The Bwiti tradition and the long road from initiation rite to clinical compound
Iboga has been used ceremonially by the Bwiti of Gabon for at least two centuries. Western pharmacology's encounter with it began in the late nineteenth century — and reframed it in ways the originating tradition did not.
The root bark of Tabernanthe iboga has been central to Bwiti spiritual practice in Gabon and neighboring regions for at least two hundred years, used in initiation ceremonies and in ongoing community ritual. The plant's place in this tradition is not as a treatment but as a sacrament.
French colonial pharmacologists isolated ibogaine in 1901, and by the mid-twentieth century the compound was being sold in France under the trade name Lambarène as a stimulant. It was withdrawn from the market in 1966.
The contemporary framing of ibogaine as an addiction interruption agent emerged largely from the observations of Howard Lotsof in 1962, whose accounts of his own and others' experiences set the agenda for the next several decades of research. Whether that framing fully accounts for the compound's effects, or whether it imports assumptions foreign to the originating tradition, remains an open question in medical anthropology.