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"Has the cure for addiction been
suppressed since `60s?" asks the kicker.
Veterans of the Yippies, those old
counterculture radicals, attempt to make
the case in this new tome from Brooklyn's
anarchist-oriented Autonomedia press.
Howard Lotsof claims to have
dis-covered the addiction-interrupting
effects of the African shamanic drug
Ibogaine almost accidentally in the 1960s.
In the 1980s, from his home on Staten
Island, he launched an operation (carried
out with "the same degree of secrecy as
the Manhattan Project") which brought the
potent psychoactive vine iboga from the
rainforests of Gabon to European labs
where it was synthesized into
pharmaceutical-grade Ibogaine and supplied
to Amsterdam safehouses where smack and
coke addicts were brought for treatment.
Once patents were secured, Lotsof and his
co-conspirators--most notably renegade
Yippie leader and marijuana zealot Dana
Beal--took the crusade public, attempting
to get Ibogaine legalized in the USA.
This book could better serve that
cause if it weren't so erratic and non-
linear. In 218 pages it jumps from
per-sonal ax-grinding (e.g. gossipy
minutia and trashing of the Tompkins
Square/ squatter scene on New York's Lower
East Side) to the most esoteric
mysti-cism, weaving together threads from
the cosmology of Gabon's Bwiti peo-ple
(who use iboga in rite-of-passage
ceremonies), Jewish theology, Gnosti-cism,
Einstein and the science fiction of Philip
K. Dick. After that are six
appendices--clinical studies of Ibo-gaine,
analyses of heroin withdrawal
and an effort to prove that the fabled
soma of Vedic legend was actually
harmaline (which produces effects similar
to Ibogaine).
The book provides an interesting
profile of a particular corner of the
counterculture. Among those making cameos
are Yippie Abbie Hoffman, activist
attorney Bill Kunstler, Black Panther
Dhoruba Bin Wahad and HIGH TIMES founder
Tom Forcade (there are also numerous,
generally unflattering references to
current HIGH TIMES editors). New York's
Black Panthers pioneered non-methadone
addiction-treatments in their 1968
occupation of Lincoln Detox clinic in the
Bronx, just as Lotsof and his Yippie
friends were developing their theories
about Ibogaine. The authors of The
Ibogaine Story clearly want these old
warriors to finally have their day of
establishment acceptance. Also appearing
are a slew of technocrats and researchers
from the National Institute on Drug Abuse
who were targetted by the Ibogaine lobby.
The book has graphics on every page,
as well as reproduced press clips (on
everything from Allen Ginsburg's first
acid trip to the latest findings in brain
chemistry) and numerous footnotes which
delve into various and arcane explorations
(such as tracing the theories of
anti-marijuana mouthpiece Gabriel Nahas to
Nazi doctors). While this makes for an
interesting read, The Ibogaine Story would
be more convincing if it kept its eye on
the ball and avoided such millennialist
pretensions as "Ibogaine represents the
next evolution of human life..."
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