In which countries is iboga banned?

Treatment with iboga is a legal grey area. To this day, the effectiveness of ibogaine and the risk associated with taking it cannot be reliably assessed on the basis of scientific studies. This is partly due to the complicated legal situation.

In Europe, doctors are not allowed to treat patients with the substance, but in many countries, including Germany, it is not an illegal narcotic either. Possessing and consuming it is therefore permitted. This means private individuals can offer treatment with ibogaine.

It is different in the USA. There, ibogaine was banned together with other mind-expanding drugs in the late 1960s. In 1995, it briefly looked as if ibogaine might be approved as a medicine after all. After initial promising test runs, the neuroscientist Deborah Mash was given the green light by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct clinical trials. However, she cannot finance them; the public funding bodies consider the risk to patients too high. And pharmaceutical companies are not interested in ibogaine. "It is not profitable enough," people suspect.