivers what a larger volume of root bark would.

The reason it exists is volume — but that is a problem created by weak material rather than by root bark itself. Farmed Iboga, and bark taken from young trees, is considerably weaker than wild-harvested bark from old trees. Working with weak material means giving a lot of it, and a lot of it is hard to take and harder to keep down. Concentrating it into a powder solves that.

Our root bark is strong enough that the problem doesn't arise in the same way. A great deal of the TA on the market exists because the provider's bark is weak, not because extraction is an improvement on the plant.

We work with TA in detox contexts and nowhere else. Traditional retreats are held with whole root bark, wild-harvested from old trees, with the same medical screening either way.

Purified total alkaloid is total alkaloid extract taken through further refinement. Ibogaine content rises, and so does the concentration by weight of some of the other alkaloids that survive the process. Many do not survive it.

That second part is what usually gets left out. PTA is often described as ibogaine with the rest removed, which makes it sound like a near-isolate. It isn't. It is a narrower alkaloid profile in which what remains is present at higher concentration — some of it considerably higher than in the root bark it started as. What has actually happened is that the range has been cut down and what is left has been concentrated. Both at once.

That makes PTA harder to place than the tidier version suggests. It is not a midpoint on a line running from plant to molecule, and it is not simply a stronger TA. It is a different profile — fewer alkaloids present, several of them at concentrations the plant never produced.

We do not work with PTA. Where an isolated or near-isolated alkaloid is genuinely what a situation calls for, that is clinical work and belongs in a clinical setting with the staffing to match. What we hold is the plant, in a form close to how it grows.

Iboga's use is far older than any written record of it. Most researchers, and most people in Gabon, credit the Babongo with first recognising the root's effects — a people estimated to have lived in the region for more than five thousand years. That knowledge passed to neighbouring peoples around the middle of the nineteenth century and was taken up into existing ancestral traditions.³ What follows is the other history: the shorter one, in which the plant was collected, renamed, reduced to a molecule, and sold.

Most of that history was assembled by the anthropologist Sidsel Marie Henriksen at the University of Bergen, with Genís Ona. Her work traces iboga and ibogaine from Gabon through the early pharmaceutical market and into present-day treatment settings, and it sets out three overlapping phases before the 1960s.⁶

Colonial collection and renaming. Iboga-containing plants were gathered and classified out of the Congo Basin under French colonial rule. A French doctor brought specimens home around 1861. In 1888 the botanist Henri Baillon gave the plant its Linnaean name, Tabernanthe iboga Baill. — a naming made without reference to the many names it already carried among the peoples who used it.⁴

Isolation. Ibogaine was isolated from the root bark in 1900, simultaneously by two separate French groups: Dybowski and Landrin, and Haller and Heckel.⁵ Early research on its effects stayed largely within the French scientific community.

Commodification. Products followed quickly and spread internationally. Dragées Nyrdahl were on the market by at least 1903, followed by Grains des Anémiques, Ibobiose, Viris Lucet, Syséros, and later Lambarène, the best known of them, sold from 1938 as a remedy for fatigue.⁶ Nearly all were marketed as stimulants and tonics.

The anti-addictive effect was found earlier than usually reported. The standard account credits Howard Lotsof, who took ibogaine in 1962 and found it had removed his heroin cravings. But a case report published in Mexico in 1913 describes a woman treated for alcohol dependence with ibogaine tablets, in which the expected withdrawal symptoms did not appear and her symptoms resolved over roughly two weeks. Henriksen and Ona argue the discovery may belong to its author, Enrique O. Aragón, fifty years before Lotsof.⁷

Prohibition came later and unevenly. Lambarène was banned in France in 1966, though an earlier prohibition appears in the state of Montana in 1947. Syséros remained commercially available until 1997 — making ibogaine, on their reading, the first publicly commercialised psychedelic and the only one to survive international prohibition after 1971.⁸