Almost everything written about ibogaine is about the session. The dose, the experience, the visions, the hours.
But for most people who come here, the session is a single night near the end of a process that started weeks earlier. The preparation is the part nobody describes, and it is the part that determines whether the treatment is safe and whether it works.
Here is what actually happens before anyone at this clinic receives ibogaine.
First, we need to know exactly what is in your body
Before anything else, we need a complete picture of what you are taking. Not a rough idea. Everything — prescriptions, anything obtained informally, supplements, anything you have been taking daily that you might not think of as a drug.
We also need your medical history, particularly anything cardiac, and any pre-existing condition that could change how your body handles treatment.
People sometimes leave things out, usually from embarrassment. It is worth saying plainly: we are not here to judge what you have been doing, and an incomplete list is genuinely dangerous. Ibogaine interacts with a long list of medications, and the ones people are most reluctant to mention are frequently the ones that matter most.
Medications that conflict with ibogaine come off here, not at home
A number of common medications cannot be safely combined with ibogaine. Several antidepressants and psychiatric medications fall into this category, along with anything else that affects cardiac conduction.
Most clinics handle this by telling you to stop taking them before you arrive.
We don’t, because that instruction quietly fails a lot of people. Coming off a psychiatric medication is not a small thing to do alone, on a deadline, while also preparing to travel to another country for treatment. Some people can’t manage it safely. Others simply don’t, and then arrive with something on board that changes everything.
So we do it here, under medical supervision, as part of your stay. It takes longer. It is also the only version of this that is actually safe, and it means we can treat people who would otherwise have to be turned away.
If you are opioid dependent, we stabilise you first — on an opioid
This is the part that surprises people, so it’s worth explaining properly.
If you arrive dependent on opioids, kratom, or 7-OH, we transition you onto a short-acting opioid — typically oxycodone or morphine, prescribed and administered by our medical team — before ibogaine treatment.
That sounds backwards until you understand the problem it solves.
Long-acting opioids are the obstacle. Methadone has a long and highly variable half-life. Buprenorphine, the active ingredient in Suboxone, binds to opioid receptors with unusual strength and holds on. Ibogaine cannot do its work while those compounds are still occupying the receptors, which means dosing over them either doesn’t work or goes badly.
That leaves two options. Make someone endure days or weeks of withdrawal waiting for a long-acting opioid to clear — which is cruel, medically taxing, and the point at which most people give up and leave. Or bridge them onto something short-acting and predictable, keep them comfortable, and treat from there.
We do the second one.
The same logic applies to kratom and concentrated 7-OH. Those products are unregulated, and potency varies between brands and batches, so we don’t actually know what someone has been taking. Moving to a known pharmaceutical dose means we know precisely what is in your system and precisely when it clears.
How long the bridge takes
This is where honest numbers matter more than reassurance.
Methadone or Suboxone: two to four weeks. These are the longest transitions we do, and there is no way to compress them safely.
Fentanyl: ten days to three weeks. People are often surprised by this, because fentanyl is described as short-acting. That’s true of a single dose. With chronic use it accumulates in body tissue and releases slowly afterward, so real-world clearance takes far longer than the half-life suggests. Anyone telling you fentanyl clears in three days is describing a textbook, not a real person.
Look at those numbers next to a one-week program and the problem becomes obvious. For someone on methadone, the stabilisation alone would consume the entire stay before treatment could begin. A clinic running a seven-day protocol has two choices with that guest: dose them anyway, or decline them.
This is the single clearest reason our programs run in weeks rather than days. It isn’t a preference. It’s arithmetic.
You will not be sitting in withdrawal waiting for your treatment
This is the fear that stops people booking anywhere, so let us be specific about it.
Because the bridge medication is short-acting, we can keep you medicated right up to the day of treatment. There is no stretch where you are left to suffer in a room while the clock runs down.
Concretely: if your session is scheduled for 10pm, your last dose of short-acting medication is at 2pm. Eight hours. Long enough for the receptors to be available for ibogaine, short enough that you are not put through a day of withdrawal to get there.
That window is one of the main reasons we do the bridge at all.
What you are actually doing during those weeks
A reasonable question when someone tells you to plan for a month: what am I doing all that time?
Not waiting in a room.
Groups run daily. From early on, not after treatment. Being around other people going through the same thing is part of the work, and it starts before the session rather than after it.
Sweat lodge on Sundays. A traditional ceremony, and for many people the first structure their week has had in a long time.
Fluids, constantly. Most people arrive dehydrated and depleted after months or years of poor eating, poor sleep, and often vomiting. We run fluids heavily throughout.
IV therapies, including vitamin C. Part of rebuilding a body that has been running on empty, alongside food, rest, and time.
The hydration piece is not just about feeling better. Electrolyte levels — potassium and magnesium in particular — directly affect the cardiac risk profile of ibogaine, and people arriving from long-term use are very often depleted in both. Getting those corrected is a genuine part of making the treatment safe, not a comfort measure. We explain that more fully on our safety page.
Somewhere in the middle of this, most people notice they are sleeping. Then eating. Then that they have gone several days without the thing that organised their entire life. That happens before the ibogaine, and it matters more than people expect.
The day itself
Your last dose of bridge medication is in the afternoon. Final checks are done, and the session begins that evening under continuous cardiac monitoring with medical staff present throughout.
Sessions run overnight. They are long — the better part of a day — which is why the preparation exists in the first place. You are not going into that on a depleted body, on medications that conflict with it, or in the middle of withdrawal.
Why we tell you this
Most clinics don’t publish their preparation protocol, and some don’t have one worth publishing.
We do, for a simple reason. When you call somewhere else, you now have specific things to ask. How long will you stabilise me. What will you do about my medications. Will I be in withdrawal before the session. How many days clear do you require, and how did you arrive at that number.
The answers will tell you a great deal about where you are calling.
If you want to know what your preparation would look like
Every timeline above depends on what you have actually been taking and for how long. If you want a realistic picture of how long you would need — and an honest answer, including if it is longer than you were hoping — call us at (877) 876-4157.
Free, confidential, and nothing to buy.
This page describes our general approach and is not medical advice. All medications are prescribed and administered by our medical team based on individual assessment. Your own preparation timeline can only be determined after a full evaluation.