Hey, it's Arielle.
We are taking a short break and we
will be back next week with a brand
new episode.
But this week we wanted to replay an
episode from last season about a
former US Navy SEAL with a traumatic
brain injury who participates in
a Stanford University research study
on ibogaine.
One of the researchers who led that
study was Dr. Nolan
R. Williams, a neuroscientist
and physician who was the founder
and director of the Brain
Stimulation Lab at Stanford
University.
And we have some sad news to share
about Dr. Williams.
Earlier this month, Dr. William
died.
He was 42.
He dedicated his life to developing
innovative treatments for people
suffering from depression, trauma,
and brain injury.
In a tribute to him, the Veterans
Psychedelic Advocacy Organization,
VETS, said, quote, his legacy
is not just in his work,
but in the lives that he changed.
The episode you're about to hear
originally aired on October 23rd,
2024.
And it's worth noting that it
mentions both suicide and suicidal
ideation.
So please take care.
I woke up in the morning going
about the usual stuff.
My wife gets up slightly a different
time than me, but I got up, I got
out, got my cup of coffee.
She's doing her thing.
I'm doing my thing,
and I'm sitting at
my desk in my office and I can't
remember her name.
We'd been married 28
years,
it was my wife's name,
the person sleeping beside me every
night that I'm home, the person
that is raising my kids with me.
There's no excusing that.
This is Craig.
He didn't want me to use his full
name.
Craig's a retired combat veteran and
the time he's describing was back in
2020.
Craig was 51 years old,
living with his family near Durango,
Colorado.
And he was sitting in his home
office racking his brains,
trying to recall his wife's name
for hours.
I'm going back through past
conversations and I'm trying to
figure out, okay,
geez, something's going to stir this
because it's something I
should be able to remember.
So I feel like I have to
make myself remember it.
And were you afraid of an encounter
with her where you would reveal that
you didn't know her name?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I was terrified that
she would walk in and that
I would have to say her name in the
normal course of conversation
and that she would see me
as broken.
And so what'd you do?
I stayed in my office until
I could figure it out.
I struck upon the idea,
okay, I've got a filing cabinet over
here with a bunch of records in
it and pieces of mail laying on top.
And so I went through our mail and
I found something with my wife's
name on it in the mail.
Gretchen. The name of his wife was
Gretchen.
They had been married for almost
three decades.
And that's when I was ready to say,
hey, you know what?
This isn't right.
Something is not right.
A few months after that inexplicable
brain freeze, Craig decided to
do something way out of character.
He traveled to Mexico to take
the psychedelic drug ibogaine.
Since the 1960s, scientists
have studied ibogaine as a potential
treatment for opioid addiction.
Now it's also being studied for
post-traumatic stress disorder and
traumatic brain injury, or TBI.
And yet, ibogain is still a
schedule one drug, meaning that the
government considers it to have no
accepted medical use and
a high potential for abuse.
It's illegal.
But that hasn't stopped hundreds,
maybe even thousands, of U.S.
Veterans from traveling abroad to
receive ibogaine-based treatments.
And Craig, who we just heard from,
is one of them.
He traveled to Mexico in 2022
to seek treatment for his traumatic
brain injury.
I'm Arielle Duhaime-Ross, and this
is Altered States.
Reporter Curtis Fox spoke with Craig
about his experience.
You can hear me okay?
Yes, I can hear you very well.
It's been about four years since
that morning when Craig forgot his
wife's name.
I am 55 years
old.
He's got a full head of green hair.
He's clean shaven.
He's fit.
He's handsome.
He has a day job in the defense and
aerospace industry that he does
remotely.
And also he runs a small ranch
with Gretchen.
It's mostly pasture and we
raise beef, pork and poultry as
well.
I'm talking to Craig because I want
to understand what led a serious,
controlled guy.
I really despise
drugs in my system to travel to
another country
to take a psychedelic drug.
A farm kid with low prospects,
I join the military.
And to understand that, I asked a
lot of questions about his military
service, like when did he join?
I joined the military right
after high school.
This was in 1988.
It took me a while to find them.
I was a ski instructor the year
before I became a SEAL.
Before he became a Navy SEAL,
that is.
But that came later, after 18 months
as a junior enlisted in the Navy and
sometime back home in Colorado,
that's when he started dating his
future wife, Gretchen, who'd
had her eye on him for a few years
already.
He was a ski instructor, and I
was up there skiing with my
friends, and then the instructors
would do this thing where they,
I mean, it wouldn't fly in
today's world to be admitting this,
but it was pretty funny.
In the 80s, like, they would choose
a cute girl of the day,
and they'd all pitch into a
pool, and whoever could get a
date with her then got the date
money.
They didn't know, nor did he know,
that I'd had a crush on him for like
four years. So, I was a pretty
easy catch.
In 1991, Craig started
BUD/S, the infamously grueling
Navy SEAL training.
His first deployment was a training
mission that took him to Bahrain,
United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and
other countries throughout the
Middle East.
It was the first of his nine
deployments over 27 years
as a SEAL.
All of my deployments were Mideast.
You know, I was there for the very
beginning of the global
war on terror, where it was largely
the first time for everybody.
You must get this every time you
talk to somebody who has been in
the service, what kind of action did
you see?
So in small unit tactics,
especially when you're 16 guys
or less, you're trying really hard
not to see action.
Seeing action means you screwed
up somewhere.
Craig is not the kind of guy who
wants to tell war stories.
Can you describe one
mission that didn't
go as planned?
That'd be all of them.
He would only talk generally about
what he did as if it was something
that everyone like him did.
You dominate the space as you move
through the building.
You take possession of the first
room.
Yeah.
Craig did want to make one thing
crystal, clear to me.
I never had an event, I
never participated in an event in
conflict where I felt like I did
something that I just couldn't
square morally with myself.
I had no moral crisis.
Nor did I see anybody else do
anything that I thought didn't
square with the morals of who I am
and who we are supposed to be
as US military service members.
So basically what he's saying is
that his experience of war did not
psychologically traumatize him.
His problem, he says, shares some of
the symptoms of post-traumatic
stress disorder, but it is
not PTSD.
Were you around a lot of explosions?
Yeah, all of your training involves
setting off breacher charges,
demolition charges, firing
50 cal firing rocket
propelled grenades.
Yeah, a lot things going boom all
the time.
It wasn't just explosions.
There were incidents, like the
time when the air temperature was
warmer than expected, and Craig
and other guys parachuting out of a
plane dropped to the ground much
faster than they were supposed to.
Out of 14 guys that jumped.
We had 12 of us that were
unconscious for, we don't know
really for how long after we hit
the ground.
And that kind of hard hit is just,
you get up, you move on, you don't
dwell on that.
But it was mainly explosions.
Lots and lots of explosions.
Craig told me he taught advanced
applied explosives and
breaching.
So you'd hang a charge on a locked
door, you'd blow that,
and everybody would flood in as
quickly as possible.
And I was, as a safety guy, I was
usually somewhere very close to the
front of that train.
And it was not uncommon at all
to run one or two dozen
explosives like that in an
afternoon.
After about the third or fourth time
that day, you'd go through that door
and you'd have to kind of shake
your head and blink a little bit and
remember, who am
I, where am I?
What am I doing?
Oh, yeah, it's Thursday afternoon.
I'm on the range.
Okay. Yep standing here.
We just blew the charge and
okay. Everybody's safe.
I've never been there explosion.
What happens to your body?
How does it feel?
Like if you've ever stepped out into
the wind And
the wind just kind of pounds your
whole body
It's that but multiply it
by about a thousand and then just
really compress the
time frame in which it happens.
So you have
this blast wave.
It's really rolling through
your body.
And give me a sense of how many
explosions you were exposed to.
In 27 years, the nearest I could
tell, it runs into
the tens of thousands.
I would say somewhere between 15 and
20,000.
We know a lot more today about brain
injuries than we did a decade ago.
We know that football players can
develop CTE, or chronic
traumatic encephalopathy, from
all those hits to the head.
We know soldiers who've been exposed
to blasts can suffer from traumatic
brain injury, or TBI.
Craig does not blame the military.
He says they've been careful to
adhere to the safety standards of
the time, and besides.
The whole idea of being in the
military is it's not a
career choice that is wrapped up
in being super
safe. It's being safe enough.
Got it.
I mean, I had injuries, but
I'm not disabled.
I got 10 fingers, right?
I got ten toes.
And I got at
least as many
close comrades and
teammates.
So I'll be damned if I'm gonna go
out and say that I'm injured.
I got buddies that can't stand up
that would love to.
That didn't mean he wasn't injured,
but it took him a long time to
see that he was.
The entire culture of the military
is very much don't ever
admit when you're injured.
Nobody wants to let their buddies go
off to war while they
sit at home nursing a boo-boo.
The problem with Craig is he looks
good, and a
lot of these guys, they look
good, they look healthy,
they looks strong, they are
super capable,
and they'll get the job done
even if they feel like shit.
Gretchen and Craig got married
shortly after he became a SEAL.
Between deployments, he would spend
long stretches of time at home.
They have four kids.
Girl, girl, boy, girl.
They've been married now for
28 years, Craig said.
No, no, 31.
I need credit for all of them.
Yeah.
Over those 31 years, Gretchen
has seen firsthand the toll
that Craig's career has taken on
him.
She first noticed something wasn't
quite right about 14 years
ago.
I had just had our fourth child.
I had four kids, nine and under.
Craig would come home from work.
Go to his chair, he'd
sit, and he was done.
That's like all he's got.
He definitely was having cognitive
issues and definitely a lot of
stress-related stuff, forgetting
words.
Gretchen and Craig didn't have a
diagnosis, and they didn't have much
faith in conventional medicine
either.
A friend of theirs in the service
recommended a naturopathic doctor
who put him on various medications
for his thyroid and endocrine system
and worked with him on sleep hygiene
and nutrition.
Gretjen says his symptoms improved a
bit, but after he retired from
the SEALs in 2016,
it was pretty clear that
things were not getting better.
For Craig, his cognitive
issues manifest
as frustration.
I mean, we have a busy life, right?
We've got the four kids, we've got a
ranch.
He's got, you know, a full-time job,
all this stuff going on.
And then the
extension cord doesn't get
wrapped up the right way.
He'd fly off the handle.
We're like, really?
The extension cord?
I was an emotional grenade laying in
the room, and my wife
and kids had the pleasure of walking
around that grenade all day.
Well, things started to get really,
really rocky in our family.
Craig was already starting to come
to the end of himself.
You know, we were just
really, really, really trying to
save our family
Now, suicide among
vets is epidemic.
Absolutely.
Were you worried about that?
Um, uh,
I wasn't really worried about that
for a long time until
I would say within the last
five years,
I'm assuming he talked to you about
it. I know there's been times
where he's considered, um,
uh there have been, there were,
there have been times in the last
five years that
he had me lock up the weapons.
Craig actually had talked to me
about suicide, but only in
very general terms.
He spoke about it as something vets
like him are highly susceptible
to.
We don't quit ever.
We solve problems.
That's what we do.
That is our purpose, is solving
problems.
And the people that I care most
about are those in my family.
I want to solve their problems.
I want to make sure that my
family is safe, that danger
and harm never look at them.
And...
When you realize one morning, when
you wake up, you look
at the mirror and you say, my family
has a problem.
And that asshole right there, that's
the problem.
I'm the problem. Then
you solve it.
You use the tools of your trade
and you solve the problem.
It was around this time when Craig
woke up that morning and couldn't
remember Gretchen's name.
For him, it was a wake up call.
For her, it about time he
woke up.
She had been bothering me for
weeks at that point, maybe months
actually, she had been bugging
me saying, hey, this isn't
right and you need
to go get fixed.
I'm just pretty optimistic and
pretty solution oriented.
So like, it's like, all right, no,
we're gonna find a way out of this.
We're gonna figure it out.
We're going to, you know, I'll
research, I'll find something we'll
do. You know, we'll try this and
that and the other.
And so she scoured the internet,
she networked with the spouses of
other vets, and through the
grapevine, she started hearing about
psilocybin.
And that is kind of what got me
on the rabbit trail
of psychedelics.
All I want is for my family
to be whole.
So I started researching.
And as I usually do,
I'm like, well, I am not going to
like just test something out on like
my family or whatever.
So that summer, I
started microdosing psilocybin.
It just...
Took the edge off of the
oppression, the heaviness.
The rabbit trail into psychedelics
didn't end with psilocybin though.
She kept reading articles, she
watched videos, and eventually
she landed upon a psychedelic drug
that gave her hope.
ibogaine really shoves in your face
compared to ayahuasca.
ibogaine.
ibogaine is more like (clap), and
that's why it's so good for team
guys.
ibogaine comes from the root of the
iboga plant in West Africa,
where it has long been used in
religious ceremonies.
From 1939 to about 1970,
a purified version of ibogaine was
sold in France as an antidepressant
that could improve mood and physical
strength, and was used by some
athletes to improve performance.
In the early 1960s, it was studied
as a remedy for opiate cravings
and addictions. More recently,
it has been studied as a treatment
for TBI and PTSD.
I knew that there was research
going on at Stanford with
vets.
I understood, like, this looks like
it's really helping with TBI, not
just the emotional stuff.
It's different than just psilocybin.
Eventually, Gretchen learned about a
study that scientists from Stanford
University were about to do on
ibogaine and veterans.
She heard about it from an
organization called VETS,
or Veterans Exploring Treatment
Solutions, which was working with
Stanford to find subjects for the
study.
Like I had listened to every single
thing out there before I
proposed it to Craig.
And to her surprise, Craig
immediately agreed to sign up.
After the break, we'll hear exactly
what Craig signed up for.
Welcome back to Altered States, I'm
Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
Before the break, we heard about how
a former US Navy SEAL named Craig
started to realize that he was
having cognitive issues after almost
30 years in the service.
That's when his wife Gretchen got
him to sign up for a study where
veterans were taking the psychedelic
ibogaine.
Here's reporter Curtis Fox with the
rest of the story.
In 2021, neuroscientists
at Stanford University's Brain
Stimulation Lab started an
experiment.
They wanted to see the effects of
ibogaine on people with traumatic
brain injury.
Dr. Jacob Keynan is a neuroscientist
in Tel Aviv who worked on the
Stanford experiment and was one
of the authors of the study.
As someone that has researched
post-traumatic stress for,
I guess, about a decade now,
the existing treatments are
limited.
And so people started looking for
other options.
And in a way, as scientists, we kind
of followed them, you know, they go,
they went to Mexico, we knew that
they're going to Mexico to get the
treatment. And we said, okay,
let's get empirical evidence that
this actually works.
They've been hearing anecdotally
that ibogaine was dramatically
helping people with TBI and PTSD.
But there were many unknowns.
First of all, we wanted to document
the safety of the treatment.
We wanted to see if this has
potential to do damage.
There are reports in the literature
of even death following
ibogaine because of
a cardiotoxic effect.
ibogaine can fatally mess with a
person's heart rhythm.
And as with a lot of schedule one
psychedelics, there haven't been a
lot Ibogain studies.
According to Dr. Keynan, no one
had yet evaluated people before
they took Ibograine and then
evaluated them afterwards to see
what kind of effect the drug may
have had on their brains, moods,
and behaviors.
Yeah, so we had we had 30
participants.
The participants were special
operation veterans,
mostly Navy SEALs, I believe.
A small sample, all guys,
nearly all white.
These are veterans that had a very
high load of blast
exposures.
That's where the traumatic brain
injury came.
Before the study, before they did
the ibogaine treatment, those 30
special ops guys were brought to
Stanford for testing and evaluation.
We did a full clinical
assessment.
Psychiatric test for.
Addictions and mood disorders like
anxiety and depression.
We did a neuropsychological
assessment.
For cognitive functioning, language
and memory, they also conducted
fMRIs to look at brain function
and MRIs to get pictures
of brain structure.
And all these tests were repeated
several days after the ibogaine
treatment and yet again a month
later.
To take Ibogane, the special ops
guys in the Stanford study went to
Mexico where the drug is not
illegal.
We're only a few minutes from the
airport in San Diego, about 30 or
40 minutes before they reach our
facility.
Trevor Millar is a founder of Ambio
Life Sciences, just over the
border in Tijuana.
Trevor says that in the three years
since they've opened, Ambio has
treated about 1,500 people.
I'd say the bulk of our clients have
been veterans, and specifically
U.S. Special Forces veterans.
Most of these vets have come on
their own dime.
Of course, Craig found his way there
with the Stanford study.
His travel and treatment were paid
for by a grant from VETS.
And what I'm about to do now
is participate.
In a Stanford University
study of
the psychedelic ibogaine.
Okay, and with that in
mind, can you tell us about
This is from an iPhone video
Gretchen made with Craig before he
joined the Stanford study.
Craig told me they just wanted to
get a record of what he was like
then, as a kind of future reference
point.
In the video, or videos I guess,
because they stop and start a lot,
Craig has a beard, he looks
uncomfortable.
There are good days and there are
bad days, kind of
vacillates.
Chronic cognitive processing
problems that
cause me frustration.
By this point, Craig suspected
he had TBI, but he
still didn't have a diagnosis, and
deep down he thought he wasn't
injured enough to be admitted into
the study.
Nonetheless, he flew out to Stanford
for the first long day of testing.
And it's like 8
p.m. And I'm talking to
the psychologist who's
assessing all the inputs.
And I'm like,
all right, give it to me.
Do I need to go home now?
And she's like, man,
you're the poster child of traumatic
brain injury.
There was a bit of relief to say,
holy shit, okay.
From an objective standpoint,
somebody's saying, yeah, this
is not right.
And that means maybe
it can be better.
So Craig travels alone from Stanford
to San Diego, then he goes
to a hotel where a vehicle from
Ambio is gonna pick him up, and
four other guys participating in the
study, guys he's never met.
I walk up to a bunch
of guys who look exactly like me.
They wear clothes like me, they
stand like me they make sure
that they've cleared all the corners
of all the buildings around them
just like me and they're you know
tracking everybody that's walking
through so I make eye contact
with them from you know 60
yards away and I'm like yeah that's
the guy that I'm supposed to be with
because they're staring at me right
now.
When they get to Ambio's campus.
The director of the facility is
there.
The hostess of the facilities is
there, all of the kitchen
staff is there
all the medical staff are
all there.
They greet you, they shake
your hand, give you a hug, take your
bags from you.
The place looks like a high-class
spa with views of the Pacific
Ocean, massages,
good food, and coaching.
Even before they got there, they had
several sessions with psychedelic
integration coaches from Ambio
to help prepare them for their
journey, as they call it.
At Ambio, Trevor Miller helps
them get ready for the drug
experience itself.
My favorite metaphor to help people
prepare for the ibogaine journey is
that taking Ibogane is like
getting on a roller coaster.
There might be ups, there might be
downs, maybe a loop, maybe water
feature, maybe a tunnel of
terror, but the only real
rule of roller coasters is just
don't try and off in the middle of
the ride.
The problem with the roller coaster
metaphor is that roller coaster
rides last only a few minutes,
but a full dose of ibogaine can last
up to 24, 36,
even 48 hours.
The participants have been asked by
their integration coaches to come
with an intention.
What do they wanna focus on during
the ibogaine treatment?
For Craig, it's pretty simple.
He wants answers to a few
worrying questions.
My intention that I set was,
is there anything more?
What do you mean by that?
I mean, is this as good as
it gets?
Is my current lack of performance,
my current struggle
daily just to
get by?
Is the overwhelming feeling
that I'm faking it and somebody's
gonna find me out and realize
that I am an idiot?
Is that really, is that all
there is? Or is there something
more?
On the evening of the second day,
after a massage and a light meal,
it's time to take the drug.
Okay, now we're
going to go show you the treatment
room. So they take us up there.
I walk into this treatment room,
it's pallets on the floor,
not beds.
And I'm like, okay, that's a
little strange, but okay, whatever.
I'm going to suspend my disbelief
and we'll just deal with this.
Craig and the other guys go back
downstairs where they watch the
sun setting over the Pacific Ocean.
I take the first dose.
It's a pill, the first of four.
We're together as a group of
guys where at this point we've
bonded, we've told each other our
stories, feeling pretty comfortable
with this.
The medical staff is there with us.
And they're giving an IV drip with
magnesium, which is thought to
protect against the heart
arrhythmias that ibogaine can
trigger.
They're also wired up with EKGs.
They're going to monitor our pulse,
our respiration, our heart rate, and
our temperature for the next
24 to 36 hours.
So we're wired up already.
So I'm standing there talking to
these folks and they say, hey,
if you start to feel any
effects, if anything feels
a little off of normal,
we'll escort you upstairs, lay
down on the pallet and you'll begin
your journey.
It takes a while for Craig to start
feeling anything.
The other guys have already gone
upstairs to the treatment room.
Craig takes a second pill.
He's still not really feeling it,
but out of curiosity, he heads
upstairs and sits down on
his palate.
They have this music in the
background.
It's a playlist made specifically
for ibogaine rituals.
Sitting on his palate, Craig takes
his third and fourth doses.
He still doesn't feel anything.
So he gets up to go to the bathroom.
The protocol is to go with a staff
member because when the ibogaine
hits, you become ataxic,
you lose motor control.
So they...
Help me stand up.
I'm fine.
Help me walk into the restroom.
I'm Fine.
Wash my hands.
I'm, fine.
Turn to walk out of the restroom, I
ain't fine.
It's like I turned my head to
walk out and the whole world just
kept turning.
So I'm like, all right,
now it's time to lay down.
Back in my bed, staring at the
ceiling.
Music's still going.
It's been an hour and a half.
This guy beside me,
he's like, he just screams
at the top of his
lungs. He's like for the love of
God, change the f- sound
track. God damn it.
That's the one time that has ever
happened.
I remember who said it, but
yeah, we just changed it.
Whatever. It's not that big a deal.
It was going to switch to a softer
music shortly thereafter.
By now, Craig is in the grip of
ibogaine. He vomits.
My stomach's cramping up here.
I'm like, I am officially miserable
right now. And I'm gonna be like,
I volunteered for this?
This is not fun.
I'm not enjoying this experience at
all.
He learns later that the other four
guys were vomiting too.
The music serves the very practical
purpose of drowning out the
retching sounds.
After purging, Craig settles
in for his long roller coaster
ride.
So what happens physically to
someone taking ibogaine?
I put that question to Dr. Keynan.
It has a very wide
effect on the brain.
He says it affects
neurotransmitters.
Like dopamine,
serotonin, glutamate.
He says it can have vivid visual
effects, though he wouldn't call
them hallucinations.
ibogaine, he says, taps into some of
the same receptors that opioids
and MDMA do.
So basically,
almost any human function that
you can think of, ibogaine would
have some influence on that.
And it induces a state,
a wakeful dream-like state.
Think about dreaming and being aware
to the fact that you're dreaming.
So Craig is lying there on his
pallet, largely unaware
of the passing of time.
It's kind of this low-key,
kind of normal experience for me,
and I'm thinking.
So I've got like eight to 12
hours of this.
Awesome.
He said his mind went back to the
questions he came in with.
Is this all there is?
Is he gonna continue to struggle in
daily life?
I got to sit with that question
in a comfortably long period of
time.
And his conversation with himself
went something like this.
Yeah, you're struggling to
perform, but did
you expect it to be easy?
No, I've never expected anything to
be easily.
Are you really that stupid?
Well, no, I'm not stupid.
I just, I was really struggling to
express myself.
So I can't describe
things the way I want to people and
that's frustrating.
Is that catastrophic?
No, not really, I guess.
Somewhere in that dark of
night, it felt like
somebody had pulled a
knife, three of them,
out of my skull, out my
brain.
It felt like if you've ever had a
Charlie horse, I felt like
I had had a charlie horse in
my brain, if that makes any sense,
and I know it doesn't, for like 20
years.
And it just relaxed.
And I
felt this like, like
profound.
I wouldn't call it peace, but I
would call it profound relaxation,
where I was just like, ah,
I can deal.
The next day, it's late morning, if
not already afternoon,
to his surprise, everyone else has
left the room and Craig starts to
feel like himself again.
He rises from his pallet, he goes
downstairs, he goes back to his
room and he begins what they call
the gray day.
Everybody feels pretty rough the day
after ibogaine.
You're just depleted.
The night before, all of your
neurotransmitters would have been
firing on full blast, and the next
day you've got nothing.
So you're just about as tired as
you've ever been, but you can't
quite fall asleep, and then
eventually you get some sleep, and
then it's after you get some sleep
that you really start feeling the
benefits of ibogaine.
I walk outside onto
the beautiful balcony
overlooking the ocean and
look off into the hillside and the
day before, I couldn't
tell what the
livestock was in that pasture.
I walked out that morning, I looked
over there and I'm looking at
the cattle on the hillside and
I can see the cattle and I see
them chewing. I'm like,
yeah, my eyesight's better.
To my knowledge, there's no
scientific evidence that ibogaine
can improve a person's eyesight,
but Craig said that he had no
more use for his expensive Oakley
eyeglasses.
This seemed far-fetched to me, but I
made a mental note to ask a
scientist about this.
After five days and four nights in
Mexico, Craig flies back to
Stanford for the second round of
psychological and cognitive tests
for the MRI and the fMRI.
The first time, he found
it utterly exhausting.
And the second time through, I was
like, okay, hey, I'm ready to go
grab the guys and let's go get
dinner together.
More energy post ibogaine.
And there's another effect he
notices.
Had a day off before I had
to get on the plane to go home.
So I'm in Palo Alto, go out,
went to a coffee shop.
Craig says he was a four pot a
day coffee drinker, straight black.
Sat down and I
couldn't finish a whole cup of
coffee. I'm about halfway through or
not even halfway through a cup of
coffee and I'm just like, I really
don't need this.
So an old habit appears to have
fallen by the wayside, which
might speak to ibogaine's reputation
as a cure for addictions.
Then Craig flies back to Colorado,
back home to Gretchen and his kids.
It was a bummer because
we had had some issues while he was
gone, kid issues,
right? And I had to tell him
immediately when he got home, I'm
like, I just, I
was just sick because I wanted him
to have like a week or whatever of
just bliss.
We don't live a life of bliss, it's
not reality.
So he had to come right back into
reality.
Something happened with one of the
kids and she thought that it was
going to be a huge blow up.
And she's like, I wanted this
experience, you coming home to be so
I'm like, honey, it's okay.
I'm fine.
But it's not okay.
Because I went, I'm like, Honey,
I am fine.
Let's figure out what's wrong with
the kid and why the kid's upset.
Let's worry about that.
And she's just like,
wait a minute.
So yeah, definitely right
at first, there was absolutely
a very obvious, a
lot more bandwidth.
She's expecting her husband
to come home, only he doesn't.
This new dude shows up.
A month later, this new dude goes
back to Stanford for the third and
final round of in-person evaluation
and testing.
Gretchen says his new chill lasts
for a while.
He was doing so much better.
It was what I wanted when
he went down there. I wanted him to
be doing better.
I wanted him to be happy.
I wanted him to be engaged.
But that literally, that was
a horrible time for me.
It was horrible.
It was probably one of the lowest
times I've ever experienced.
Why?
Why, I think because it took away
his part of what I
was experiencing.
And it shone the spotlight
on my part.
And some of the deficits within
myself or some of just the areas
that were non-functional within
me.
And so that was a real struggle.
And I'm not alone in this.
This comes up a lot with the wives
of the people who do the treatment,
that we spend so
much of our time focused on the
guys, and they're very much the
low-hanging fruit.
It's very obvious what
their issues are, what their part
in the whole dynamic is.
And so that can often
mask.
What our part is or what's
going on with us.
It's like, oh, fine.
Like, yeah, that's fine and dandy.
Like you went and you did drugs
in Mexico and you feel great
and we still feel like crap.
So I
went down at the end of March.
In the spring of 2022,
Gretchen went down to Mexico and
had her own ibogaine experience.
She says that like Craig, before she
went, she met with her integration
coach and set out her goals.
So my intention was I
just wanted to know what was the
truth. I wanted to know why
these hang-ups, why that hang-up.
What I thought the truth was that I
needed to see was the
ugly parts or the bad parts.
What I came out of there was I
didn't need to know the truth about
anything bad about myself.
I needed the truth about the good
about myself, I came
out of there feeling and knowing was
that Yeah, we all have dark
in us, but the light so
far overshadows the dark.
I felt like definitely the
negative self-talk, the chatter,
the shame, the mom guilt,
just a release of that.
So Craig and Gretchen both had
powerful and personally meaningful
ibogaine experiences.
So much so that Craig took a
part-time job advocating for
veterans access to psychedelic
assisted therapy.
But as positive as they are,
everything Craig and Gretchen say is
just anecdotal.
To really establish that Ibograine
is safe and effective in the
treatment of TBI, PTSD,
anxiety, or anything else,
We need a lot more research,
more scientific evidence.
Dr. Keynan and his colleagues in the
Stanford study were trying to
establish objective measurements
from their observational studies
and for their MRIs
and fMRIs.
The MRI study has yet to be publicly
released.
You know, I heard from my colleagues
that we're doing the assessments
that it's going pretty well,
but I've been there before.
And Dr. Keynan's job was
to crunch the data from all the
psychological and cognitive tests
they did.
You know, I've been doing clinical
research and a lot of times you hear
from patients, from clinicians,
yeah, this really helped.
But when you look at the data as a
whole, you start seeing it's not as
clear cut as you wished
it would be.
And here, at first, I
couldn't believe the results that I
saw.
Dr. Keynan re-crunched the numbers.
I couldn't believe what I'm seeing.
100%, all of the participants
had what we call a
clinically meaningful response.
TBI symptoms had decreased,
on average, by more than 80%.
And if you look at remission,
86% remission means that 86%
of our sample at
the one month follow-up
point clinically did
not have PTSD anymore.
Their findings were published in
Nature Medicine in January of
this year, but are the findings
too good to be true?
Possibly.
As the researchers themselves
acknowledge, their sample
size was small, it wasn't diverse,
their subjects had coaching therapy
along with ibogaine, and they
couldn't separate out the effects of
that.
There was no control group, subjects
who didn't take Ibogain, to compare
with the ones who did.
There's likely some expectation
bias.
If you believe something is going to
help you, you're more likely to be
helped.
I don't think like, you know, we
have a hundred percent response,
eighty-six percent remission.
I don't think it could all
be explained by expectation bias,
but that's something we need
to rule out.
In other words, he's saying that
more studies are needed, more
studies on subjects who haven't been
primed by their colleagues, their
spouses, by online videos and
interviews, to think that the
drug they're about to take will heal
them.
We need studies that include a
placebo group so that subjects
really don't know if they're taking
the drug or a placebo,
which is hard to pull off with a
psychedelic drug that lasts for 24
hours.
What about Craig's claim of improved
eyesight after taking ibogaine?
I expected Dr. Keynan to dismiss
this possibility outright.
That's actually something I
neglected to mention.
So ibogaine increases the
transcription of neurotrophic
factors, substances that
cause cell
regeneration.
You know, something has to explain
the magnitude of the clinical
effects.
I wouldn't be surprised to see that
it's true.
But Dr. Keenan said he would want to
see the results across the whole
group of subjects.
So there's still no proof yet that
ibogaine improves vision.
In any case, I think it's safe to
say that Craig had a heavy dose
of expectation bias going
into the study.
So did Gretchen after seeing Craig's
improvement.
So it surprised me to hear from
each of them separately a
kind of modesty about what
ibogaine could do for people.
I think ibogaine is an amazing
tool to be used in a
toolbox.
I don't think it's the Swiss
Army knife.
I do not think that
it is a standalone, that it's
going to do the trick if you don't
do the work.
This medicine is a breacher charge
into your psyche
or problems that you
have.
Now you still have to clear the
house.
You still have go in there.
You still to engage the
terrorists and you
still to rescue the hostages.
We're not, I mean, we're not out of
the woods.
There's still a lot of
work to be done, and the healing
that helps the veteran
doesn't always help the
family, but that
doesn't mean that the veteran
shouldn't be helped.
If you or someone you know is in
crisis, dial 988
to speak with a trained listener via
the suicide and crisis lifeline.
This episode was reported and
produced by Curtis Fox.
This was the last episode of our
very first season.
So keep an eye out for what we have
coming up next.
But in the meantime, if you want
to continue to engage with our work,
you can find me on most social media
platforms at ADRS.
And you can the UC Berkeley Center
for the Science of Psychedelics at
SciPsychedelics.
That's S-C-I, psychedelics,
one word, as well as on
the newsletter, the microdose, which
is on Substack.
All right, roll the rest of the
credits. And thank you for
listening.
Altered States is a production of
the UC Berkeley Center for the
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