#ibogaine #psychedelics #RickPerry #KyrstenSinema
"On a Tuesday morning in September 2023 in a medical clinic just outside of Tijuana, Mexico, Rick Perry, the former Republican presidential candidate, energy secretary and Texas governor, lay down on a mattress, put on an eye mask and soon began to believe that he was hurtling through space.
Objects flew past him. Some of them appeared to resemble Maya hieroglyphics. He saw an arm reaching out for him, and attached to it was a figure with horns. 'Satan, get behind me,' he heard himself say. The figure instantly disappeared.
Mr. Perry’s hallucinations, induced by the powerful psychotropic drug ibogaine he had taken about 45 minutes before putting on his eye mask, continued for more than 12 hours. The experience was an ordeal. He vomited intermittently and lost much of his body coordination. It took all of Wednesday to recover.
But on Thursday morning, Mr. Perry recalled in describing his experience publicly for the first time, 'I woke up very clearheaded, with this very warm feeling in my body. I was as calm and as happy as I’d been in memory.'
Since that experience, Mr. Perry, 75, a social conservative, has emerged as a leading champion of ibogaine as a potential treatment for brain trauma, addiction and even cognitive decline.
He was an unlikely keynote speaker at the Psychedelic Science Conference in Denver in June. His allies in the effort include the former senator Kyrsten Sinema, a progressive on social issues who underwent ibogaine treatment in May with the aim of preventing dementia of the sort that claimed her grandmother a few years ago. In an interview, Ms. Sinema described Mr. Perry as 'one of the few very conservative individuals in this space, with high credibility among what I’d call a nontraditional audience for psychedelic medicine.'
To Mr. Perry, Ms. Sinema and several others who described their ibogaine experiences for this article, the psychoactive compound derived from the bark of the Tabernanthe iboga plant, a Central African rain forest shrub, is a kind of miracle drug. They say it can arrest substance abuse, reduce suicides, reverse neurodegenerative disorders, extend brain life and even reconnect individuals to their spirituality."
https://archive.ph/DJrGH