As awareness grows around the dangers of head trauma in sports, a small number of professional fighters and football players are turning to a psychedelic called ibogaine for treatment.
Ibogaine, which is derived from a West African shrub, is a Schedule 1 drug in America with no legal medical uses, and experts urge caution because of the need for further studies. But the results, several athletes say, are “game-changing.”
“It saved my life,” said former NFL offensive guard Robert Gallery, who traveled to Mexico in 2023 to try ibogaine.
“I’m not anxious all the time, I’m not depressed,” he continued, “I can go for a run and be thankful that I’m alive, rather than having a thought that I should step in front of a semi-truck coming down the road.”
The psychedelic substance is derived from the iboga plant, and proponents tout its ability to treat addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, or TBI.
An observational study of 30 special forces veterans by researchers at Stanford University suggests that ibogaine can be highly effective at reducing anxiety, depression and cognitive challenges associated with TBI.
“This is a miraculous thing,” said retired MMA fighter Tait Fletcher, who credits the treatment with freeing him from suicidal ideation.
NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre even tried ibogaine to see if it could help his Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disease linked to TBI.
Although athletes are just discovering ibogaine, the drug is well known within the veteran community, which experiences high rates of brain injury and PTSD.
In Stanford’s study on the effects of ibogaine on special forces veterans, participants saw average reductions of 88% in PTSD symptoms, 87% in depression symptoms and 81% in anxiety symptoms. They also exhibited improvements in concentration, information processing and memory.
“No other drug has ever been able to alleviate the functional and neuropsychiatric symptoms of traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Nolan Williams, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said in a statement on the results. “The results are dramatic, and we intend to study this compound further.”
To receive federal approval, ibogaine would need to pass through multiple phases of clinical trials at the Food and Drug Administration and be moved by the Drug Enforcement Administration to a less restrictive drug category.
Schedule 1 drugs are considered to have no federally accepted medical use, a high potential for abuse and a lack of accepted safety. They also include psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and marijuana.
States can work faster than the federal government by carving out exemptions for supervised ibogaine therapy programs, similar to what Oregon has done with psilocybin therapy. Many states have also opted to legalize marijuana for medicinal or recreational use.
Study co-author Dr. Ian Kratter said researchers have reported that ibogaine may stimulate brain healing by causing an increase in certain neurotrophic factors.
“These factors signal for enhanced brain cell survival and synaptic plasticity, which is the ability for brain cells to modify the strength of their connections or even form new connections,” said Kratter, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This might facilitate a healing and recovery process after an injury.”
Dr. Kevin Bickart, a UCLA neurology professor who specializes in brain injury in athletes, said that the Stanford study is “remarkably promising” and that it is reasonable to believe professional athletes could experience similar results.
“This group [veterans] is a strong analogue for retired professional athletes from high-contact sports like football or hockey who are now dealing with persistent cognitive and emotional difficulties,” he said.
Dr. Ramon Diaz-Arrastia, director of Penn Medicine’s TBI research center, said that ibogaine is “one of the more promising compounds” for treatment of TBI.
However, Bickart, Diaz-Arrastia and the Stanford researchers all emphasized the need for larger, randomized controlled trials demonstrating a strong therapeutic benefit and safety profile prior to the treatment being used in America.
They also highlighted the fact that ibogaine can cause heart problems such as cardiac arrhythmia and needs to be administered under strict medical supervision. In the Stanford study, cardiac monitoring and magnesium were used to mitigate this danger, and researchers reported that no participants experienced adverse cardiac effects.
Gallery heard about ibogaine when listening to a podcast about veterans whose struggles resonated with his own. He was at the end of his rope and willing to try anything to free himself from dark thoughts and the ringing noise inside his head.
“It was kind of a last-ditch hope for me,” he said. “I was just at that place of needing the noise and the thoughts to stop.”
Gallery’s doctor believes he likely developed CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy) as a result of repeated brain injuries during his eight seasons in the NFL. CTE, which can only be diagnosed after death, is a severe neurodegenerative disease that can cause dementia, violent mood swings, loss of motor control and depression.
Many famous athletes who committed suicide were later determined to have CTE, including New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau and Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson.
Fletcher, the former MMA fighter who is also an actor and stunt artist, heard about ibogaine through his Navy SEAL friends.
He had experienced many concussions during his fighting career, but it was head trauma during a stunt gone wrong in 2019 that pushed him over the edge and into an extremely dark place.
The following morning he woke up in a state of terror. He didn’t know how to pack his bags or get out of the hotel room he had been staying in for the shoot.
Fletcher spent the next year in near-total seclusion, largely unable to leave his house due to light and sound sensitivity. Like Gallery, he tried many conventional and experimental therapies, but nothing compared with the relief that ibogaine brought him in 2023.
“We’re putting Band-Aids on problems through pharmacology,” he said. “This [ibogaine] is a thing that I watched just set people free. Nothing short of that.”
Keith Jardine, a former UFC fighter, was inspired by Fletcher’s story and traveled to Mexico to receive treatment himself. Retired hockey player Ales Hemsky credits ibogaine with helping free him of the substance use and alcohol dependency that he struggled with after his 16-year career in the NHL.
“It’s been seven months now I haven’t had a sip of alcohol,” he said. “It’s life-changing. It really restarts your brain. It gives you a new path.”
Fletcher has seen the darkness brain injury brings to athletes and the light ibogaine provides. He wants both to be part of a bigger conversation in the professional sports world.
“I wish that these big organizations were looking into these things differently, because you could elongate careers and elongate lives,” he said. “And ibogaine is certainly a part of that conversation.”
Favre also wants to see more attention brought to speeding up medical trials of new treatments for brain injury and related conditions. After taking ibogaine, his Parkinson’s symptoms disappeared for three days before gradually returning, he said.
“I’m not disappointed by anything. I’m more excited about the opportunity knowing that I could do it again,” he said. “I’m hoping that this [conversation] helps open the door for not just ibogaine or psychedelic drugs, but just medication or treatments in general that can help people.”
Bickart said there is a major gap in effective, approved treatments for the persistent symptoms of brain injury.
“This leaves many, including veterans and potentially former athletes, without reliable solutions for ongoing disability, cognitive difficulties, and psychiatric conditions like PTSD, depression, and anxiety that can stem from head injuries,” he said.
Inspired by his own experience with ibogaine, Gallery co-founded a nonprofit called Athletes for Care to educate athletes with TBI on treatment options and advocate for research into psychedelic-assisted therapies.
“The sports community is not very good about talking about mental health,” he said. “Seeing the veterans take charge and take care of their community, I want to do that for the sports community and for my friends that I know that are out there suffering.”
Gallery, Favre, Hemsky, Fletcher and Jardine are among around a dozen retired contact-sports athletes who have received treatment at the Ambio Life Sciences clinic in Tijuana, which is a popular destination for ibogaine therapy.
Since opening in 2021, Ambio reports administering ibogaine to more than 3,000 patients, including 1,000 military veterans.
Diaz-Arrastia, the Penn Medicine professor, said he would not advise that Americans order ibogaine online or travel outside the country for treatment, as it remains unregulated, with limited research. Bickart, the UCLA professor, echoed these concerns, noting that the most critical caution is safety.
“People should be wary of any unregulated treatments, as the purity dosage and presence of contaminants are often unknown,” Bickart said. “The placebo effect can also be very powerful, especially for treatments that require significant effort and cost.”
Ambio, the clinic that Stanford researchers worked with for their observational study on ibogaine, stressed its safety protocols during treatment, including close monitoring of dosage and patients’ cardiac health.
There is growing political and scientific momentum in America for more clinical research of ibogaine.
In June, Texas approved a historic $50-million investment in state funding to support drug development trials for ibogaine, inspired by the results seen by veterans.
Arizona legislators approved $5 million in state funding for a clinical study on ibogaine in March, and California legislators are pushing to fast-track the study of ibogaine and other psychedelics.
“Honestly, I’m amazed to see how much interest there is in ibogaine now,” said Ambio co-founder Jonathan Dickinson. “We’re starting to see things that we would have thought were unimaginable several years ago.”
The post NFL and UFC athletes try ‘game-changing’ psychedelic to treat brain injury appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
