"The Tabernanthe iboga plant grows in the rainforests of Gabon. It's a leafy green shrub with fruits that look not unlike fat, orange jalapeño peppers, but it's the bark of the root from which you extract ibogaine. For centuries it has been used to induce visions in participants in the bwiti ceremony, a traditional, days-long tribal coming-of-age ritual where hallucinogenic visions are understood as a death and rebirth. They believe that iboga enables them to commune with their ancestors (bwiti is roughly translated as ancestor). According to the Global Ibogaine Therapy Alliance, which publishes research and information on ibogaine, this ancestor worship by Gabonese tribes holds that by learning the language of the spirits of things it is possible to communicate with God. In the mid-1800s researchers brought a specimen back to France and, 60 years on, ibogaine was being marketed there under the name Lambarène for use as a stimulant. In 1985 a man called Howard Lotsof was awarded the first US patent for its use in treating opioid addiction – two decades earlier Lotsof had himself been an addict when he'd first tried ibogaine. “The next thing I knew,” he told the New York Times in 1994, “I was straight.” But it remained banned in the US even as, by the late 1990s, it was being touted on the nascent internet as a miracle drug for opioid addicts."