We launched our Iboga Saves crowdfunder in October 2018 on Indiegogo, then moved to GoFundMe when our non-profit status came through. Our campaign, while garnering a lot of interest, new connections, and offers of support in kind, has raised less than five percent of our funding goal thus far, so we know that we need to step up the game in order to communicate why this is an important film to make, and why we need a high-minded grassroots effort to effect change.

Here’s what we did so far:

We filed awake.net as an educational non-profit (501c3 pending)

We’ve established a presence on social media and published a series of educational blogs

A directory of providers.

Next Steps:

I will be fulfilling perks from Indiegogo in the next couple weeks, thanks for your patience.

There are several podcasts, presentations, and fundraisers in the works, in Seattle, Silicon Valley, San Diego, Santa Cruz, LA, and potentially Vancouver. If you would like to host an Iboga Saves fundraiser dinner in your city for a small group of people, please contact me at and I could bring together an iboga panel presentation to accompany the dinner.

We’re applying for a documentary film grant in February.

Lessons Learned:

In my unabashed enthusiasm for iboga as a solution to the opioid epidemic I thought, surely the ibogaine community will get behind us on this and help us educate the public about Iboga/ibogaine, surely the psychedelic community will enthusiastically support this. Surely people will see how powerful it could be if only we give collective voice to the truth about iboga, about the imminence and importance of ibogaine as a medicine for an epidemic that is a gaping wound in the body politic. Surely, people understand that this is life and death.

But while ibogaine may have cured addiction, it has not cured self-interest and the factionalism of cliques in the rehab, addiction, and ibogaine worlds, and competitive agendas seem to supercede altruistic and communal interests, so my enthusiasm, while still unabashed, is now tempered with a better understanding of the context inside which iboga/ibogaine has failed to find its proper standing in the addiction recovery lexicon for 48 years even though 200 people a day are dying of overdose everyday and there is no other medicine like it.

The story about Iboga is essentially a story about healing not just the addicted individual but healing the social, political and legal environment inside which the wound continues to be perpetuated. Like all true healing, it’s a radical transformation.

Thank you for your attention and support!