A former Navy SEAL named Craig deployed nine times over nearly three decades in the military. When he left the service, he felt lucky to have all his limbs, toes and fingers. But he found himself struggling with language and memory and rising frustration. One day he forgot his wife’s name and couldn’t remember it for hours. His wife Gretchen started looking for help online and found information about a Stanford University research study on ibogaine and veterans. Craig volunteered. On October 8, Dr. Nolan Williams, who led that ibogaine study, died. He was 42.
Psychedelics are now at the center of a global conversation about mental health, mysticism, and even how we experience illness and death. In Altered States, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross explores how people are taking these drugs, who has access to them, how they’re regulated, who stands to profit, and what these substances might offer us as individuals and as a society. Listen to more episodes here.
Read transcript
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:00:00] 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.
Craig [00:01:03] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:01:43] 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.
Craig [00:02:06] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:02:21] And were you afraid of an encounter with her where you would reveal that you didn’t know her name?
Craig [00:02:26] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:02:40] And so what’d you do?
Craig [00:02:42] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:03:04] Gretchen. The name of his wife was Gretchen. They had been married for almost three decades.
Craig [00:03:09] And that’s when I was ready to say, hey, you know what? This isn’t right. Something is not right.
Curtis Fox [00:03:17] 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.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:03:31] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:04:23] You can hear me okay?
Craig [00:04:24] Yes, I can hear you very well.
Curtis Fox [00:04:26] It’s been about four years since that morning when Craig forgot his wife’s name.
Craig [00:04:30] I am 55 years old.
Curtis Fox [00:04:32] 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.
Craig [00:04:45] It’s mostly pasture and we raise beef, pork and poultry as well.
Curtis Fox [00:04:51] I’m talking to Craig because I want to understand what led a serious, controlled guy.
Craig [00:04:55] I really despise drugs in my system to travel to another country
Curtis Fox [00:04:59] to take a psychedelic drug.
Craig [00:05:02] A farm kid with low prospects, I join the military.
Curtis Fox [00:05:05] And to understand that, I asked a lot of questions about his military service, like when did he join?
Craig [00:05:11] I joined the military right after high school.
Curtis Fox [00:05:15] This was in 1988.
Craig [00:05:16] It took me a while to find them. I was a ski instructor the year before I became a SEAL.
Curtis Fox [00:05:22] 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.
Gretchen [00:05:37] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:06:10] 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.
Craig [00:06:29] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:06:39] You must get this every time you talk to somebody who has been in the service, what kind of action did you see?
Craig [00:06:44] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:06:55] Craig is not the kind of guy who wants to tell war stories. Can you describe one mission that didn’t go as planned?
Craig [00:07:05] That’d be all of them.
Curtis Fox [00:07:07] He would only talk generally about what he did as if it was something that everyone like him did.
Craig [00:07:11] You dominate the space as you move through the building. You take possession of the first room. Yeah.
Curtis Fox [00:07:17] Craig did want to make one thing crystal, clear to me.
Craig [00:07:20] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:07:42] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:07:58] Were you around a lot of explosions?
Craig [00:08:00] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:08:13] 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.
Craig [00:08:26] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:08:41] But it was mainly explosions. Lots and lots of explosions. Craig told me he taught advanced applied explosives and breaching.
Craig [00:08:50] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:09:28] I’ve never been there explosion. What happens to your body? How does it feel?
Craig [00:09:34] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:09:55] And give me a sense of how many explosions you were exposed to.
Craig [00:09:59] In 27 years, the nearest I could tell, it runs into the tens of thousands. I would say somewhere between 15 and 20,000.
Curtis Fox [00:10:10] 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.
Craig [00:10:36] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:10:46] Got it.
Craig [00:10:46] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:11:08] That didn’t mean he wasn’t injured, but it took him a long time to see that he was.
Craig [00:11:13] 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.
Gretchen [00:11:24] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:11:41] 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.
Gretchen [00:11:49] Girl, girl, boy, girl.
Curtis Fox [00:11:51] They’ve been married now for 28 years, Craig said.
Gretchen [00:11:55] No, no, 31. I need credit for all of them. Yeah.
Curtis Fox [00:12:01] 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.
Gretchen [00:12:12] I had just had our fourth child. I had four kids, nine and under.
Curtis Fox [00:12:16] Craig would come home from work.
Gretchen [00:12:18] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:12:29] 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.
Gretchen [00:12:57] 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?
Craig [00:13:22] I was an emotional grenade laying in the room, and my wife and kids had the pleasure of walking around that grenade all day.
Gretchen [00:13:31] 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
Curtis Fox [00:13:43] Now, suicide among vets is epidemic.
Gretchen [00:13:47] Absolutely.
Curtis Fox [00:13:48] Were you worried about that?
Gretchen [00:13:50] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:14:17] 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.
Craig [00:14:28] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:15:23] 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.
Craig [00:15:33] 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.
Gretchen [00:15:45] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:15:59] And so she scoured the internet, she networked with the spouses of other vets, and through the grapevine, she started hearing about psilocybin.
Gretchen [00:16:08] 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.
Gretchen [00:16:34] It just… Took the edge off of the oppression, the heaviness.
Curtis Fox [00:16:42] 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.
Archival Tape [00:16:54] ibogaine really shoves in your face compared to ayahuasca.
Curtis Fox [00:16:57] ibogaine.
Trevor Millar [00:16:58] ibogaine is more like (clap), and that’s why it’s so good for team guys.
Curtis Fox [00:17:04] 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.
Gretchen [00:17:34] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:17:46] 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.
Gretchen [00:18:03] Like I had listened to every single thing out there before I proposed it to Craig.
Curtis Fox [00:18:09] And to her surprise, Craig immediately agreed to sign up. After the break, we’ll hear exactly what Craig signed up for.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:18:31] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:18:56] 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.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:19:16] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:19:40] They’ve been hearing anecdotally that ibogaine was dramatically helping people with TBI and PTSD. But there were many unknowns.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:19:49] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:20:07] 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.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:20:28] Yeah, so we had we had 30 participants. The participants were special operation veterans, mostly Navy SEALs, I believe.
Curtis Fox [00:20:37] A small sample, all guys, nearly all white.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:20:41] These are veterans that had a very high load of blast exposures. That’s where the traumatic brain injury came.
Curtis Fox [00:20:49] Before the study, before they did the ibogaine treatment, those 30 special ops guys were brought to Stanford for testing and evaluation.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:20:57] We did a full clinical assessment. Psychiatric test for.
Curtis Fox [00:21:01] Addictions and mood disorders like anxiety and depression.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:21:04] We did a neuropsychological assessment.
Curtis Fox [00:21:06] 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.
Trevor Millar [00:21:28] We’re only a few minutes from the airport in San Diego, about 30 or 40 minutes before they reach our facility.
Curtis Fox [00:21:35] 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.
Trevor Millar [00:21:47] I’d say the bulk of our clients have been veterans, and specifically U.S. Special Forces veterans.
Curtis Fox [00:21:53] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:22:03] And what I’m about to do now is participate.
Craig [00:22:07] In a Stanford University study of the psychedelic ibogaine.
Gretchen [00:22:15] Okay, and with that in mind, can you tell us about
Curtis Fox [00:22:20] 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.
Craig [00:22:39] There are good days and there are bad days, kind of vacillates. Chronic cognitive processing problems that cause me frustration.
Curtis Fox [00:23:00] 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.
Craig [00:23:15] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:23:50] 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.
Craig [00:24:02] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:24:26] When they get to Ambio’s campus.
Craig [00:24:28] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:24:44] 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.
Trevor Millar [00:25:07] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:25:28] 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.
Craig [00:25:57] My intention that I set was, is there anything more?
Curtis Fox [00:26:01] What do you mean by that?
Craig [00:26:03] 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?
Curtis Fox [00:26:28] On the evening of the second day, after a massage and a light meal, it’s time to take the drug.
Craig [00:26:35] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:26:55] Craig and the other guys go back downstairs where they watch the sun setting over the Pacific Ocean.
Craig [00:27:01] I take the first dose.
Curtis Fox [00:27:03] It’s a pill, the first of four.
Craig [00:27:05] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:27:16] 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.
Craig [00:27:26] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:27:50] 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.
Craig [00:28:05] They have this music in the background.
Curtis Fox [00:28:08] 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…
Craig [00:28:30] 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.
Trevor Millar [00:29:19] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:29:32] By now, Craig is in the grip of ibogaine. He vomits.
Craig [00:29:36] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:29:56] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:30:13] So what happens physically to someone taking ibogaine? I put that question to Dr. Keynan.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:30:20] It has a very wide effect on the brain.
Curtis Fox [00:30:24] He says it affects neurotransmitters.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:30:25] Like dopamine, serotonin, glutamate.
Curtis Fox [00:30:29] 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.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:30:39] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:31:00] So Craig is lying there on his pallet, largely unaware of the passing of time.
Craig [00:31:05] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:31:16] 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?
Craig [00:31:23] I got to sit with that question in a comfortably long period of time.
Curtis Fox [00:31:29] And his conversation with himself went something like this.
Craig [00:31:34] 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.
Craig [00:32:01] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:32:42] 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.
Trevor Millar [00:32:59] 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.
Craig [00:33:22] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:33:49] 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.
Craig [00:34:19] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:34:25] More energy post ibogaine. And there’s another effect he notices.
Craig [00:34:29] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:34:36] Craig says he was a four pot a day coffee drinker, straight black.
Craig [00:34:41] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:34:49] 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.
Gretchen [00:35:02] 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.
Craig [00:35:23] 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.
Gretchen [00:35:48] So yeah, definitely right at first, there was absolutely a very obvious, a lot more bandwidth.
Craig [00:35:55] She’s expecting her husband to come home, only he doesn’t. This new dude shows up.
Curtis Fox [00:36:02] 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.
Gretchen [00:36:13] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:36:33] Why?
Gretchen [00:36:34] 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.
Gretchen [00:36:52] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:37:33] 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.
Gretchen [00:37:45] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:38:29] 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.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:39:14] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:39:22] And Dr. Keynan’s job was to crunch the data from all the psychological and cognitive tests they did.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:39:28] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:39:47] Dr. Keynan re-crunched the numbers.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:39:49] I couldn’t believe what I’m seeing. 100%, all of the participants had what we call a clinically meaningful response.
Curtis Fox [00:40:00] TBI symptoms had decreased, on average, by more than 80%.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:40:04] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:40:19] 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.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:40:54] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:41:07] 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.
Dr. Jacob Keynan [00:41:42] 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.
Curtis Fox [00:42:02] 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.
Gretchen [00:42:30] 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.
Craig [00:42:49] 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.
Gretchen [00:43:08] 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.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:43:27] 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.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:44:15] Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. Adizah Eghan is our senior editor. Jennie Cataldo is our Senior Producer. Our Associate Producer is Cassady Rosenblum. Our Audio Engineers are Tommy Bazarian and Terence Bernardo. Fact Checking by Graham Hacia. Rotating BCSP Script Readers are Michael Pollen, Michael Silver, and Bob Jesse. Our Executive Producers are Jocelyn Gonzales and Malia Wollan. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. I’m your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Altered States wherever you get your podcasts.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross [00:44:54] Most well-known psychedelics remain illegal around the world, including the United States, where it is a criminal offense to manufacture, possess, dispense, or supply most psychedelics with few exceptions. Altered states does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics or offer instructions in their use.