Beyond Molecules and Receptors: The Therapeutic Potential of Ibogaine’s Psycho-Spiritual Experience in the Treatment of Opioid Addiction (TRIPS)
September 9, 2022 | 12pm-1pm PST
w/ Thomas Kingsley Brown, PhD
About The Workshop
For more than three decades, ibogaine has been used in the treatment of addictions, most notably Opioid Use Disorder. Since the late 1980’s, when members of drug self-help groups used ibogaine to treat people in hotel rooms and apartments in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and New York City, the ibogaine movement has grown tremendously, and currently, scores of ibogaine treatment clinics operate in many countries around the world despite the drug’s illegal status in the USA and throughout most of Europe. This session will trace the growth of the “ibogaine medical subculture” and summarize recent research supporting ibogaine’s efficacy in treating addiction. It will also show that ibogaine has advantages over the classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD, particularly in the treatment of Opioid Use Disorder. In the second half of the presentation, we will focus on the psychoactive effects of ibogaine and on the question of the therapeutic relevance of these effects. We will explore the peculiar phenomenology of ibogaine’s subjective effects and consider narratives highlighting the transformational experiences that individuals undergo during treatment.
Meet Your Instructors
Thomas Kingsley Brown, Ph.D.
Thomas Kingsley Brown, PhD has been researching, writing about, and speaking about ibogaine treatment for substance dependence since 2009, when he interviewed patients at a treatment center in Baja California, Mexico to learn about their experiences. With funding from MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) he then conducted a Mexico-based study of outcomes for people receiving ibogaine-assisted treatment for opioid dependence. He has published a review article on ibogaine-assisted treatment (Current Drug Abuse Reviews, 2013), an article on the results of the research study (T.K. Brown and K.R. Alper, American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse, 2017), and an article on the potential therapeutic role of the altered states elicited by ibogaine (T.K. Brown, G.E. Noller, and J.O. Denenberg, J. Psychedelic Studies, 2019). He has been an invited speaker at numerous conferences, including the National Harm Reduction Conference (San Diego), Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics (New York City), the European Ibogaine Conference (Vienna), TEDx Venice Beach, the annual conference of the American Association of Addiction Psychiatry (Rancho Bernardo), and the Colloquium on Psychedelic Psychiatry (Stockholm). Dr. Brown’s academic training is in chemistry (B.S., University of Pittsburgh; M.S., California Institute of Technology) and anthropology (Ph.D., UC San Diego). He is currently employed as the Coordinator of the McNair Scholars Program at UC San Diego (https://mcnair.ucsd.edu) and as an Advisor to Beond, a company providing ibogaine treatment in Cancun, Mexico (https://beond.us).
Join us!
About Therapy & Research in Psychedelic Science (TRIPS)
TRIPS seminar series hosts speakers discussing scientifically-oriented presentations and discussions about psychedelics to educate healthcare professionals. This series was created to guide healthcare providers and students preparing to be professionals towards the most relevant, pragmatic, and essential information about psychedelic-assisted therapy, changing legal statuses, and harm reduction approaches in order to better serve clients and communities.
This seminar series is a fundraiser for our clinical trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for social anxiety disorder that Portland Psychotherapy investigators plan to begin in the Fall of 2021. All proceeds after presenter remuneration will go to fund this clinical trial.
These presentations are hosted through Zoom. Each presentation will be approximately 30 minutes with a 30-minute discussion afterward. Presentations will be recorded and sent to anyone who registers for the event. The recording will be available for 30 days after it has been sent to registered attendees.
Cancellation Policy: We charge a $10 administration fee for cancellations made by participants more than two weeks before the training event. For cancellations within two weeks of the training event, we will refund 50% of the tuition after subtracting the administration fee. Alternately, participants may elect to apply 100% of their tuition to a future TRIPS training event. No refunds will be given after training events.