This is a summary of an article published on another site. The full piece, in Eric Bozinny's own words, is on IbogaineAdvisor. The images on this page come from that article.
About the article
On September 7, 2026, IbogaineAdvisor published "The Convert," an eight-minute profile of Nekawa co-founder Charles Johnston. It ran in the site's Perspectives section, "Essays from the Field," and was written by Eric Bozinny after a recorded interview with Charles.
Who wrote it
Eric Bozinny founded IbogaineAdvisor.com after ibogaine changed the direction of his own life. He went to Mexico for treatment himself, and his wife and daughter later made the same trip. The site covers ibogaine science, policy, and clinics independently. It does not sell treatment, take paid clinic placements, or earn referral fees, and Eric speaks directly with the leadership of every clinic he profiles.
Why he wrote it
Eric built IbogaineAdvisor to give people weighing ibogaine, and the families around them, honest information from people who have been inside the field rather than marketing. The Perspectives series does that through long-form profiles of the people doing the work. "The Convert" is his look at one of them: who Charles is, how he got here, and what he is building now.
The main points
- Where it started. Charles grew up Mormon in Appalachia and served as a missionary before leaving the church and spending years with psychedelics. Heroin followed. After an arrest on New Year's Eve 2012, he took a bus to Tijuana and did ibogaine in early 2013. There were no visions, only hours alone with himself. By the third day, in his words, he woke up "2.0."
- A decade inside other people's programs. He spent the next ten years in sales, marketing, and leadership roles at ibogaine clinics and psychedelic programs, including ten months as executive director of Mission Within working with veterans. He kept running into limits set by someone else, and eventually decided to build his own.
- Nekawa as a school, not a clinic. Eric describes Nekawa, which Charles runs with his partner Tatiana Aya Tupinambá in the Atlantic Forest outside Paraty, as a deliberate counter to the clinic-as-medical-event model. It is a 28-day program where the founders live the daily routine alongside students: stabilization before ibogaine, integration after, and time in nature throughout.
- Against the hype. Charles is openly critical of inflated claims, including the "80 percent success" figure, and of the push to turn ibogaine into another miracle drug. His view is that the container around the medicine, the time, the people, and the practice, does most of the work.
- Addiction first. In his view, addiction is ibogaine's strongest use case and the reason the West found it in the first place.
- Small on purpose. The goal is not a chain of clinics. It is something small, deep, and built to last.
Read the full article
"The Convert" tells the whole story in far more detail than this summary, including the parts of the ibogaine industry's history that Charles saw from the inside. Read it on IbogaineAdvisor.
