Who's getting rich off ibogaine? A response to the New York Post

The Nekawa Report · Editorial.

The video above is the full editorial from The Nekawa Report. You can also listen to it or read the transcript. What follows is the same argument in writing, with the reporting and research behind it.

On October 2, 2026, the New York Post published a feature about executives, celebrities, biohackers and burned-out professionals traveling to a clinic in Cancún for ibogaine, at $12,500 to $20,000 a stay (Beard, 2026). If you are researching ibogaine treatment, comparing an ibogaine treatment center with an iboga retreat, or just reading the headlines, I want to add the question that story skips: who is getting rich off ibogaine, and who is being left out?

I am not writing this to attack anyone's experience. Ibogaine is a remarkable medicine, and the people in that article describe real changes in their lives. My concern is with where the money goes and whose knowledge gets erased along the way.

1. What the New York Post reported

The feature follows clients who went to Mexico, where ibogaine is not prohibited, for what the clinic calls health and optimization rather than addiction treatment. One of the clinic's co-founders told the Post, "The fastest-growing segment is health and optimization." Clients stay around ten days, work with coaches, and take a large "flood dose" of ibogaine under medical supervision.

The article is honest about some limits. It notes that ibogaine is a Schedule I substance in the United States, that it can disturb the heart's electrical system, and that independent evidence for performance or creativity benefits does not exist yet. It also quotes the clinic's clinical director: "People shouldn't take it outside of a medical setting."

That last line is the one I want to talk about.

2. What the article leaves out

People have worked with iboga outside of any medical setting for a very long time. In Gabon and neighboring countries, the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga sits at the center of several Bwiti (or Bwété) initiatory traditions (Helfend, 2026). Those traditions have their own knowledge of preparation, dosing over time, ceremony and support afterwards.

A story about ibogaine and personal growth that never mentions the people who carried this plant into the present is missing its first chapter. The Post article names a clinic, its founders and its staff. It names no Gabonese practitioner, no Bwiti community, and no one whose knowledge made the whole field possible.

3. Iboga is where ibogaine comes from

Ibogaine did not start in a lab. It is the most abundant of the alkaloids in iboga's root bark, and the plant makes it through its own biosynthetic pathway (Farrow et al., 2018). Science isolated one molecule from a plant that people already knew well.

In my own training, the most important lesson has been that iboga is a spiritual medicine before it is anything else. I believe the problems we bring to it as human beings are, at root, problems of the spirit. That is my perspective as an initiate, not a medical claim, and I wrote more about it in Ibogaine versus Iboga.

4. Follow the money

Here is what bugs me most. People are spending large sums on ibogaine, and that money mostly stays with clinics and companies outside Africa, while the people who have studied the plant's spiritual nature for generations are paid little or nothing for that knowledge.

This is not only my opinion. Reporting from Gabon this month describes exactly that gap (Helfend, 2026):

• One community association that chose to cultivate iboga rather than strip wild plants earned about $50,000 from three legal shipments since 2023. Its promised share of what the bark is worth further down the chain, as extracts and clinic treatments, had not arrived.
• In May 2026, Gabon signed a decree asserting sovereignty over iboga, its derivatives and the traditional knowledge around it, requiring benefit-sharing agreements for commercial use and creating a sovereign fund. Gabon is a party to the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing; the United States is not.
• In September 2026, Gabon moved to halt exports of iboga and all its derivatives while it builds a national framework.
• Practitioners describe heavy wild harvesting and illegal trafficking, with the oldest plants taken first.

One Bwiti leader quoted in that reporting put it simply: "The revenues from the exploitation of iboga must be redistributed." That is the conversation the Post feature never gets to.

5. When a medical setting makes sense

I want to be clear about where I agree with the clinic. If you are dealing with substance use disorder, and especially opioid withdrawal, ibogaine is usually given at higher doses, and doing it in a clinic with medical care makes a lot of sense.

I would add something I did not say strongly enough in the video: the heart risk does not depend on the setting. Ibogaine can prolong the heart's QT interval, which raises the risk of dangerous arrhythmias, and deaths have been reported (Koenig & Hilber, 2015; Ona et al., 2022). In a Dutch hospital study of 14 people with opioid use disorder given a single dose, QT prolongation was common and some reached levels cardiologists treat as dangerous (Knuijver et al., 2022). A recent scoping review still names cardiac safety as a central unresolved concern (Esperança et al., 2026).

So my position is not "skip the screening." It is that people who are not dealing with addiction, who come for growth, creativity or spiritual reasons, should look to the tradition and pay the people who hold it, with honest medical screening wherever they go. A ceremony does not remove the risk to your heart, and neither does a price tag. See Is ibogaine safe? for the medical side.

6. The fair question back to us

If I ask who is getting rich, I owe you the same transparency. Nekawa charges for its program too, and you can see our price and what it includes on our pricing page.

Our price for 28 days is often what many programs charge for 10 days, so we are much more affordable than most. Unlike most ibogaine clinics, we employ Indigenous staff, and for our retreats we bring in Gabonese and Bwiti-trained facilitators rather than Westerners. We are also developing a land project so the plants can prosper, both in Gabon and in Brazil.

We do not have this perfectly worked out, and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise. What I can promise is that the tradition is not a decoration on our program. It is the reason it exists.

7. What research supports and what remains uncertain

Personal stories and clinical evidence are different things, and both deserve to be labeled clearly.

• Addiction. Small observational studies report reduced withdrawal and drug use after ibogaine treatment for opioid use disorder, but without comparison groups they cannot show that ibogaine works better than other treatments (Brown & Alper, 2018).
• Trauma and brain injury. A 2024 observational study of 30 special-operations veterans given ibogaine with magnesium reported large improvements in functioning and PTSD symptoms a month later (Cherian et al., 2024). It had no control group.
• Optimization and creativity. There is no peer-reviewed evidence yet that ibogaine improves performance in healthy people. Even the clinic in the Post article says so.
• Traditional practice. There is no clinical research comparing outcomes in traditional settings with clinics. My belief that the traditional path offers more is based on experience, not trials.

8. Questions to ask before you pay for ibogaine

Whether you choose a clinic, an iboga retreat or a traditional practitioner, ask:

• Who benefits from my money? Does any of it reach Gabonese communities or the practitioners whose knowledge the program draws on?
• Where does the medicine come from? Is it ibogaine HCl, root bark or an extract, how was it sourced, and has it been tested?
• Who screens me? Who checks my heart with an ECG, my medical history and my medications before anything is given?
• What support is there afterwards, and for how long?
• Who is telling me this story, and why? When you read the next ibogaine article, ask who it benefits.

If you want to talk it through with us, honestly and without pressure, connect with us: join an integration circle, schedule a call, or just let us know how you're doing.

Related reading

• Ibogaine versus Iboga and the difference between plant and molecule
• Is ibogaine safe?
• Ibogaine treatment cost at Nekawa
• What is ibogaine?
• Why 28 days? Preparation, integration, and the jungle in ibogaine care
• The Nekawa Report playlist on YouTube

About the author

Charles D. Johnston is co-founder and lead teacher of Nekawa. After years of heroin and cocaine addiction, he went through ibogaine treatment in 2013 and helped launch six ibogaine projects in Mexico and Costa Rica before founding Nekawa in Brazil. He is initiated in Bwiti and continues training with Gabonese elders in Brazil and Gabon. He is the author of Facets of Ayahuasca (2018) and executive producer of Curandera (2025). Read his story.