Meryl Horne

So Paul's team just tweaked it slightly and made something else called nor-Ibogaine, which is what your body turns Ibogaine into as it breaks down the chemical.

Okay, so they got their norabagain, they recruited 27 people who were addicted to opioids, and they were on methadone, which they weaned off before they started the trial, and they brought them into a hospital.

So imagine a big room with a bunch of beds.

And it was really easy for them to do this because there are these telltale signs that someone's gone into withdrawal.

Yes, yes, nor-Ibogaine.

Basically, except they also try a bunch of different doses because they're trying to look for, okay, as they're also monitoring their hearts, how high up can we go before we start to see bad things start to happen to the heart?

So now he can check, okay, at the highest dose they could give was safe, what happened to the withdrawal symptoms?

Got it.

And so he tried these different doses and he could see this heart problem getting worse and worse, the higher and higher the dose they gave.

Right.

And so they had to stop at a pretty low dose.

And he checked to see, did it help?

Did people's withdrawal symptoms get any better compared to the placebo?

Yeah.

And Paul knew, based on what other drugs have been approved, that with those effects that they were seeing, there's no way a drug that was having those effects on the heart would ever fly.

Yeah.

It is kind of a bummer, huh?

Yeah, we'll see.

And I did find one other small trial, placebo-controlled trial, looking at Ibogaine.

And when I first saw that one, I was like, oh, this is great because they found that it was really working for people.