Sacred Addicts
by Jason GodeskyThe history of neoshamanism is bound up with the history of psychedelic drugs in the 1960s. Carlos Castenada’s hoax was accepted uncritically because it provided something that people were looking for: a mythic framework for tripping, a worldview that gave their experience a context and meaning. Government propaganda against psychotropic drugs was countered by raising the point of shamanic use of those same drugs. Unfortunately, the myths of “progress” and “the Enlightenment” combined those ideas seamlessly. Yes, shamans used psychotropic drugs; that underscores the uselessness of religion, and the basic foundation of religious expression in delusion. Shamans became denigrated as some kind of sacred addict.
These “plant allies” in shamanic cultures bolster the shaman’s abilities. They allow new, inexperienced shamans and those uninitiated into the mysteries of consciousness to experience those states the shaman specializes in. Sometimes the state is described as a kind of symbiosis between the shaman and the “plant ally.” The altered state of consciousness is considered a melding of the practitioner’s human consciousness, and the entheogen’s plant consciousness. Very often among entheogenic, shamanic cultures, the entheogen they use is apotheosized as a god in itself. Bwitists in Africa believe iboga is a superconscious being sent to teach mankind, for example. Jonathan Ott, who helped coin the term “entheogen,” defended the term’s use, including this argument:
We noted that, besides being pejorative outside of the counterculture, psychedelic was “so invested with connotations of the popculture of the 1960s that it is incongruous to speak of a shaman’s taking a ‘psychedelic’ drug.” Entheogen[ic] (literally ‘becoming divine within’) was derived from an obsolete Creek word describing religious communion with visionary drugs, prophetic seizures and erotic passion, and is cognate with the common word enthusiasm.
And yet, with all the ethnographic uses we find of the use of entheogens, we find a common theme. We find that it is primarily we who give it pride of place. We make it central, because to us, it is exotic. We take one tool in the shaman’s repertoire, and make it the shaman’s defining feature–because it is one tool that we find difficult to accept, something we cannot accept on its own. We have been propagandized on the issue too thoroughly; the entheogen must either be angel or devil. It cannot inhabit any area in between. This theme comes out even in Carlos Castenada’s own psychedelic fiction. In the final novel in his series, Journey to Ixtlan, Castenada writes:
My insistence on holding on to my standard version of reality, rendered me almost deaf and blind to don Juan’s aims. Therefore, it was simply my lack of sensitivity which had fostered [the use of the power plants].
Daniel Pinchbeck’s account of his experiences with Bwiti are fascinating in this regard. The Bwiti itself is an initiation ritual involving iboga. Pinchbeck includes this easily-missed snippet:
Over the next days I tried to learn what Moutamba’s status as “king of the Bwiti” meant. I received different answers; in Gabon, it was often difficult to separate truth from fantasy. Alain Borgia Dukaga, an English-speaking Gabonese who acted as our translator, told me: “Moutamba is like Jesus to us. Most of the people now are like lacking roots, they got tied to the Christian ways and forgot their culture. Moutamba is helping to bring back our culture. We hope soon they will start teaching Bwiti again in the schools.” A few days later, when relations soured between us and our shaman, Borgia (as he asked us to call him) reversed himself. “Moutamba?” he scoffed. “He’s not the king of anything. He just calls himself that.”
The king’s homestead consisted of a complex of wooden buildings in a jungle clearing where children, hens and roosters meandered about. One roofless structure decorated with palm fronds, the “Pygmy House,” honored the region’s natives for discovering “le bois sacre,” the sacred wood, another name for iboga. The Pygmies still live in small bands in Gabon’s interior jungles, and it is theoretically possible to have a Pygmy initiation.
There are two important points here. Firstly, the Bwitists in Gabon and Cameroon are not the ones who developed the entheogenic use of iboga–that honor goes to the foraging pygmies that Colin Turnbull glorified in The Forest People, and it seems to me that singing plays far more a central role in their culture than iboga. Rather, the Bwiti are an amalgamation of the displaced, the disinherited, those who have suffered the trauma of the destruction of their entire world and way of life because of the terrible toll of European contact and colonialism. They are uninitiated, cut off from their own heritage. They are desperately seeking to reconnect to what they once had, to find some meaning that is their own–rather than a European meaning invented for them.
This is another theme we see rising again and again among those cultures where entheogens take center stage. They reprise their role as helper and ally to the weak and uninitiated, allowing them to connect to the shamans’ world. In these cases, they take on that role on a grand scale–helping an entire society that has been lost, displaced, and cut off from its lineage to reconnect to that world. The centrality of peyote among the shattered tribes of the American southwest may stand as another example of this phenomenon.
In The Way of the Shaman, Harner claims that only 10% of shamanic cultures use entheogens, including the group that he did the majority of his field work with, the Conibo of Peru (who use ayahuasca). I have yet to confirm that figure elsewhere, and Harner has certainly compromised his credibility. That entheogens are found widely across the globe cannot be denied. Yet, I see an almost universal pattern among shamanic cultures regarding the use of entheogens.
Each culture generally has one preferred entheogen. That entheogen is apotheosized, and worshipped as a living god. Its spirit is considered sentient in itself, a power with which humans commune in its ingestion.
The entheogen is often called something like an “ally,” and the general attitude towards the entheogen is that it can help the shaman–but it cannot make the shaman. It can provide a first taste of non-ordinary reality. It can blow open “the doors of perception” (a turn of phrase from William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite,” that was taken by Alduous Huxley as the title of his book, describing his experience with mescaline). But ultimately, the measure of a shaman must always be his own ability to consciously manipulate his own consciousness. Communion with the semi-divine spirit of the sacred plant ally can provide a glimpse of the shamans’ world, and help the shaman see what it is he is striving towards–but it cannot replace the striving and sacrifice that defines the shaman’s difficult path. The shaman can commune with plant spirits just as he can with animal spirits, totems, gods and the ghosts of the dead, but any shaman who cannot journey without his plant allies is no shaman at all–he’s just an addict with delusions of grandeur.
“Recreational drug use” thus commits the same cardinal sin as neoshamanism. It is sacrilege and blasphemy. It communes with the sacred plant allies for a bit of fun. It’s a spiritual joyride. Any plant that can lift the human soul to such heights is well-deserving of such worship. The addict approaches these plants with far less respect than is their due. That is blasphemy. They abuse the sacred for nothing more than their persoanl amusement. That is sacrilege.
This was cut from the original article; didn’t fit in there, yet it feels like it needs to be said, nonetheless:
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 October 2005 @ 5:59 PM
Hiding offstage behind the curtain of Tolerance…
Enter, Judgment.
Comment by JCamasto — 18 October 2005 @ 6:27 PM
hi–i’m new. very interesting sight, and very intriguing topic here at the moment. but this sounds slightly too harsh to me:
“Recreational drug use” thus commits the same cardinal sin as neoshamanism. It is sacrilege and blasphemy. It communes with the sacred plant allies for a bit of fun. It’s a spiritual joyride. Any plant that can lift the human soul to such heights is well-deserving of such worship. The addict approaches these plants with far less respect than is their due. That is blasphemy. They abuse the sacred for nothing more than their persoanl amusement. That is sacrilege.”
UNLESS, you take it into account that ALL of “life” should be seen for the sacred experience that it is. we do SO MANY THINGS mindlessly, of course we approach mind-interactive plants with the same lack of understanding, lack of sight. we’ve made everything dead, when it should be alive.
just a thought.
Comment by Librarian — 18 October 2005 @ 6:44 PM
Hey –
Time to pull out Maynard….
(hee hee)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 18 October 2005 @ 7:13 PM
Then it wouldn’t be recreational, would it?
That’s exactly the quote I was looking for! Thanks, Janene!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 October 2005 @ 7:33 PM
On the whole, I really don’t agree. Especially with this:
and
Points:
The economic-based abuse of plants including cannbis, psilocybin mushrooms, coca and poppies is as wrong and exploitive as the abuse of any other life-form by intensive agriculture and capitalism. But I can’t figure out why it should be more so, just because the those plants affect our state-of-mind in more obvious ways than corn, beef or soybeans.
Sitting and relaxing with a joint, a beer, a cup of tea, a cigarette or pipe of tobacco (as you’ll find in tribal, animistic, shamanistic cultures the world over), a betel nut or a kola nut (same as for tobacco, but confined to Melanesia and Africa, respectively) a piece of chocolate–I don’t see these as any more wrong than sitting and relaxing with–name your substance. A glass of water, an apple, a cup of juice.
What is really the argument here? From what I can tell, your position seems to be that ingesting a substance for the sake of pleasure is wrong if and only if that substance alters one’s state of consciousness beyond a certain degree, though you don’t specify what that degree is. Drinking a cup of delicious sassafras tea will cause changes in the chemical makeup of your brain. I’m not sure of the exact neuroscience–perhaps its dopamine that’s released as you sigh with pleasure at that root-beer taste. Drinking a cup of horrid-tasting ayahuasca tea will also cause a change in your brain. The DMT in the ayahuasca will lock into your serotonin receptors, and reality will take on a very new aspect. In both cases your state of awareness has changed. Your position seems to be that one is acceptable, but the other isn’t. Where do you draw the line? Is tea acceptable? Coffee?
In a way, the position that relaxing with a joint is somehow wrong whereas relaxing with a cup of sassafras is okay is akin to ethical veganism. For some reason, the marijuana (or psilocybe mushroom, or diviner’s sage) plant’s life is somehow more valuable than that of others, because its effect upon one’s consciousness (EVERYTHING has an effect on one’s consciousness) is more pronounced. It’s not that different from the life of a cow being worth more than the life of a carrot, because cows can look back at us. It’s just as an anthrpocentric value-judgement. We are given permission to consume the other life-form based upon our human perception of it. It looks like us; it changes our mental state–wrong to eat. It doesn’t look like us, it doesn’t get us stoned–okay to eat. Why?
Where do we draw the line at which a plant is “too sacred” (assuming we believe every plant to be sacred) for pleasurable use? Is it okay to eat nutritionally valueless wood sorrel for the pleasure of its lemonny taste, but not okay to eat nutritionally valueless Psilocybe cubensis for the pleasure of its strange effects on my thoughts? If I can’t relax with a (mind-altering) pipe of marijuana, can I relax with a cup of (mind-altering) chamomile tea? Can I drink mint tea when I don’t have a sore throat? Is sassafras tea okay, but not ayahuasca, just because the former doesn’t have DMT in it?
This is a little more complex:
Let’s reduce all of this to chemicals and hallucinations. Our brain manufactures dimethyltriptamine–DMT–the active ingredient in ayahuasca, the world’s most potent hallucinogen. Strassman showed that patients administered large doses of DMT had experiences similar to alien abductions and near-death experiences. Therefore, again reducing everything to the level of meaningless chemicals, there is sound evidence that we can manipulate our own consciousnesses ourselves to the same extent that entheogens can. Is it somehow more of a feat to reach that state of consciousness without “outside help”? To the extent that such a feat demonstrates control over one’s own bodily processes, and hence one’s holistic awareness and selfhood, yes. Still–one is left to wonder: A shaman has a number of methods for altering his consciousness at his disposal, including fasting, sensory deprivation, drumming, chanting, dancing, meditating, and consuming entheogens. Usually shamanic rituals involve some combination of these methods. Why is one, and only one, of them a sign of weakness?
A few final points–Of course, stealing anything from another culture is wrong–that includes their sacramental plants (this is the real reason sassafras tea is okay, but ayahuasca is wrong–without permission).
And I’ve never seen the 10% statistic validated anywhere. Frankly, I don’t buy it.
Comment by Steve Thomas — 18 October 2005 @ 11:38 PM
Shamans became denigrated as some kind of sacred addict.
Since I don’t know of any quasi-shamanic drug that is addictive, I’m going to take the word “addict” to mean “user.”
That being the case: The role of “sacred drug user” is only a denigration under two conditions:
1. First, the use of (certain) drugs has to be denigrated. It is a culture’s choice to react to the use of certain drugs in a manner of moral outrage. It’s not a somehow instinctive reaction.
2. The denigration of the shaman as a “sacred user” then requires ignoring everything else about him except that he used drugs (which it is our cultural decision to find abhorent).
The denigration of the shaman as a drug-user, then, rises from ethnocentrism, and trying to preserve the shaman from denigration by insisting that he wasn’t a “user” is to speak from the same cultural mindset, to speak within the same discursive framework, as that which denigrated him in the first place. On the other hand, we do the same when we elevate him for his drug-use alone. The drugs aren’t the point. The nature of reality is the point, and the role of the shaman in society and in relation to his tribe is the point. We need to move past Nancy Reagan and Tim Leary.
As an after thought– I keep using that “he” pronoun, but shamans were often women. In some societies shamanism was one of the only paths to high status available to women. (But this varies–in an odd reversal, shamanism is mostly an all-boys-club on gender-egalitarian Vanitinai).
Comment by Steve Thomas — 18 October 2005 @ 11:55 PM
The problem with recreational drug use is the same problem with neoshamanism, not the drug use itself, but the attempt to enter the shamanic state of consciousness itself for petty or personal reasons.
I don’t drink sassafras tea to travel the Axis Mundi. I haven’t known anyone who ever smoked pot to see his totem. But I know lots of people who’ve tripped acid, taken mescaline, or smoked peyote to have “an experience.”
“Personal enlightenment” definitely counts as a petty and personal reason. The shaman journeys for others. Journeying for your own selfish edification is the worst kind of sin that shamanism has.
Shamans undertake these journeys to aid their communities. If you’re undertaking these journeys “recreationally,” then that’s sacrilege. If you’ve turned shamanic ecstasy into nothing more than a mere trip, a high, a buzz, then you’re commiting blasphemy. The spirit world is not a tourist spot.
Since when has public perception ever been rooted in reality?
That’s my point.
You’ll note in my earlier articles I used my now-usual, indefinite “she.” I stopped that here with reference to shamans because, while this is true, there is a tendency for shamans to be male. Whether this has anything to do with predispositions in the male brain for fragmentation and a greater need for integration, I have no idea, but with the smaller male corpus collosum, it certainly seems plausible.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 October 2005 @ 5:48 AM
Hey-
Perspective, check, Jason…. how can Shamanism be expressed with words like ’sin’ ’sacrilege’ and ‘blasphemy’?
Those are words of the hierarchichal, ‘church as control mechanism’ Catholic Institution and have NOTHING to do with shamanism… they can’t because there is no Man in Shamanism that could possobly lay down such ‘law’…
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 October 2005 @ 8:15 AM
The sense of the sacred has nothing to do with hierarchical control mechanisms. When that sense of the sacred is transgressed, a “sin” is committed. To use the sacred for petty or personal reasons makes a mockery of the sacred; that’s “sacrilege” or “blasphemy.” These things can exist because they are not violations of any man-made law. Rather, they are transgressions against the nature of the world. They are the sins of lacking a sense of perspective or propriety; failing to appreciate the nature of those things one is tampering with.
Simply because the concept is also shared–and heavily abused–by a hierarchical institution does not make it, in itself, hierarchical, the same way that me picking up a tree branch and hitting people in the head with it does not make tree branches inherently violent. When “sin” becomes “breaking this rule I made up,” then that is a hierarchical control mechanism. But that’s not the kind of “sin” I’m talking about. I didn’t make up this rule, and I’m not enforcing it, either. It just strikes me as something so disgusting disrespectful that “disrespect” fails to capture its magnitude–and isn’t that what we really mean by such words as “blasphemy” and “sacrilege”? The ultimate disrespect, shown to that which most deserves respect?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 October 2005 @ 8:26 AM
Hey –
I understand what you are saying — but I also vehemently disagree.
To say ’sin’, ‘blasphemy’ or ’sacrilege’ you are imposing your personal feelings onto my ‘personal’ experiance.
So long as Shamanism reflects the same general tenor of reality as Quinn’s ‘animism’ (which I think it does, with some more specific comments on how one experiances it) it is ALL about personal experiance.
The Shaman spends his life studying and exploring and teaching — but what he is teaching is ‘connecting to the divine’ NOT ‘This is what is divine’ and that is how it can maintain itself without hierarchy stepping in. As you noted, in North America, Shamanism was treated as ‘Secret Mysteries’ (or ‘This is what is divine because I SAID SO’) and so it became a mechanism for power and control. If it is to support and bolster egalitarian society, you can think anything you want to about it… but for you to ‘proclaim from on high’ is a dangerous first step to take.
(Regardless of whether you meant to proclaim from on high, it is what you are doing — you have taken on the role of ‘teacher’ by writing this series of blogs. When you abuse that by invoking ‘blaspheny’ you are stating that you have some ’superior’ sense of what is and is not sacred.)
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 October 2005 @ 9:24 AM
One thing that’s always amazed me about shamanism is the absolute certainty of it. Shamans don’t say that they hallucinated about transforming into an animal–they say they became an animal. They don’t dream about flying; they fly. Perhaps the most oft-quoted passage from Castenada’s novels is one where Carlos tries to explain the idea of a hallucination to Don Juan, by saying that even if he were bound to a rock, he would still “fly.” Don Juan agrees, but says then he’d have to fly chained to a big ass rock.
Every reality is accepted as equally valid–objective reality is no more or less than subjective reality.
None of us can find everything acceptable. If we believe everything, then we don’t stand for anything. The shaman’s way, it seems to me, is Many Right Ways. Not even in the weak sense of, “This is right for you, this is right for me.” No. X is absolute truth, and not X is absolute truth. Simultaneously.
I am deeply offended by neoshamans, and by reckless, recreational use of entheogens. I find both practices despicable. That is absolute truth. If another wants to stand and proclaim a mutually exclusive absolute truth, I will accept that as absolute truth, as well.
For me, entheogen use just isn’t something that interests me. The story of Harner’s ayahuasca-induced scrape with “the Lords of the Outer Darkness” suggests to me the dangers of what can happen when you journey without control of your own mind. I have a suspicion that such an episode might have been involved in the origins of civilization, actually….
But I can certainly see the use of entheogens in a particular role. When used respectfully, they may be a very good introduction to the shamanic state.
Respectfully and introduction being the key words here.
The entheogen does not a shaman make. Someone who needs the entheogen to journey is not a shaman–he’s just someone addicted to the experience. And someone who uses them without respect is no shaman, either–he’s a tourist, abusing powers he does not understand.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 October 2005 @ 9:45 AM
Hey –
I have absolutely no problem with anything you wrote there, Jason.
Perhaps you nailed it on the head: “X is absolute truth, and not X is absolute truth. Simultaneously.”
If X: Recreational Drug use is against the sacred: is true
AND
NotX: Recreational Drug use is sacred: is also true
THEN
How can either be sin? Sin is absolute. Of course, a big part of this is the English Language… Roxy, have you got some better terms for us? Get on it, won’t you
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 October 2005 @ 10:13 AM
I’m pretty comfortable with sin … but for me, “sin” doesn’t carry so much a connotation of breaking man-made dogma, as it does a transgression against the nature of the world itself, an act that necessarily entails a pollution of one’s own soul.
I also don’t believe everything the Catholic Church calls a “sin” really is (in fact, almost none of it), so perhaps I just have a uniquely theological understanding of the term.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 October 2005 @ 10:15 AM
Hey –
You also haven’t gotten almost fanatical about ‘framing’ as I have. I can’t read ANYTHING without breaking down the hidden(or not so) connotations behind the words. Not just for myself, but for ‘every’ other potential reader as well.
Of all the obsessions I’ve had, this one doesn’t bother me so much
Janene
Comment by Janene — 19 October 2005 @ 12:40 PM
True–but it also carries with it the danger of reading too much into it. Is it really a universal frame, or is the framing peculiar to your own perspective?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 October 2005 @ 1:37 PM
Because I could say a million things here, let me just say what I think is important.
At about hour two of any psychedelic experience the way your brains neurons fire begin to change. This is a point where you are coming off the peak experience and the most vivid of your visions.
this is the time when you begin to put into words and feelings wat you were experiencing; this is when your form your memories of the experience.
To your typical day-tripper, this period of evaluation is often done to the dancing of music or scrawling around the floor of their tent. You can find plenty of grown humans in the fetal position of raves…
When you take an entheogenic substance at a party, you are reinforcing that experience. By taking psychedelics and writing them off as a fun; getting off; or even a horribel experience, you are profaning the experience itself.
I think believing the lie that enthoegens are hallucinogenic, and therefore harmless, is a serious problem.
However, due to the illegality of the drug, your typical human who would be interested in this connection to the universe really can’t access the information as to what these susbstances really are.
Unless you are a 33rd level Mason (I believe entheogenic expereiences occur as low as the 24th level, but I’m not totally sure…)
There are many sub cultures that still use plants with entheogenic properties.
I can only assume the writers above who so quickly dismiss the work of Timothy Leary actually buys into the propaganda that has been slopped in his direction. If you can’t get past the name, a more radical, and even more intense philosophy is shared by Terrence McKenna, P.D. Ouspensky, G.I. Gurdjieff, as well as other Fourth Wayers….
Comment by Tonyz — 20 October 2005 @ 12:12 AM
A quick cultural note on entheogens from Southern California.
The ‘drug of choice’ over here is datura. High fever, chance of coma or death if you don’t dose right. Interesting hallucinations apparently. Very difficult experience.
The Tongva required that each member of the tribe take it once, at puberty. The Tongva also had a special class of people that could take it again. This was their “shamans” and consisted of medicine workers, expert basket weavers, storytellers, dancers, bisexuals & homosexuals, and (finally) a group of folks who spent much of their time in direct communication with the spirits. Although all of them were considered holy and were chosen by the spirits, the last group was the only ones who took the drug on a semi regular basis and this was considered to be an extremely hard life.
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 24 October 2005 @ 3:38 AM
The problem with neo-shamans and entheogens is that they just don’t seem to fundamentally get the relationship between all life.
If you’re an animist, you accept that all life has the possibility of consciousness. What the neo-shamans have never seemed to sort out is what that implies. If you are using the plant for your own agenda who says the plant can’t also use you as well?
True shamans use a number a different allies to achieve the goal and also respect them enough to pay back any favors. To use one entheogen over and over again risks contaminating you with needs that may put you at odds with your tribe.
Let’s take a look, for example, at the most abused entheogen of history - wheat. Wheat contains enough exorphins in it to create a distinct psychological change. Certainly enough to mark it as at least in part a medicine plant.
So, given this long term relationship with grass, how do we find our civilization affected by it? Hm. Grass is a plant that works ideally in areas that have been devastated by disaster. It’s also a quick grower (it has to grow quick to survive).
We who worship grass have instituted a campaign of destruction that is masterful in its execution and (as pointed out in Thesis 12), we’ve got to keep growing or that’s it.
Metaphor, poetic justice, or the agenda of spirits? Or all of the above?
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 24 October 2005 @ 3:53 AM
“ Shamanism and Peyote Use Among the Apaches of the Mescalero Indian Reservation” — Very interesting article on changing peyote use among the Apache as they were domesticated and settled on reservations.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 24 October 2005 @ 12:38 PM
read Schultes and Wilbert, plent of entheogens are used but in a ritual context and for recreation by many indigenous groups. Yopo is a supreme example where youths take it for fun back and forth. Likewise, many of the snuffs in South America are used as such.
Comment by Anonymous — 3 February 2007 @ 9:28 AM
The ritualistic worship of intoxication by the “mad” followers of Dionysus might appear blasphemous + sacrilegious indeed.
Just don’t show up at one of their gathering to tell them that, you know?
Comment by xavier watson — 30 April 2008 @ 11:22 AM
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/03/24/094810.php
Cultural Spiritual Colonialism; Witness a Theft in Progress; West Central Africa.
Below is a posted response (tribenet Iboga) to a White So.African businessman who publicly slandered Gabonese (Africa) Traditional Practitioner Nganga Mallendi.
So.African Simon, Subjects Nganga Mallendi to the Erroneous Criteria of A NewAge Plastic Techno Shaman.
Simon, A So.African, Nganga wanna-be, has the gall to Subject Multi- Generational Nganga Mallendi to NewAge Concepts of Neo-Shamanism.
Spiritual Genocide; Simon’s Super Plastic Shaman Criteria is an Assault on the Prior Art of Nganga Mallendi. Simon & the likes are going for the throats of Traditional Practitioners to eliminate the competition. Simon & other Spiritual Neo-Colonists are patently damning African Indigenous knowledge into Oblivion.
Will Nganga Mallendi’s great great grandchildren be persecuted by the WTO for patent infringement for using Iboga? or perhaps be forced to use Synthetic derivatives at a high cost?
Contrary to Synthetic BS…..Iboga is safer than ibogaine and being treated in Gabon by an Nganga would be first on my list just because of the history of Pentagon funded ‘Skunk Projects’ aimed at data collection, & duping unwitting guinea pigs into submitting to experimentation & unnecessary screening. Medical Apartheid.
Go for treatment from Synthetic, & he won’t even give you a little soup after, what a Schlump!
Simon could learn a lot from Mallendi. Mallendi fed us after Iboga.
Comment by Moughessangana — 9 May 2008 @ 11:18 AM