Clayton Smith was ready to die.
Like all soldiers, the former U.S. Army Captain accepted the reality of losing his life on the battlefield. But preparing for death at home was different. Despite a good job and a loving wife, Smith hurt immensely. He had tried everything to stop the pain, but everything failed. Only one thing stood between him and suicide: a final gamble on a psychedelic called ibogaine.
“I was convinced this wasn’t going to work because I’m so goddamn special and unique. My preconceived notion was that I’d done everything possible to heal myself already, so nothing was ever going to work,” he said. “It’s not that I wanted to die, but I was prepared to die. I even wrote a letter in case I were to die in there… I was going to try [ibogaine] because then I could say, ‘This shit doesn’t work. It’s bullshit. I can go kill myself now.’”
PTSD and alcoholism eroded Smith’s mental well-being and threatened his marriage, leaving him stuck in a joyless life. Those struggles are far from unique. According to the VA, 31% of recent veterans have a confirmed mental diagnosis, though the real number is likely higher. For those who don’t find benefits through traditional channels, ibogaine offers hope.
Research confirms the substance, found in the African iboga shrub, can heal traumatic brain injuries, break addictions, and reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression. Although it is rated as a Schedule I substance in the U.S., a fledgling industry has developed in Latin America and Europe to provide ibogaine treatments to foreigners, with many clinics offering programs designed specifically for American veterans. While it’s often effective, it’s no easy sell. For many of our nation’s bravest, confronting personal truth is scarier than any battlefield.
Ibogaine trips often leave veterans forever changed. But while the results are well documented, it’s rare to hear about how those changes come about.
The War at Home
Gabriel Estremera spent five years in the Marine Corps, attaining the rank of sergeant and serving a tour in Afghanistan in 2013. But the transition to civilian life sent him to the hurt locker. Month by month, his mental state decayed until he could barely focus.
“I had a lot of head fog. You know when you’re trying to log in and you get that six-digit verification number? The two seconds when I would switch away from that, I couldn’t remember it,” he said.
Realizing that he couldn’t operate effectively as a father, husband, and employee, Estremera set out to fix himself. He started with exercise, then testosterone replacement therapy, but nothing worked. He was staunchly against talk therapy, but desperate for help. When he heard about ibogaine from a podcast, something clicked. He realized concussions from youth football might be partially responsible for his troubles and hoped ibogaine would heal his brain. Not long after learning about the substance, he was lying in a clinic in Mexico with an IV in his arm and a bucket by his bed to catch vomit.
“The experience was very childlike. Have you seen the Disney movie “Soul”? Those little souls that were really playful, they showed up as guides in my journey,” he said.
His trip felt like watching a movie about his life, and he could control it. But after hours of fast-forwarding through unpleasant memories, he came to a scene too persistent to ignore.
“I was back in my third-grade classroom, where everything started. That’s when my teacher called me stupid in front of the whole class. My mom told me from that point on, everything was average. I stopped performing, stopped caring,” he recalled. “But my soul guides were cheerful and looking at my teacher, and before she even can open her mouth, she starts to spin and just imploded and disappeared. I realized later through journaling what happened: that moment was no longer alive in me. That killed it.”
Although he hadn’t gone through classes or a program, the experience changed him.
“I call ibogaine my switch. It was like a whole backup power source got turned on. There were suddenly new connections in my brain, and I knew I was all right. When I went back to work, I wasn’t losing track of the conversation. I was focused there. I could do eye contact. I was locked in,” he said. “Ibogaine was more of a mental clearing and healing, whereas ayahuasca was heart clearing and healing for me, very spiritual.”
The improvement lasted for months, until Estremera took a sip of alcohol and “felt it turn off.” Knowing the potential of psychedelics, Estremera decided to try again. This time, he went with ayahuasca (and did the prep work). The experience left him changed. He quit his work with solar panels to work as a life coach and entheogenic integration coach, helping others to get the most out of psychedelic experiences.
“Definitely do your research on what medicines do. Yes, it all sounds great, cool, like ‘I wanna go try it,’ but there’s a lot you have to commit to personally,” he said. “A lot of veterans are not ready to let go of their story. They embody the trauma so much that [ibogaine] is such a huge change; they have to sit with it for a while. We all want to be free of our wounds, but if your wounds have been your identity for so long, you don’t know who you’re going to become, who you’re going to be, if it’s gone. It’s like ‘Am I going to be a whole new person whom I don’t know?’ Yes, but no. You are, but in a good way.”
Hatred and Forgiveness
Where Estremera found his own way, Smith followed procedure. The former Army Ranger and Purple Heart recipient dried himself out and took every class offered at Beond Ibogaine. He was given a large dose and monitored by a nurse for 12 hours while he tripped.
“I had an expectation that I was going to be in the upside down from Stranger Things, trapped and chased by all the demons of the things I’d done wrong. But instead I was shown that I can love myself, that I’m worthy of love,” he said. “I realized I’d spent 36 years knowing what love was intellectually but never letting myself feel it. Ibogaine showed me I was worthy of love.”
Smith and Estremera claimed their service didn’t cause their mental health troubles, but exacerbated them. And while they had positive experiences, both insist that long-term change requires more than a one-time dose.
“I still think about alcohol almost daily. I still don’t know if I’m an alcoholic or if I’m a recovering alcoholic, but I know I’m not a practicing alcoholic,” Smith said. “And I can tell you what the last 16 months of my life have unequivocally been the best 16 months of my life. And I can say, without a doubt, that there’s nothing that happened in the last 16 months that I feel would’ve been made better with alcohol, and because of that, I’ve decided there’s no reason to experiment. Ibogaine, it doesn’t cure addiction. But it allows you to see a different path.”
Smith’s program at the clinic included three doses of ibogaine spread out over a few days. Every trip, he said, imparted different knowledge.
“It’s not a recreational experience. It’s a deeply therapeutic experience, but there’s not much recreational about it,” Smith said. “There’s an oral tradition of the Bwiti tribe that says it’s the only plant medicine that has a masculine and a feminine spirit, and I totally believe that. My first sitting was deeply feminine. It hugged me and loved me and gave me the support that I had always sought. My second experience, I went in thinking it would be a batch of the greatest experience in my life—but it was much more masculine. It had a grandfatherly attitude. It sat me down and was like, ‘All right, boy, it’s time to learn.”
“The theme of that second time was forgiveness,” he added. “I knew I had to forgive the person I hated most in the world, and so I started flipping through a Rolodex of names and people and faces, thinking about who did I wrong the most? Ibogaine is like a truth serum, so you can’t bullshit yourself. Eventually, my Rolodex landed on me, and it was like ‘Ohhh, I’m the person I hate most in the world. Well, all I have to do now is forgive myself, and that’s easy.’ So I kept trying to do it, saying, ‘I forgive you, man. You were young and you were lost and you made mistakes,’ but the medicine was like, ‘Nope!’ It wouldn’t let me out. And then, after about three hours, I came to a place where I had my heart forgive my ego, and I had a moment where I actually forgave myself for what I did to hurt my wife. And within 30 seconds of that, the nurse squeezed my shoulder and told me that my heart rate was low enough that I could leave the treatment room, that I could leave whenever I wanted.”
Did you know Texas recently launched the largest publicly-funded psychedelic research initiative on ibogaine? Read our article on it HERE.
