Table of Contents.
Table of Contents.
Howard Lotsof first did an interview on Dutch pirate radio while Geerte (pronounced Heartuh ) F. was attending the 1988-89 Semester of Art School in New York City, where she was renovating Umbrella House, a squat on Ave C. Both Geerte and the pirate radio people considered themselves part of the international squatter's movement.
The pirate radio was in a large squat in Amsterdam. It was affiliated with Hi-Res, a smaller squat with a lot of computers. All the squats in Amsterdam had problems with heroin, Three people from Hi-Res, Chris Schwart, Reinhardt Hecht and Simon, had c ome across published references to Ibogaine, and they wanted their friends and the people they lived with to be treated. But they also wanted the squatter movement to be the group of people to tell the world about Ibogaine. So they were looking into how t o get their own supply, how to get people to eat it, and just doing research.
Hi-Res had to wait until Sisko came to Holland in October, 1989, for two volunteers to be treated--Geerte and Ron. In June, Geerte had returned from New York, where she had learned of Ibogaine in the squat scene, to live with her drug-addicted boyfri end, Ron. She was not using when she made arrangements to treat Ron, but started doing it with him during the three months she spent waiting for Sisko to come. There's a videotape of Chris Swart interviewing Geerte and Ron, helping Sisko with the intake procedure for the first Dutch addicts ever treated.
Ron had been addicted for 12 or 13 years. He had been doing 85 milligrams of methadone every day for twelve years, with one exception--15 months spent in spent in a rehab center to avoid going to jail. He actually followed the program on this rehab fa rm and he was clean under his own power.
But this particular program was merely suppressing Ron's aggression, so that for those 15 months, Ron longed for the day he could get out, and rebel. So one day after he came out of rehab he copped smack, and fell back to using drugs right away--alc ohol, pills, speed, cocaine and anything else he could get his hands on.
Ron had gone into treatment to get out of going to jail. But he learned a lot from the program anyway--which helped him with the Ibogaine treatment. It gave him the experience of being clean, which helps when you're suddenly given Ibogaine. Addicts h ave literally forgotten what it's like to spend a period of time without heroin.
Ron's treatment worked out very well. The day before he was a total wreck, completely chaotic idiot. He took the Ibogaine and he laid down for a day. He was very peaceful, quiet and happy. He came out like he'd been in the laundry machine, like a comp letely different person. That night he sat up and smoked a joint, drank a beer and he was totally happy and balanced.
Geerte was treated the day after Ron. She took the Ibogaine at 8:00 AM on an empty stomach. Sisko kept coming into the room to see if she had laid down yet, to have her walk a bit to check if she appeared wobbly. This only made Geerte determined to w alk in straight lines. She kept telling him the Ibogaine wasn't working. She even ran around a chair to show she had full coordination.
In reality, she was resisting the effect because she didn't know what to expect from the Ibogaine--trying to prove that if she didn't want to be knocked out, she wouldn't get knocked out. It involved intense will power. She had had many mind-bending t rips on LSD and mushrooms, maybe 30 or 40, but she didn't like what this was doing to her, because when she closed her eyes she saw things--
"...Patterns in the beginning, about an hour after you take the Ibogaine, maybe 10% as vivid as LSD. But if you close your eyes, you see all kinds of stuff happening, really rapidly, too. As soon as you close your eyes, you go into a REM sleep thing."
The minute she experienced it, the eyes-closed stuff was familiar. Her mind recognized it as REM-like. What she saw was all these cartoon images--what a child's mind is formed out of in this century. She had been told she'd see a chronological movie of her life, "...but all I saw was these weird cartoon figures coming past. I have a vision of walking through my brain, as if walking in a giant computer-like file-cabinet. There are long narrow drawers with selected, collective information. Somebody in the hotel turned on the radio, with commercials, and I just got-- like all the commercial jingles I ever heard came out of this little drawer in my brain. It came out as one long song, and I visually saw the song.
"Can you imagine all the jingles you ever heard on the radio all coming out as one thing. Like a harmonica. The trip is hard to explain. You're existing on ten different levels at the same time. You don't have any control over it and it just happens t o you. Something you just can't comprehend-- you begin to comprehend it when the experience is over.
"You really feel that something is changing in your mind, and I kept saying to Ron, who was in the room when I got treated: 'There should be a doctor here: we should take a scan of my brain at this very moment. This is really too intense, it can't be happening.'
"It felt like re-programming. I thought, "This is not good. This is way too much. Nobody should experience this because it's way too intense." Weeks after the treatment you start to understand why you experienced the things you did.
"I would sit down on the bed and I'd hear a drum, like someone drumming in the next room. It's not like you hear this drumming in your mind and you can just stop it, like it's just a mind thing. No, it's really happening and you can't stop it. Lik e a African drum. Next thing I know I'm walking in Africa. Literally walking in the jungle with bare feet and snakes around me. Jungle leaves around my face and I thought, "What the fuck is going on?" But then I open my eyes and I"m still in the room. It 's like an out-of-body experience, but you just open your eyes as soon as you want to snap back into your body, and you're there."
The visions of Africa made Geerte uncomfortable-- "For the first time in my life, I accepted being born white in the 20th century in northern Europe." She also found the room irritating. The sheets were really bright red. She didn't like Sisko coming in to check up on her, saying "Maybe we should put some more Ibogaine into you." He seemed like a threatening pigmy from the forest, trying to stuff this root down her throat. Then he would leave to fall asleep, snoring in the next room. She felt they s hould be there for her. Ron was there, but he was taking showers and telling her how great he felt. He was sitting there talking and she said, "Shut up. I'm in the middle of this experience here. Go for a walk or something."
Ron had gotten treated on a Sunday, a really quiet day. It was Monday, and all of a sudden people were cutting trees in front of the hotel, painters were painting windows, people were cleaning the hallways--there was all this noise. Sounds really get intensified on Ibogaine. About three or four hours into the treatment, Geerte decided to split.
"I tried to puke up as much of the Ibogaine as I could. I thought it would stop the effect. It didn't, but I told myself it did, that it should be wearing off in half an hour. It wasn't, I was full-blown into it. But I wanted to go home. I dressed and wrote Sisko, who was still sleeping, a note: "Have fun discovering new cultures in Africa with your freaky friends. See you another time."
On the trainride home to Utrecht, the Ibogaine was active--"I saw a lot of people who I experienced as being 'dead in the head.' " At home she threw up again, which made her feel cheated-- "I was not supposed to have withdrawal now." She went out to her dealer's house, where she smoked some heroin, and felt much better, though still trippy. Throwing up brought relief, but everything tasted and smelled bitter from the Ibogaine.
Late that night, as the heroin effect wore off, she lay down on the couch "in a dreamlike, half-awake state," and the Ibogaine effect resumed as a rapid re-birthing experience. She saw herself as a fetus emerging from her mother's womb, felt "an114 in credible devotional love coming from my parents." This enabled her to accept mistakes her parents made during her growing up: "For the first time, I can feel respect for my parents, which shapes our whole relationship into a harmonious reality." Many ot her dream flashes appeared.
Researchers had known Ibogaine potentiates morphine analgesia, but here was a new finding--opiates potentiated the completion of Geerte's Ibogaine experience. She awoke the next morning completely refreshed, newborn and hungry as a wolf. She gave h er heroin away, and with Ron, started evaluating the experience. New things kept falling into place. It was as if all information in their brain filecabinets was shaken out of its drawers onto one big pile, looked at "objectively" and re-filed, untwisted from emotional trauma.
It took time to realize they're not getting sick, that there's no need to get money to run to the dealer anymore. The days went by--one incredibly energetic and active, the next one needed to relax. A withdrawal never took place-- just some occasiona l yawning and minor chills. Initially their junkie friends were skeptical, until they realized Ron was selling his 65 mg. dose of methadone every day, for weeks in a row, and spending the money on camping gear to go to India, not drugs.
"In a normal withdrawal," said Geerte, " you need all your motivated energy to go through being sick, which burns you out completely." This time their motivation was reinforced, and together with all of the visual experience, Ibogaine put Ron and Geer te on a path directed towards their goal. Some of their junkie friends found this positive attitude irritating. Others wanted to experience Ibogaine too. It was frustrating not to be able to give it to them.
The presence of hard drugs in their environment was neither threatening or particularly attractive: It just didn't matter. Once when Geerte tried heroin to see what it would do, it didn't get her stoned. It seemed to re-activate the Ibogaine. Up unti l four months after the treatment, she experienced colors and light very intensely. Geerte lost interest in drugs in general; she found the effect of Ibogaine went far beyond their effect, though not necessarily in a pleasant way.
Ron stayed heroin-free until they reached Pakistan. Someone who's been a hardcore addict for twelve years finds it hard to resist a gram of smack for 4 dollars a day. Geerte carried all Ron's smack in her underwear for 3 months, because she was least likely to be strip-searched. And she stayed clean--
"For years we'd been hunting it every day, and all of a sudden I was walking around with grams at a time and not touching it, because it made me nauseous, and felt horrible. My first Ibogaine experience also made me stop smoking, for six months. It wa s great."
Upon returning to Holland from Pakistan, India and Nepal, Geerte decided to go back to school in New York. But she had six months left in Holland, and she was so happy to be clean that she didn't want to hang around Ron, who was back to being a full- blown addict. She moved from Utrecht to Amsterdam, leaving Ron. There, all the friends that she told about her experience would come over every day, or call, asking, "Where's the Ibogaine? I want to get treated."
She'd been back a month, in March 1990, when she came into contact with Chris Schwartz again. He said Sisko had phoned and wanted to treat this guy Nico, who had founded the junkiebond in Rotterdam more than a decade earlier. Geerte realized this me ant the international coalition was going to continue doing treatments in Holland. Right away Geerte flashed on the idea of setting up her own addict self-help group to talk to people who were going to be treated, to prepare them. Then they could meet aft erwards to do follow-up, and write up reports.
Chris introduced her to Simon and Reinhardt, who taught her how to work the Hi-Res squat computer. She started with all the information about Ron's and her treatments. She designed questionaires. She did research with Simon about how to get their own supply of Ibogaine. The pharmaceutical companies told them they couldn't give any to people who were not scientific researchers.
Simon, who was English, had contacts in Cambridge with friends who had a laboratory there who said they could produce Ibogaine HCl. As they negotiated, the deal went sour because the Cambridge chemists refused to provide a sample. They just wanted to send the whole shipment, and they wanted cash--about $100 a gram.The squatters were willing to do benefits to raise the money, but at the same time they didn't want the media to catch on.
Then all of a sudden Chris, Simon and Reinhard decided to write a big article for the major newpapers, to tell them about the existence of Ibogaine.
It was May. Nico had been been treated by a team including Geerte. Sisko stuck around a little bit and then he left us 9 or 10 doses of ibogaine to set up a group to start treating Dutch addicts. The first to be treated was Nico's girlfriend, Josien. She was a total heroin prostitute and looked like a holocaust surviver. The only thing she would do is smoke heroin--smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke...and be a prostitute to get the money.
Within a week she was like a new person. She bought a mountain bike and started working out, got totally into vegetarian food... in 3 months she became this big, fat momma. Nico, Josien, and Geerte sat down, read everything on Ibogaine, the whole Afr ican ritual, and figured out how to involve the ritual in treating the next group, Geerte's friends from Utrecht:
"We'd have the person come over the night before his treatment and introduce ourselves as momma and poppa Iboga, because the addict is the child going through re-birth. We would tell them about the African ritual the night before the treatment so tha t they'd totally know what they were going to face. We'd tell them the Africans use it basically to guide people into adulthood so they become more responsible people, and that's what we'd be doing. Making a person more responsible in life, so that he'd have control over drugs instead of drugs over the person.
"If the person was a shooter, we would let him or her take their last shot, then let her or him destroy their syringe, symbolizing the destruction of their addiction. The same went for smokers and snorters--use up their last dose, then destroy the par aphernalia."
"Each treament was a full moon and sun cycle. We had a room with two doors, which was perfect. We'd move someone in through a door with a moon painted on it, into the room where they would have the experience, and then after treatment guide them out t he doorway decorated with a Sun.
"We'd treat the person with much love and care. Momma and Papa Iboga would keep checking up on the person. All the treatments, about 10 in a row during June, July and August of 1990, worked out fine. They were all my circle of friends, because I t hought if they were all going to go home alone, and they didn't know each other, then they wouldn't have any help or recognition from each other. Before they were treated, I visited them at least five times, to prepare them mentally as best I could. I made all these trips to Utrecht.
"Finally, I would introduce them to Nico and Josien, and we would do the treatments at Nico and Josien's house in Rotterdam, which was good because it was another city, and they couldn't just run out to buy heroin. But if people did want to go cop a fter the treatment, we'd first talk about if that was what they really wanted. If so, we'd help them cop.
"We weren't anti-dope, just anti-addiction. We were pro-choice. It was perfectly set up, and all these people from the same generation just clicked. We all used to be members of the revolution but weren't any more. We were all idealists who had falle n into cynicism, and related in a similar way."
Geerte kept going back to Amsterdam after each treatment to put it on the computer. She wrote up each treatment from minute to minute, from intake to after-treatment. "During each treatment we took notes: 9:00 AM--person takes this much Ibogaine. 9 :15 AM-- person vomits up a little Ibogaine. You could read exactly how the treatment would take place, what we said to the person, etc."
But then, after 8 more treatments, Hi-Res--Simon, Chris and Reinhardt--all wanted to go public. Geerte, Nico, Josien objected strenuously. They were afraid publicity would cause the Dutch government to make Ibogaine illegal. What if health authoriti es broke in the midst of a treatment? Geerte said: "First we've got to treat 50 people and get all the data so we can throw out some numbers."
Geerte, Nico and Josien wanted it kept underground; Hi-Res wanted it in the news. So Geerte erased all the data from their computer, took all the information she had laying around, and moved out of the squat.
When she came back to pick up more stuff, Simon told her he had a back-up of all her data on the hard disk, and he was going ahead and making it into an article for the newspapers. Geerte shot back: "You never used heroin. You never used Ibogaine. N ow you want to treat people and tell the newspapers what it's like? This is insane!"
The Hi-Res report, consisting of the information on the hard disk, was released to the newspapers. But most of the newspaper people said, if this was really happening, we would hear from the drug re-habs, we would hear from Erasmus University. We wou ldn't hear it from some people who aren't even junkies, who haven't even experienced Ibogaine themselves.
Chris, Simon and Reinhardt continued to do radio programs about Ibogaine, but the report was premature. It passed around the squats without igniting any kind of serious movement. Geerte, Nico and Josien decided to cut Hi-Res off from all subsequent t reatments. This was in June, when they had done about 6 treatments.
After 8 treatments, Geerte and a friend in Utrecht were seriously talking of an Ibogaine support group. One day Nico's boss, Charlie Kaplan, walked in to Nico's house and suggested that everyone who had tried ibogaine should start a focus group and g et a doctor involved. Soon they were meeting once a week as a focus group, being examined by a doctor, sitting down and talking about their Ibogaine treatment and the aftereffects.
At this point Nico and Josien were totally clean and happy, and so were the others. Some had used heroin in the first weeks after the treatment but didn't become re-addicted. Geerte's treatment was already more than 6 months old, and Ron had found out she'd done heroin here and there, without becoming re-addicted. Yet via the focus group, Geerte found out something very important--
"I kept having contacts with my friends all through the months after my treatment and they basically all slowly but surely fell back into their addiction. The people who were dealing the heroin were very powerful, socially. They had friends in the foc us group going back ten, fifteen years--they went all the way back to hippie times together. They had been through all kinds of shit and they had this intense bond.
"The leader of this group was a heroin dealer, and in a way I was fucking with him by treating all his customers. I tried to stay friends so I wouldn't have a war with him. He himself wasn't healthy enough for a treatment--only had half his lungs lef t, from TB. Like most people in his scene he used to be an anti-heroin acidhead and pot-smoker.
" In the end he won. After the Ibogaine people discovered they were alone, and the one thing they had in common was that every day, they used to sit at this guy's table and get together--and that contact would happen through smack, (which was his mon ey). In the end they all fell back to maintain their social contact, and because the Ibogaine effect was wearing off."
The problem was that after treating people who lived in Rotterdam, Utrecht and Amsterdam, Geerte would have to take several train trips just to get the focus group together to talk. Some didn't even have phones. When she finally lost the war with the smack dealer, she realized it couldn't just be her, Nico and Josien doing the treatments. It had to be on the clinical level, by re-habs who could follow through with employment, housing, support groups, everything. Or the underground movement would have to grow--which it wasn't doing because all the people who were treated just wanted to get on with their lives where they'd left off when they became addicted.
A lot of things happened fast right after Nico got treated--the snowball effect. After Josien got treated, she, Nico and Geerte went to see Professor Dzoljic, who was the first to experiment in rats with Ibogaine and morphine self-administration. Dzo ljic was interested in the activities of the treatment group, but not involved in the actual treatments.
Then, after Hi-Res succeeded in getting one small town newspaper to publish a story about Ibogaine, Charlie Kaplan was fired as head of the Addiction Research Center at Erasmus Universtiy. Charlie was the one who got Sisko and Nico to connect, but he never officially witnessed a treatment. However, he made the mistake in answering questions from this reporter about his involvement without proper clearance. The headline said A Cure For Addiction. But when they called Erasmus University and asked ab out one of their professors being associated with these treatments, Erasmus didn't want to be held responsible, so they dissociated themselves and fired Charlie.
So Nico's boss was fired. It was the middle of the summer. Nico started to put all Geerte's focus group data in his personal computer. Charlie did manage to get a German scientific researcher involved, doing a project for a thesis, and because she was genuinely interested in junkies. Nico really wanted to start a whole new life--without junkies--but he didn't because his field researcher job was well-paying. Just before she left for New York, Geerte's best friend died on the operating table of dir ty needles and bad heroin. She had to take care of his wife.
When she brought the work she'd done on the Hi-Res computer to Nico so he could enter it on the computer at Erasmus, they found they had a basic disagreement--
"What we really have to do is sit down with the drug rehabs and tell them Ibogaine is out there," said Geerte, "so they come foreward with the interest and the money for the next treatments."
Nico did not want the rehabs involved: "If I wanted to be treated, I'd want tobe treated in a situation like we treated out friends in--in a house, treated by ex-junkies, not by some doctor in a clinical situation."
"I agree that should be happening," said Geerte, "but it also should behappening on a bigger level. We can't treat thousands of people. They can. We should be working on two levels instead of one."
"I don't believe in clinical settings," Nico told her. "We should keep the ritual involved with it.."
Geerte agreed on some level, and sought consensus-- "We could train the rehabs."
"No." Nico insisted. "If you haven't had the Ibogaine experience, you can't know how to treat other people, becaue you don't know what they're going through. You're going to doctors with all these inputs connected to you. They're going to hook you up with all these machines, all kinds of experiments."
Nico did two more treatments--the couple from the Rotterdam Central Station--just when Sisko was treating some one else in another part of Rotterdam, so there were three treatments going on at once, with available paraclinicians completely overstretch ed. This woman at Nico's couldn't sleep and he didn't give her any sedatives. She was up for three or four days in a row, totally psychotic. Nico went out to get a doctor on a bicycle. He didn't even have a phone. He didn't come back for a whole day, whi ch totally exasperated Sisko.
Sisko concluded that if Nico--who was already refusing to bring in the drug re-habs, or share data on any of the Dutch treatments--wouldn't cooperate with Sisko in doing treatments, he would cut off Nico's supply of Ibogaine.
This episode, when Geerte heard about it in New York, convinced her treatments must be done by a team, since no one person can really understand a personality. "You have to do it as a group, and not do a treatment here and there at the same time. Nico should have kept working with Sisko, but Sisko cut Nico off, and from that moment on, nothing happened, the whole year I was in New York, from Sept. '90 to June, 1991.
"In June, 1991, I walked back into Nico's house and asked-- where's my data, where's my computer work? Turns out the guy has done hardly anything, hasn't set up the focus groups, hasn't kept up any of the people we treated. He's sitting there talking about going to big annual international conferences to talk about Ibogaine, going to Zurich, to needle park..."
"I don't want to hang out with the junkie scene any more," Nico was saying. "I just want to treat addicts"
"This is not the right attitude," Geerte interjected. "I'm sorry, but I'm not going to work with you if you're in this state of mind." Geerte was living at Nico and Josien's house with Adam, her new boyfriend from New York. Adam was a member of the New York band Missing Foundation. As soon as they got to Holland they got to be junkies again with three weeks because the Dutch smack was so intense. Finally Geerte sat down with Nico and sighed--
"I don't want be a junkie again, I'm sick of it." And Nico said, "I was cleaning my bookshelf and I found three doses of Ibogaine behind the books."
"What?" asked Geerte. And Nico was introducing this guy, and saying "I want to treat this dude from the train station...," when Geerte broke in-- "You fucking asshole! Why don't you treat me? I'm the one putting all the years of work into this project , and I'm the one hooked again, and I want another treatment!"
Adam wanted to be treated as well, so eventually Nico agreed to treat both of them. "I actually started crying right before I took the capsules because I knew..." mused Geerte. "This time, knowing I was about to go through this experience. was a pret ty heavy duty decision. The first time you don't know what's going to happen. But the second time you do--which is more difficult. This time I didn't resist the effects, and Nico really helped me. I took it and in half an hour it started working. I lay do wn on my bed and started tripping immediately. The climax is about four hours after you take it. I think I fainted in the middle of my climax. Adam was treated two days before me, and he did very well. It was July, 1991."
The disagreement with Nico persisted. Adam and Geerte had to move into their own place in Rotterdam. They founded DASH--Dutch Addict Self-Help. Theystarted going to all the rehabs in Holland, telling them about Ibogaine. Geerte. mailed out Ibogaine pa ckets. But the reaction was pretty lame.
Adam and Geerte got married. Their honeymoon was the Drug Policy Foundation conference in November, 1991. There they met Eric Fromberg, from the Netherlands Institute on Drug and Alcohol Abuse. They started talking Dutch. He wanted to find out more ab out Ibogaine. When Geerte and Adam went back to Holland, she looked up Fromberg.
"You should help introduce Ibogaine to Dutch scientists, and to the rehabs," she told him.
"I'll only do it if I see some treatments," said Fromberg.
Geerte told Howard, "I have to do some treatments." He said, "Okay, four treatments on the way."
While they were waiting for Howard to arrive, Geerte and Adam went to Berlin, to the European Interest Group of Drug Users, the conference of the junkie unions in Europe. It was January, 1992, and they were discussing human rights for HIV-infected add icts. Geerte and Adam went around telling all the junkiebonds ofEurope about Ibogaine, and most of them responded, "So what? We don't want to get treated. We want free heroin and methadone."
"One of the only ones who picked up on Ibogaine," Geerte continued, "was the organizer of the conference, Herman, who was HIV positive. We wanted ibogaine to be one of their projects, but only Herman supported it, and they wouldn't elect me to anythin g. At the end of the conference, Herman publicly said he would promote Ibogaine. We came back and we thought-- 'If the junkiebonds won't do it, we'll have to work harder than ever, and DASH will be on its own!'" Geerte and Adam went ahead and turned their house into a clinic.
"I was in the middle of an art show when the treatments took place, in early April. Things were very hectic. I had sleep spaces set up for Howard and Norma. I had three treatment rooms--rooms for doctors and everything." DASH supplied two people for t reatment, Lanna and Grinnato. Howard and Norma brought a 19 year old male crackhead who couldn't stop touching the cold sores on his face, and Carol Baker, an HIV positive woman dually-addicted to methadone and heroin.
The treatments went off without a hitch, with Fromberg present throughout, along with two people from Dutch treatment groups and two doctors and Professor Bastiaans. This time the doctors who were there had authorizations from their respective institu tions to be there. They saw the aftereffects, that these people were actually cleaned out.122
"Grinato was a second-timer," said Geerte. "His case was the most successful because he was very motivated. He loved his experience."
Geerte went back to New York soon afterwards. Before she had gone to Holland, she had been forced out of Umbrella House, which she started, as a suspected junkie. The same Lower East Side anarchists who earlier engineered the big split to keep the mar ijuana movement from supporting Ibogaine even broke into Geerte's space to see if they could find bags of dope. She couldn't get her apartment back from Seth Tobocman, who held on to it as a studio while he lived in his own, rented, apartment.
Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, Nico found out he's HIV positive, and decided to take more responsibility for the project, according to Howard and Sisko. Nico has started involving Ibogaine in his work at the University.
The next move is for Fromberg to do treatments on 10 methadone addicts, but he has to first inform the government and get funding. Said Geerte, of the doctors who have witnessed treatments in Holland: "All three of them are scientific witnesses that i t works. That's what you need. You can't be a junkie or an ex-junkie, because people won't take you seriously. But they take doctors seriously. Now we need the money to do and track ten treatments, and fight the Dutch bureaucracy."
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