It is one thing to enjoy a beer or a smoke every now and again for fun, with restraint, or even to use certain healing herbs regularly because of an underlying health condition. But it is an entirely different thing to use potentially addictive substances when you don't actually need them, which can result in the formation of an addiction.
A person can become addicted to just about anything, including refined sugar and video games, as well as the more common vices like alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs. And the good news, according to Dr. Deborah Mash from DemeRx.com, is that there is hope.
Dr. Mash spoke with the Health Ranger in a recent episode of the Health Ranger Report about addiction, and how a naturally derived molecule known as ibogaine is helping people to overcome it without the need for conventional pharmaceutical interventions.
As we reported, ibogaine comes from an African psychedelic plant, bearing dissociative and oneiric properties that function as anti-addictive mechanisms in the body.
An NIH-funded (National Institutes of Health) investigator, Dr. Mash has an extensive understanding of ibogaine. Watch and listen below as she tells all about how ibogaine is changing lives by helping people to naturally overcome their addictions, whatever they may be.
"In the 1990s, I heard about a molecule that came from Africa, from Mother Nature – and it's very interesting, when you think about addiction and addicting alkaloids, they come from Mother Nature too," Dr. Mash explained about how she first discovered ibogaine.
"Cocaine, nicotine, opium – Mother Nature gives us those. And here's another molecule that comes from Western equatorial Africa that may be an antidote to addiction. And indeed, there is open-label evidence that supports this idea that ibogaine can be an addiction interrupter.
Ibogaine can help with all forms of addiction
Hailing from the deep forests of Gabon and Cameroon, ibogaine has more than 100 years of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology behind it. Long before the advent of pharmaceutical drugs, ibogaine was used naturally in traditional medicine for this very purpose.
Keep in mind that most pharmaceutical drugs come from natural plants as well. They are the unnatural, patented versions of Mother Nature that generate billions of dollars in profits for drug companies – but often at a major cost to society in the form of addiction.
For the most part, natural substances, including those from which drugs like cocaine and heroin are derived, do not bear the same addictive properties as their synthesized counterparts. But most people who end up getting addicted to drugs encounter the synthetic varieties, which often leads to addiction.
There are some natural substances, i.e., tobacco, that science tells us are inherently addictive in their natural form as well. They, too, stand to benefit from the use of ibogaine.
In order for it to go mainstream, ibogaine is currently in the pipeline for its own synthesis and eventual FDA (Food and Drug Administration) approval, which the Health Ranger says is a good thing because it will help to ensure that people with addictions get the help they need in a reliable, high-quality dose every single time.
"You want quality control; you want standardized doses; you want efficacy testing; and you want to be able to reach all the distribution that is recognized by the medical establishment to reach addicted people and also potentially allow insurance to cover this because it's a good investment to get people off addictive drugs and bring them back to society," the Health Ranger stated during the interview.
More related news coverage can be found at Addiction.news.
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