This is an astonishing item. It is the first real hope for a
therapeutic protocol that succeeds in resolving addictive behavior.
Of course it is controversial but what we have here is specific and
dramatic improvement and are relapses easily overcome.
What has been poorly understood is that modern empiricism is
revolutionizing the practice of medicine. By modern empiricism I mean
internet assisted empiricism that nicely dispenses with professional
science and prods data to discover fresh data. That is much of what
we now do here.
All empirical results now attract a community of interest that allows
a new participant to investigate and test it himself. Science itself
kicks in formally once a body of evidence supports that level of
investment.
One aspect of medicine is often forgotten at any point in time, a
given ailment has a finite number of victims. Severe addiction on
its own has a small subculture that has been isolated generally.
This allows it to be ignored.
What this means is that a successful resolution can be applied
directly to this subculture and ninety percent of the real problem
disappears. The rest then lose opportunity and also use the same
exit as it becomes obvious they must. For them generally the real
problem is denial. AA's success comes from overcoming that problem.
Ancient traditions
get new life
Plant-based drugs win
accolades as treatments for substance abuse
BY IAN MULGREW,
VANCOUVER SUN NOVEMBER 3, 2012
Cynthia Davidson still
glows at mere mention of ayahuasca, the Amazon plant known to the
Indians as "the vine of the souls."
She says it gave her
back her life. "The experience I had was literally like 10
years of therapy in one night," enthused the 32-year-old
Haida woman, who has struggled with chronic addiction for more than a
decade.
"I went from
cigarettes to drinking to marijuana to snorting cocaine to smoking
rock cocaine, then starting to shoot cocaine and heroin. It all just
escalated. But after I experienced the ayahuasca ...."
She is taken away by a
reverie of the two-night event.
"I was sexually
abused as a child by numerous men and I knew that I always blocked
out from the age of seven and under for a reason," she
explained.
"Doing
ayahuasca, I tell you, the visions that I got were so traumatic that
I didn't want to believe them. But I was also able to deal with them
and fill that void that I was always using drugs to try to fill. That
one huge void was filled. I felt like I was on Cloud 9."
The tea brewed from
the ayahuasca vine and the leaves of a jungle bush opened up her
psyche, Davidson said, and allowed her to deal with those lifelong
secrets that scarred her childhood and left her emotionally crippled.
"I had been in
and out of AA meetings thinking that was the answer for 10 years,"
she said. "I tried various detox and treatment - nothing
worked."
Then her boyfriend and
fellow addict Justin Burggraeve gave her a book - In Search of Hungry
Ghosts, by Vancouver doctor Gabor Maté - which talked about a
radical treatment program involving ayahuasca.
The result of her
participation in that, Davidson said, was "phenomenal."
"Life is great: I
work; I got my eldest (15-year-old) daughter back (from government
custody). From being right down in the gutter to where I am now is
just amazing."
Ayahuasca is just
one of several ancient traditions now attracting attention as western
medicine confronts epidemic-sized populations of people struggling
with substance abuse and post-traumatic stress disorders.
These widespread
ailments cry out for novel approaches given the damage they are doing
to families and communities everywhere.
Vancouver, with
thousands of addicts and a strong counter-culture ethos, is a hub for
experimentation.
...
Like Davidson, many
people are discovering the benefit of plant-based psychedelic
substances such as aya-huasca, psilocybin or ibogaine, a
derivative of the bark of the West African iboga shrub.
These powerful
psychotropics are used to uncover painful memories and, in a
ritualistic setting, spark a catharsis.
As a result of that
unburdening, some learn to understand and control their addictive
behaviours.
But these approaches
are not without controversy and critics question whether such
substances can be incorporated into the western pharmacopoeia.
The criteria for
clinical trials are next to impossible to apply to anything that
can't be accurately measured, quantified and guaranteed to have the
same effects every time you swallow it.
As well, these
substances exist in a kind of grey area, where the active ingredients
are subject to criminal bans but the plants themselves can be
possessed under some circumstances.
A year ago, Health
Canada ordered Maté to stop using ayahuasca to help chronic drug and
alcohol addicts such as Davidson, or face prosecution.
(A documentary on his
work is available at:
A leading thinker on
addiction who was the resident doctor at the Portland Hotel in the
Downtown Eastside, Maté said he no longer does clinical work because
he spends most of his time writing and on speaking tours.
An ibogaine conference
in Vancouver earlier this month was kept private to avoid contention
- the residue of the bad taste left by the uncontrolled use of
psychedelics in the '60s.
As a result of the
clampdown that followed, scientific interest and potential was
squashed too.
The criminal
prohibitions remain in place, research bans only slowly have been
overcome and a sane discussion about the benefits of psychotropics
remains nascent.
Neither Maté nor
anyone else who has worked with these substances holds them out as
panaceas, but say they belong in the basket of solutions needed to
salve some of the most intractable addiction and post-traumatic
disorders - particularly given the remarkable results that have been
reported.
French doctor Jacques
Mabit, for instance, runs a detox centre in the Amazon (Takiwasi or
"The House That Sings") and claims very positive results
with ayahuasca - quadruple the average recovery rate.
...
At the University of
B.C. on the weekend, some two-dozen scholars, scientists and shamans
will speak at the second annual Spirit Plant Medicine Conference to
discuss the latest developments.
(Maté was the keynote
speaker last year, which drew about 250 people:
www.spiritplantmedicine.com).
Andrew Rezmer, a
52-year-old Polish-born engineer who runs www.consciousradio.org
, organized what he
hopes will be an annual gathering.
"Usually the
medical establishment gets together and talks about different
properties of different plants that could be utilized in treating
certain diseases and conditions," Rezmer said.
"It's very
scientific, very expensive and designed mainly for people who are
interested in exploring new therapies - like ibogaine or ayahuasca,
which have been proven up to 93-percent effective in treating
hard-drug addictions."
There is also a
second, "more new-agey," kind of conference involving these
plants, he said.
"These are people
more interested in the psychedelic properties of these plants and
they usually meet in some gathering outside of the city, in nature,"
he explained.
"Each group
usually makes fun of the other. The new-agey people make fun of the
doctors for trying to put aya-huasca in a pill, and the doctors make
fun of the new-agers who don't understand the crisis the medical
community is trying to deal with. We're trying to bridge those two
groups."
He said the rise in
scientific interest has been matched by increased cultural interest
in aboriginal peoples and their traditions.
Iboga, for instance,
is central to the African spiritual traditions of the native people
in Gabon and Cameroon.
Similarly, ayahuasca
is key to the ceremonies of the Brazilian-based Santo Daime syncretic
churches.
"Our kind of
approach is to show how those plants have been used in a ceremonial,
intentional setting not the way, say, cannabis is being used right
now, as recreational escapism," said Rezmer.
A presenter at the
conference, Stephen Gray, the 63-year-old author of Returning to the
Sacred World (www.stephengrayvision.com),
said interest in these substances is "expanding like wildfire."
"In terms of
iboga, there are something like three million adherents to the Bwiti
religion," which celebrates iboga, he said.
The Native American
Church, Gray continued, which uses peyote in some of its rituals, is
growing and now has some 300,000 members. "Ayahuasca shamans are
travelling up and down the coast," Gray said. "I know of a
half-dozen people doing ayahuasca ceremonies. I'm coordinating an
iboga ceremony on the Sunshine Coast."
There are about
two-dozen ibogaine clinics operating under the official radar, too,
he ventured.
"We'd like to see
these substances recognized for what they can do in a whole bunch of
ways, narrowly in a therapeutic context and in a larger context of
bringing a genuine spiritual awakening to people," Gray said.
Jonathan Dickinson,
another presenter and organizer of the recent academic ibogaine
conference, said about 60 people from 14 countries attended the five
days of meetings. "It was quite productive," the
26-year-old advocate for drug-policy change added.
One doctor from
Argentina was doing cocaine-detox with impoverished addicted children
between 10 and 13 years old in the country's slums.
"He wanted to
know how young can you give someone ibogaine? They weren't working
with ibogaine yet, but they're dealing with this incredible problem,"
Dickinson said. "There is only one clinic in Canada (using
ibo-gaine) that I know of."
Dickinson insisted
that the setting and a guide, such as a shaman, are critical whenever
anyone has the draining physical, emotional and spiritual experience
these substances trigger.
"It puts you in
an altered state of awareness and you see things, but they usually
have very deep personal subconscious meaning, the way dreams do. They
have very much the quality of waking dreams."
...
Davidson said that
after reading Maté's book, she was sure ayahuasca would work for
her. As an aboriginal Canadian, she said she identified with a native
rite from South America.
"My dad, being
the addict that he was, became a very spiritual man," she said.
"He's been clean for 24 years now and he does everything
traditionally - he's a ceremonial pipe carrier, he runs sweat lodges,
he does vision quests."
Her boyfriend
Burggraeve decided to take ayahuasca as well.
At 29 years old, he
had been an addict since he was 12.
Like Davidson,
Burggraeve believed he used drugs to numb the pain of a tortured
childhood in London, Ont. He came to B.C. several years ago to escape
his past, met Davidson and the two were soon on the needle.
"We both ended up
homeless very shortly after that," Burggraeve said. "We
basically beat our brains in with drugs for another couple of years.
It was a complete nightmare."
They tried to get
sober. "Nothing worked," he said. "It didn't matter
what we did."
The couple contacted
Maté last year and he invited them on an ayahuasca retreat. Both had
to go on strict diets and come off methadone and other medications.
"It's a lonely
place out there when you're an addict and being in a group setting on
Vancouver Island with a bunch of people who come from where you do is
pretty special," Davidson said.
You don't drink
ayahuasca until it starts to get dark, she explained.
For an hour or so
before, you pray or meditate on "your intention" - what it
is you are going to ask of Mother Ayahuasca, the spirit of the plant,
to reveal. The bitter tea takes about 30 minutes to take effect.
"I saw these
colours flying around me," Burggraeve said.
"We're talking
about a rainbow of colours. I couldn't tell whether they were blue,
yellow, red, white. They were colours I couldn't quite describe
because there isn't a name for them. They started pouring out of my
chest, from where my heart was, and they would surround me and I felt
like I was being hugged by these colours .... All of sudden this
low-life, piece-of-garbage junkie, wasn't a piece of garbage at all;
all of a sudden I'm caring, loving, compassionate, giving, just a
wonderful human being who just happened to have a spiritual hole."
Davidson said she was
similarly overwhelmed but her images involved her abuse.
"The most
traumatic experience of my life became one of the greatest things I
ever could have done for myself," she said.
Both found the
experience transformative.
Davidson has repeated
the experience twice and found it reinforcing. Unlike methadone,
which is used as a replacement drug for addicts, aya-huasca is a kind
of therapy aid used to achieve perspective and free ingrained thought
processes. Burggraeve hasn't done it again.
Burggraeve has held a
job for most of the last year, he said, and couldn't get the time
off.
He, too, "had a
hiccup" recently and relapsed briefly.
"But I get a
little better each day," he insisted. "It's about spiritual
progression not spiritual perfection. Ayahuasca may have been the
most important thing I ever did in my life." Davidson, too,
relapsed.
"But I was able
to pick myself up very quickly whereas before I did aya-huasca, if I
tried to get clean, when I relapsed I would be out there for a couple
of years again. I've only used one time in 14 months."
Both felt there
needed to be followup support; there wasn't.
Davidson hopes to one
day be reunited with all her children. Her 11-year-old daughter lives
with her grandparents by choice, Davidson said, because she doesn't
like the city. Her two youngest (who are six and eight) are with
their dad.
"I went from
living in an SRO (single-room occupancy hotel) down on Hastings for
the last three years to having a one-bedroom apartment and my eldest
daughter back,"she said.
"You can't
imagine what that means."
No comments:
Post a Comment