Kentucky’s $42m Ibogaine Funding Appears Dead in the Water

The seed was planted when Hubbard stumbled upon a Substack column by Julia Christina in 2021. The newsletter, called The Journey, has just over a few thousand subscribers, according to the platform, and charts Christina’s personal struggles with anxiety, depression and an eating disorder; and the role that she believes psychedelics played in addressing these ailments.Aside from chronicling the apparent therapeutic effects of psychedelics, Hubbard notes that Christina “also explains how her plant medicine experiences created and affirmed her concrete knowledge of the existence of a Higher Power whose essence is pure, unconditional love”, adding, “I was moved by her life’s story.”Following his appointment to the KYOAAC, Hubbard says he reached out to Christina to schedule a phone call, which took place on July 29, 2022. It was here, according to Hubbard, that he heard the word “ibogaine” for the first time.From there, Hubbard says Christina connected him with others who had interest and/or experience in ibogaine.When asked by Adriana Kertzer—a lawyer who practices in the psychedelic space—who he might wish to be put in touch with, Hubbard “advised her that I was completely ignorant of the subject matter and couldn’t begin to name any specific individuals.”Hubbard agreed to visit Kertzer’s home in New York City to attend a gathering of individuals and discuss ibogaine’s “potential relevance to Kentucky’s opioid epidemic.” (In the letter seen by Psychedelic Alpha, Hubbard is keen to note that he committed to attending the meeting “on my personal time and dime, even though it presented substantial risks.”)And so, in December 2022, Hubbard and his wife travelled to Kertzer’s home in New York where he met “researchers, philanthropists, and the leaders of U.S. military veteran organizations whose collective mission is to make plant medicines legally available and accessible to everyone who wishes to benefit”, he said in his letter.Hubbard recalls receiving “commitments from all attendees to supply whatever informational resources and contacts I may need to decide whether to present ibogaine as Kentucky’s ‘Manhattan Project Opportunity’.” Those attendees, he says, came through; supplying him with “an immense trove of research and informational resources to make an informed judgement as to ibogaine’s legitimacy as a potential breakthrough treatment for opioid dependence.”“For over a month, I worked a second, off-the-books, after-hours, full-time job-consuming academic research and knowledge from dozens of individual sources to make a measured and informed determination”, he says.This, Hubbard writes, led him to four conclusions, or “consistent realities” as he calls them.The first is that opioid dependence is a “neurochemical brain injury that shuts down dopamine and serotonin production”. Those two neurotransmitters, according to Hubbard, “drive all baseline human survival behaviors which encompass the hardwired instincts to eat, drink, and procreate.”His second conclusion is that “ibogaine clears the brain’s opioid receptors and restores its natural production of dopamine and serotonin”, and his third is that individuals who receive ibogaine treatment “report the acquisition of individual autonomy”.His fourth “consistent reality” is that “[p]eople who receive ibogaine treatment report receiving absolute affirmation of their individual divinity as spiritual beings who are connected to and loved by a Higher Power”. “The transformative power of this affirmation”, which he describes as “Divinely Engineered power” later in the letter, “is perhaps the most potent and compelling ibogaine attribute.”All of this leads Hubbard to believe that ibogaine “may be the most advanced neurotherapeutic medication ever discovered.”



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