The ENDABUSE Report Video on Ibogaine - Part 1 of 6

In 1994 Howard and Norma Lotsof and I decided to produce a corporate video on the status of NDA International's patents involving the ENDABUSE Procedure using Ibogaine Hydrochloride in the treatment of addictive chemical dependency disorders. The result was a 56 minute video that featured Howard as NDA president, scientists that presented ethnobotanical research (BeLinda Hayes, PhD) and animal studies (Patrica Broderick, Phd; Stanley Glick, MD and M.R. Dzoljic, PhD, MD) to the Food and Drug Administration, 6 addicts who were treated with ibogaine, social workers Rommell Washington and Barbara Judd, and a doctor who observed patients using the ENDABUSE Procedure (tm).




Part 1 of this 6 video series features the scientists who performed animal studies. Future videos will focus on testimonials from addicts and those who work with them.

Howard, Norma and I met as film students at New York University in 1973. It was a natural for us to document the early history of this project. I shot all the footage with Howard's assistance on lighting and Howard, Norma and I spent days in the editing room with a NewTek Video Toaster system painstakingly constructing each edit on a linear editing system using 2 VCRs. Although primitive compared to non-linear computer video editing systems today, we made do with what we had and put together the very first comprehensive video documenting the science of ibogaine combined with addict, social worker, and medical testimonials on its efficacy.

Since 1994, The ENDABUSE Report video has been shown at conferences all over the world to scientists, lay-people, organizers, and addicts. Dana Beal has ripped off parts without my permission for use in his own ibogaine videos (Dana is a friend, so I'm okay with this. He just never asked me for my okay).

This video has to be viewed in the context of history. In 1994 Howard Lotsof was still considered by the medical and 99.9% of the scientific community to be an ex-addict crackpot with unsubstantiated and ridiculous, laughable claims for a Schedule 1 illegal hallucinogen derived from the root of an African shrub that indigenous peoples have been using for centuries.

Nobody outside of a handful (counted on one hand) of scientific researchers and a very few of the addict community believed anything Howard had to say. To the medical, pharma-industrial complex, and our government, why should they believe a word of what this lay person and a bunch of outcast drug addicts were saying? Who the hell cares about society's lepers and this whining, pain-in-the-ass, ex-addict who just wouldn't shut up about ibo-who? Who did he think he was, anyway?

Fourteen years later over 300 scientific papers have been published on ibogaine. Ken Alper, MD, of NYU Medical Center estimates over 4,000 addicts have been successfully treated in mostly non-clinical settings using ibogaine to eliminate narcotic withdrawal and reduce drugs cravings from weeks to months to years. The U.S. government and your friendly neighborhood pharmaceutical conglomerates with tens of billions in profits each year continue to ignore ibogaine and millions of addicts around the world and choose to focus on drugs to maintain male erections (sorry for the dig, I know they manufacture a lot of very important drugs to treat diseases and help people like you and me).

Enough of my ranting! Thank goodness for blogs so people like me can rant and chill out in my spare time when I should be watching the tube.

BTW - I apologize for the quality of this video. The original was shot and edited on S-VHS; only a VHS dub could be found at this time to be digitized. I'm still in the process of locating the S-VHS edit master and hope to re-post a higher quality excerpt in the future.

In the meantime, please sit back, pull on some good squeeze, and enjoy.