The New York Times Just Called Out the Ibogaine Treatment Industry. Here's What They Missed.

Recorded September 15, 2026, at the Nekawa campus in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The video above is the full talk. What follows is the same argument in writing.

On August 26 The New York Times published a long look at the psychedelic treatment industry, and at ibogaine clinics in Mexico in particular. It is a critical piece. It found clinics stacking multiple psychedelics into a few days, a woman who arrived expecting care and got a prescription bottle, and a psychiatrist who watched a testimonial being filmed by someone who looked like they were still in the experience.

I run an ibogaine program. I have also taken ibogaine myself, more than once. So I read the article with two reactions at the same time. The first was relief that someone with a big platform finally said some of this out loud. The second was frustration, because the Times described the symptoms and never quite named the disease.

Here are the three things that stood out to me, and the one thing I think they missed.

1. Four days is not a program

The article spends time at a clinic in Tijuana that works with veterans. Many of those veterans are doing ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT back to back. The clinic defends the practice by saying that more than one person, maybe two, told them that without the 5-MeO-DMT they would have gone home suicidal.

Stacking psychedelics is not automatically wrong. Plenty of centers do it, and 5-MeO-DMT can help people. It can also do real harm. But that is not the part of the story that caught me.

The part that caught me is that the program is four days long.

Think about what that means. A person takes ibogaine, and in the normal course of events they are on a plane home within two days. Of course some of them feel suicidal. Ibogaine is grueling. It takes far longer than two days to come back from it. Every time I have gone through it, it has taken me at least a week before I even want to look at my phone, let alone engage with the ordinary world. For some people it takes weeks.

So the clinic reaches for a second psychedelic to patch the hole that its own schedule created. The Times treated that as a question about drug combinations. I think it is a question about time. These programs are not long enough for anyone to process what ibogaine does to them, and the fix is not another molecule. The fix is more days, more structure, and more people around you when the hard part arrives.

That, more than anything else in the article, is what I see as the biggest problem in this industry: not enough time.

2. "I didn't feel prepared." Neither did our student.

The second story in the piece belongs to a woman named Katie Stewart. She went to one of the most popular ibogaine clinics in the world, the one in Cancun that does a very good job of marketing itself on social media. You know the one.

She expected a well-supported experience with a lot of care. What she describes instead is being handed Ambien and benzodiazepines on arrival, even though she was not taking either.

I want to be careful here, because I was not in that room. But one of our students at Nekawa went to the same clinic before he came to us, and he tells the same story about the same place. Sedatives on arrival, regardless of what he was already on. The clinic's owner told the Times that they prescribe based on a person's existing prescriptions. That does not match what two separate people have told us about their own experience there.

There was a detail the article did not have that I learned from our student afterwards. The integration work after his treatment was done over Zoom. He was physically at the clinic. The person guiding him through integration was somewhere else, someone he had never met, and who may never have gone through ibogaine themselves.

Why would a clinic do that? Because it is running thirty people at a time. At that scale you cannot sit with each person. So you outsource the sitting.

Two problems, then. Clinics describing themselves in ways that do not match what people find when they arrive. And a standard of care that gets more impersonal the bigger and more famous a clinic becomes.

When you are choosing where to do this, ask a plain question: who will I actually talk to afterwards, and have they done this themselves? You will need that person. Ibogaine is not rainbows and butterflies. It often leaves people in a very hard place for a while, and the only thing that reliably helps is someone nearby who understands what you are going through.

3. Testimonials filmed inside the experience

The third thing came from a psychiatrist who visited that same clinic. She described a person being interviewed on camera within days of treatment, giving a testimonial, and looking to her like they were in a manic episode.

Sit with that for a second. The acute ibogaine experience is usually described as lasting somewhere between 24 and 72 hours, and the aftereffects go on much longer. So there is a real chance the person on camera was still under the influence of the medicine while telling you how great it was. I find it hard enough to talk on camera on a normal day. Imagine doing it hours out of the most intense psychedelic experience of your life, with a clinic's marketing team waiting for the good quote.

And here is the part I want to push on harder than the Times did. A lot of the people you see on camera talking about ibogaine were never paying customers. They are influencers. They were invited, they were comped, and in return they owe the clinic a good review for their followers.

So you have people without serious problems being paid to describe a smooth experience, and that content is used to bring in people with very serious problems who now expect the same thing. Where is the ethics in that? It is not just misleading. It is, frankly, icky. When you know the person is being paid to tell you the treatment is good, everything they say is worth less.

What I would push for instead

I do not want to be a critic and nothing else. So here is what I actually want.

More regulation. More oversight. More honesty between centers about what goes wrong, not just what goes right. I want every treatment center in this field talking to each other and helping each other get better, because right now most of us are guessing in private.

I work with people going through ibogaine treatment every week, and I can tell you this: it is hard, and people very often do not get the experience they were promised on a podcast or an Instagram reel. Then I have to sit across from them and explain that no, this does not mean it did not work. What it means is that there is a lot more work ahead, and they are going to need support, long-term support, and people to do it with.

My honest hope, as ibogaine moves toward medicine and the mainstream, is that we stop treating it like a quick fix. It is not something you fly in for, take, and fly home cured. It is a stepping stone. A very good one, if you treat it as one. But you have to understand what you are stepping onto.

How Nekawa is built around that

I am not neutral here, so I will just say plainly what we do differently and let you judge it.

Our standard program is 28 days, not four. The days before treatment are for preparation, and the days after are for integration, in person, with people who have been through it. For complex cases we run longer programs of six to twelve weeks, and we offer residential aftercare for people who need more time before going home.

Small groups. Every person knows the people they will be talking to afterwards, and those people have done this themselves.

The medicine itself is not ours to give. Ibogaine for our students is prescribed and administered by independent, licensed physicians in a hospital in Brazil, where it is medically regulated. We coordinate the program around that; we do not play doctor.

And we do not pay anyone to say nice things about us. If you read something about Nekawa, it came from someone who paid to be here or from us directly, with our name on it.

If you are trying to decide whether ibogaine is right for you, or for someone you love, talk to us. You will get a straight answer, including "no" if it is not a fit. If you already know, you can start the application.

Disagree with me

This is Charles Johnston, from the rainforest in Brazil, trying to bring a little authenticity to a space that badly needs it. Reach out, follow, comment, disagree, argue. I am happy to field all of it. Dialogue is the only way any of us get better at this.

Read the original reporting: The New York Times, August 26, 2026.