Mississippi should expand the tools it uses to treat addiction and mental illness, including carefully supervised therapies involving psychedelic drugs, the leader of a drug-policy nonprofit told the Rotary Club of North Jackson.
Christina Dent, founder and president of End It For Good, discussed the potential uses and risks of ibogaine and psilocybin during the club’s July 28 meeting. Her Jackson-based nonprofit advocates moving drug policy away from incarceration and punishment and toward treatment and public health.
Dent said conventional addiction treatment remains inaccessible to many people, is often expensive and does not work for everyone. She cited federal data showing that about 17% of American adults have a substance-use disorder and said 78 of Mississippi’s 82 counties are designated mental-health professional shortage areas.
“We need more tools,” Dent said. “There is no other complex problem that we would say one tool is all we need.”
The Mississippi Legislature opened the door to research on one such tool this year. House Bill 314, signed by Gov. Tate Reeves on March 26, authorizes the Mississippi State Department of Health to select a consortium to conduct clinical trials of ibogaine and seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Lawmakers also appropriated $5 million in opioid-settlement funds for the effort. The law requires matching money from outside the state and limits trial sites to hospitals or institutions of higher learning.
Ibogaine is a psychoactive compound derived from the root bark of the iboga plant, which is native to West Africa. Dent said it has shown promise in interrupting opioid dependence and reducing withdrawal symptoms. She described the treatment as an intense, dreamlike experience that can last 24 to 48 hours.
The drug also carries serious risks, particularly for the heart. Dent said prospective patients must undergo cardiac screening and remain connected to monitors during treatment. Ibogaine is not approved for medical treatment in the United States and remains a Schedule I controlled substance under federal law.
Dent told the audience about a friend who traveled outside the country for ibogaine treatment after years of opioid addiction. The woman, she said, has not returned to opioid use in 13 years and now works as a psychotherapist helping other patients prepare for treatment.
“It is not a magic bullet,” Dent said. “Not everyone experiences that, but it opened a window of opportunity.”
She also described a former University of Mississippi Medical Center nurse who sought ibogaine treatment after a traumatic brain injury. Dent said the woman later returned to nursing and now consults on safety protocols for ibogaine clinics.
Such accounts are anecdotal, and federal regulators have not determined that ibogaine is safe and effective for addiction, brain injuries or other conditions. The new Mississippi initiative is intended to help produce the clinical evidence needed for an FDA review.
Dent devoted much of her presentation to psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in certain mushrooms. Researchers are studying it as a possible treatment for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance-use disorders and other conditions. The FDA has given expedited status to some psilocybin research, but psilocybin also remains federally prohibited and is not an FDA-approved treatment.
Psilocybin can temporarily increase communication among different regions of the brain, Dent said, potentially allowing patients to reconsider entrenched thoughts or behaviors. A supervised session generally lasts three to six hours and may include eye shades, music and a facilitator who remains with the participant.
Dent emphasized what practitioners call “set and setting” — the patient’s mental preparation and the physical and social surroundings in which the drug is taken. She said a clinical program bears little resemblance to recreational drug use.
Preparation before a session and follow-up counseling known as integration are essential, she said. The goal is to help a patient understand the experience and apply any insight to life afterward.
Psilocybin can cause panic, nausea and disorientation and is not appropriate for everyone. Dent said screening is needed to identify people at greater risk, including those taking certain medications or experiencing some acute psychiatric conditions.
Oregon became the first state to establish a regulated system in which adults may consume psilocybin at licensed service centers. Centers began serving clients in 2023. Colorado has developed a similar program, while New Mexico has adopted a more medically limited model.
Dent said Mississippians already travel to Oregon or other countries for psychedelic services. She knows of a Mississippi veterans organization interested in sending veterans with PTSD to Oregon, she said, but local access would be less expensive.
She suggested Mississippi could eventually consider a limited psilocybin pilot program, although the Legislature has not authorized one. The state’s willingness to support ibogaine research indicates that lawmakers may be open to considering additional approaches, she said.
During a question-and-answer session, a Rotary member asked whether insurers might eventually cover psychedelic-assisted treatment. Dent said insurance coverage would be important to broad access, but would likely follow only after regulators approve a treatment and stronger evidence establishes its safety and effectiveness.
She argued that insurers might ultimately find a short course of psychedelic-assisted therapy less costly than repeated stays in residential addiction programs or years of medication. Those savings, however, would depend on the results of controlled studies and the durability of any benefit.
Another audience member asked whether the drugs could be addictive. Dent said classic psychedelics are not generally associated with compulsive use, despite their placement in Schedule I, a federal category for drugs considered to have high abuse potential and no accepted medical use.
Dent said no single therapy will work for everyone. Her larger argument was that success should be measured by whether people achieve stable, healthy lives, not whether they all follow the same path.
“The goal isn’t how you get there,” she said. “It’s that we have more people living a healthy, thriving life.”
Below is a full transcript of Christina Dent's talk to the Rotary Club of North Jackson:
CHRISTINA DENT: PSYCHEDELIC-ASSISTED THERAPY
Rotary Club of North Jackson | July 28, 2026
Editor’s note: Christina Dent is the founder and president of End It For Good, a Mississippi-based nonprofit that advocates a health-centered approach to drugs and addiction. This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability.
I'm so excited to be back here. Thank you to my father-in-law, Tommy Dunn, who is also here. So I've spoken here about a couple of different things. One is kind of shifting from a primarily criminal justice approach to drugs and addiction to a health-centered one. The last time I was here, I was talking about a number of different alternative treatment options for addiction some of which are available in Mississippi and some of which have not yet made it here.
And today we're zeroing in on one of those that I talked just a little bit about last time, but it's particularly important for right now because Mississippi just passed legislation that Governor Reeves just signed a couple of months ago related to psychedelic-assisted therapy. So if those words sound like they shouldn't all belong in the same sentence to you, you're in the right place. We're going to dive into this a little bit, and then hopefully have a lot of time for questions, comments, things like that. So it's helpful if you see this slide, but also feel free to turn your chairs around, etc.
About 17% of adults in the United States struggle with a substance addiction. This is not including gambling addiction and other kinds of addictions. That is substance addiction. We've got almost one in five people that has some sort of substance use disorder. It could be alcohol, it could be illegal drugs, some sort of substance use disorder. A very small number of people with that enter treatment, and less than half of the people who go to treatment complete it. Then of those that complete the treatment, the vast majority of them relapse. So we have a huge problem, very few people getting help.
The help that we have is not very helpful for most people that access it. And here in Mississippi, where we have such a mental health crisis, because a substance use disorder is often an underlying mental health issue, 78 of our 82 counties are designated as mental health professional shortage areas. So we have very little access to mental health care for people in Mississippi. And that's on top of all of the challenges that are happening nationwide related to substance use addiction, poor rates of success for treatment. Treatment is also very expensive.
Many, many people have seen their retirement savings just drained by putting children, grandchildren, brothers and sisters through numerous types of treatment where you're shelling out $20,000, and if your loved one walks away four days in, they don't say there's a refund. They say, "Sorry, that's part of it." So our goal at End It For Good is how can we help more people experience a healthy, thriving life? So we're much more interested in that than the pathway that they take to get there. We think whatever path works for someone to be able to overcome a problem like a substance use disorder, that's a really helpful thing.
It doesn't have to be that everybody takes the exact same path to get there. You all drove different routes to get here. We all ended up in the same place, and nobody is saying, "Did you take State Street or did you come in on Fortification?" It doesn't matter. We're all here, and that's how we want to think about the goal. The goal isn't how you get there, it's that we have more people living a healthy, thriving life. And for that, given the challenge, we need more tools. I think it's a really helpful thing to think about tools in our tool belt. Why would we want only one tool?
In Mississippi, primarily Alcoholics Anonymous is the tool people think of, and they think of it as kind of the only tool that is a legitimate pathway. There is no other complex problem that we would say one tool is all we need. Even medications, they work for some people, they don't work for others. We recognize that people are complex and problems are as well. So we need more tools. Psychedelic-assisted treatment is one tool that can be very helpful for some people. So psychedelics right now are under active clinical investigation.
They cause behavioral and neurological changes in the body and brain, and they're being used and studied to treat a whole host of mental illnesses beyond addiction. That's just the particular issue that we work on. But I want you to see a little bit that this, whether or not addiction is of particular interest to you, there's a lot of other issues that families are struggling with that can potentially be treated and sometimes cured by psychedelic-assisted therapy. So we're just going to look at two psychedelics today. These are pictures of them. The top picture is of the iboga plant. It's got little orange kind of seed pods.
The bottom one is of psilocybin mushrooms. So looking at ibogaine first, the iboga plant has been growing since the creation of the world in West Africa. And you can take the roots of that plant, and from that is a psychoactive substance, which is ibogaine. In the 1960s, it was discovered that people who took ibogaine had the experience that they simply stopped using opioids, even if they had been addicted to them. It was sort of an accidental discovery in the '60s, but that's a pretty revolutionary thing when an opioid addiction is very difficult to overcome.
But in the 1970s, ibogaine was swept up along with all of the other drugs in the Controlled Substances Act, which banned them and put them all on Schedule I. It is no longer available, and it is nearly impossible to study. So it goes dormant. There was lots of research happening in the 1960s on various psychedelic substances for mental health benefit and treatment. All of that ended in the 1970s with kind of the war on drugs beginning. But research is beginning again today.
Unfortunately, most of the ibogaine research is happening offshore because the United States is so strict about how we approach any kind of substance that is currently on Schedule I. So it's very difficult to study it, but studies are happening in other places, just not generally on the mainland of the United States. So what does ibogaine do? It induces a dreamlike state that can last 24 to 48 hours. It has a way of resetting your opioid receptors. So the reason you continue to compulsively use opioids is because your brain is screaming for that connection point. It has become accustomed to that. And ibogaine kind of allows that to release.
It can reduce withdrawal symptoms. Ibogaine must be taken in a controlled clinical setting. Some people have been compulsively using opioids for years. They go through an ibogaine treatment, and it is over. They never touch opioids again. I have a friend, that was her experience. She was active, chaotic, addicted to opioids, and traveled out of the country, had ibogaine treatment. That was 13 years ago. She's now a psychotherapist that helps people prepare for ibogaine treatment, and she said she's never had more than a passing thought about opioids since her treatment. It is not a magic bullet.
Not everyone experiences that, but it opened a window of opportunity and the resetting of those receptors where she did not have to go through all of the cravings and all of the challenge that makes staying abstinent so difficult, and she was able to rebuild a life apart from opioids. Ibogaine does have some risks. It is actually probably the riskiest of psychedelics that have mental health benefits. So it can cause nausea or anxiety. If you are well screened for it, you are unlikely to experience things like mania or psychosis, but it can increase your blood pressure.
You do need to have a cardiac screening before you take it, because part of the way that it works is increasing the time lapse between your heartbeats. And for some people, that is not a healthy thing to do. And so you need to be screened. You're hooked up to a heart monitor the whole time that you're accessing it. So if you're trying to envision, how does this work? There are clinics all along the U.S.-Mexico border because they cannot be open in the United States. But people travel across the border, and it's in a clinic that looks similar to a therapist's office. There are beds for people. There's nurses. There's doctors on site.
You're hooked up to monitors. You have people with you that help guide you through that experience because it is a dreamlike state, and you have lots of thoughts that are running through your mind. Maybe things from your past, maybe things from your childhood, all kinds of things that are coming as part of a psychedelic experience. But people have been prepped for that. You go through some sessions with a therapist before that to prepare for this, and then afterwards you go through integration with a therapist to understand what was it that came up for you, what might that mean, how might that impact your life.
And people often describe these experiences as one of the top three to five most impactful and meaningful experiences of their lives. Doesn't mean that it's an easy experience. It's generally very difficult for the experience itself because of what's coming up for you. For my friend, it was a lot of the pain that she had experienced as a child. But what it did for her was finally allow her to move past that pain instead of that continual self-medication with the opioids that doesn't end. So ibogaine is being studied for addiction treatment, alcohol addiction, opioid addiction.
It's also being studied and used, excuse me, for PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, depression, anxiety. I have another friend who graduated top of her class as a nurse at UMC. She was rookie of the year nurse at UMC when she started working there. She was about my age. Had an accident, went through a traumatic brain injury, and was disabled, unable to work. She ended up, after a couple of years of that, learning about ibogaine. She traveled out of the country, had ibogaine treatment, and it offered an opportunity and a window of opportunity for her because of the way that it opens up and rewires parts of your brain.
And she was able to heal from that. She is now back working. She's worked at ibogaine clinics all over the world, and she's one of the top experts in ibogaine safety protocols and consults for that now. As well as she's an ER nurse out in California, and she comes back to Mississippi regularly. So that's pretty amazing because most of us, we think traumatic brain injury is, that's kind of what you're left with. It's fascinating to me and very hopeful to me that it's possible that there are compounds that can help people experience a degree—and sometimes a very significant degree—of healing.
For people who have PTSD, particularly for veterans, they are often just on lifelong medications to try to survive. Psychedelic-assisted treatment is often showing they have the treatment, and they no longer have the symptoms that qualify them for a PTSD diagnosis. It can be that transformative in a small amount of time. So access to ibogaine right now, you have to go out of the country. Texas passed legislation a year ago to participate in an FDA trial in the United States to try to get ibogaine passed as a treatment. Mississippi joined that. We were the second state to pass ibogaine legislation that Governor Reeves just signed to join that.
We put $5 million of the opioid settlement funding into joining that research effort, because the legislature believes that this is a potential opportunity for us to be on the front end of something that could really be transformative for a lot of people experiencing a whole host of health conditions. So that will be happening over the next couple of years, that research and hopefully that FDA approval. But something that is happening even at a greater speed and with more potential to help more people with lower risk is psilocybin treatment. So now we're switching over to psilocybin mushrooms.
Interestingly enough, Mississippi is one of the places where psilocybin mushrooms grow in the wild best in the whole country. You might not know that, but they are. They actually grow in cow patties, which is where they grow the most. And Mississippi happens to be the climate, what we do here just happens to make it one of the best places to grow psilocybin mushrooms if they're in the wild. So in the 1950s, psilocybin was isolated and synthesized in the '60s. It was under research at the same time ibogaine was. In the '70s, also banned along with all the other drugs in the Controlled Substances Act.
In the 2000s, research started happening again. Psilocybin has now gotten Breakthrough Therapy designation twice from the FDA for major depressive disorder, treatment-resistant depression. So that's a really huge thing. They only give that to treatments that show such promise and radically better results than the current things that are available to treat those things. So depression is a huge problem, and we have something that has now twice the FDA has said, "We actually think this has far greater promise than the available options and treatments for depression." So psilocybin increases your brain connectivity similar to what ibogaine does.
It suppresses that fight, flight, or freeze response, which is part of what makes it so powerful for PTSD. It's really difficult if you're experiencing the response of PTSD to actually stay with it. Your body is, everything is trying to shut down. You don't want to go near to those memories to try to process those and be able to move forward. It can reduce your fear memories, and it enables divergent thinking and introspection. And to show you what that looks like in a brain, so these are replicas of what brain imaging shows. The circle on the left is a brain under a placebo.
So these are the connections being made between different parts of your brain normally. Your brain, especially as you age, it gets more and more stuck in its ruts. It's harder and harder for your brain areas to talk to other parts of your brain, and so you get really entrenched in the way that you think. What psilocybin does is it opens up all of that connectivity and allows parts of your brain to interact with each other that maybe haven't done that ever or for a very long time.
And you can see the one on the right is all of this brain connectivity, all of this potential for new synapses to be formed, where it unlocks all of that rigid thinking, and often with things like addiction, that compulsivity of behavior, and allows for new types of connections to form that don't require that compulsive behavior anymore. So psilocybin does have some risks. You can have panic attacks, nausea, disorientation. You need to be screened similarly to make sure, like if you're on lithium, you can't have it. If you're actively suicidal, they will not allow you to have psilocybin treatment.
But it's being used for addiction treatment of many different addictions, nicotine, alcohol, opioids, and also for other mental health conditions, depression, anxiety. Interestingly, obsessive compulsive disorder is being helpfully treated in people with psilocybin. Anorexia, very difficult type of food and control addiction. Psilocybin is being used to treat that, as well as end-of-life distress. So for people that have a terminal diagnosis and are struggling with the fear of death, there are providers that specialize in psilocybin treatment that can significantly reduce or eliminate that fear.
So now we have actually psilocybin access in the United States for the first time since the 1960s, and that is happening first in Oregon. They passed a law in 2020 to establish, they call them service centers. There are now 20 licensed service centers where you can go and get psilocybin therapy. There are 400 licensed facilitators, and if you're thinking this is like your college roommate who was like, "I'll take some people on a trip." They have to have 160 hours of licensed training. They have to pass an exam. They go through a practicum. The whole program is overseen by Oregon's equivalent of the Department of Health.
It's a state agency that licenses all of their hospitals and all of that. It oversees their psilocybin program. It has become part of their healthcare offerings to people. There have now been 22,000 people that have gone through psilocybin therapy in Oregon in the last three years since clinics have been open, and there have only been 32 emergency calls out of 22,000 people that have gone through it. That is like... It's hard to get that low with something like Tylenol. I mean, it is incredibly safe to use if you have been screened appropriately.
And again, people often rank it as one of, if not the most meaningful, transformative experience of their life and what they can take from that. So you can now go to Oregon. Anybody in this room can fly to Oregon and go get psilocybin treatment. You do not have to have a diagnosed condition for it. Oregon specifically wanted to keep it open for people who did not either want to go to the doctor to get a diagnosis or wanted to take it for any number of reasons. They wanted it to be open to anyone. So Colorado passed a similar program in 2022.
Their centers just opened about a year ago, and New Mexico just passed a program scheduled to open this fall. So theirs is— New Mexico's is different in that you do have to have a set of diagnosed health conditions to be part of their program. So it's a much narrower scope of what is available in New Mexico. But in both Oregon and Colorado, you don't have to have a condition to be admitted into the program. If you are an adult and you can pay for it, then you can go and access it. So if you're wondering, what does it look like? So these are two rooms. This happens to be, Odyssey is one of the centers.
Many of the centers that operate in Oregon also operate in Colorado. So this is a picture of one of their centers. I just pulled the first thing I saw off their website for Colorado and for Oregon. If you go to any center sites, they all look very similar to this. Some of them are in beautiful mountain cabins that are more expensive. Some of them are just in houses that have been converted into service centers.
So when you go— thinking about, I gave this presentation at the Richland Rotary, and they were like, "Walk us through." "What does this look like to go?" Because if people have experience with psychedelics, they're thinking, like, "It's a crazy time when I was a teenager" kind of thing. So you have a facilitator who is always present with you during your psilocybin experience. It lasts about three to six hours, so much shorter than the twenty-four to forty-eight hours that an ibogaine experience can last. Always prep work, always integration work afterwards. It is not a magic bullet.
It offers an opportunity of incredible brain reconnectivity, but you have to use that opportunity. And working with somebody who is trained in helping you make sense of the experience you had is really important. That integration is important. Interestingly, the average client in Oregon is between forty-five and eighty years old. So this room is the prime audience for psilocybin therapy in Oregon. Again, not the college kids that are trying to get in under age. Cost of psilocybin therapy, it can range. It can be as inexpensive as seven hundred and fifty dollars if you want to show up at a clinic, have the treatment, and go back to a hotel.
And there's all kinds of... If you want to come to a beautiful mountain cabin and have a private chef, then do a whole week-long thing where you do all kinds of other things and some yoga, etc. You can pay as much as you want to. But you can get it very inexpensively as well. There are companies that specialize in making a licensed, very safe, helpful experience available for much lower cost.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How is it administered?
CHRISTINA DENT: Say again.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How is it administered?
CHRISTINA DENT: Oh, how is it administered? Good question. So you can eat the actual mushrooms. Most people don't do that in a clinical setting like this. It's ground up and put into a tea, and you just drink the tea. And then about twenty, thirty minutes after that, you begin to experience the effects of that. And you're— These little kind of low beds you can see, that's very typical. You would lie on that with eye shades on. They would have calming music playing in the background, and you would experience whatever it is you experience. Everyone's experience is different. It's very unique to the person.
It's not like a pharmaceutical drug that you take and people experience similar things. Very different than that and— You go tripping, and what comes up is going to be unique to the person. For some of you, I would imagine you've had experience with psilocybin. You're thinking, "Ain't no way this is therapeutic." Like, "Nothing I ever saw was therapeutic." The way that psychedelics impact you is very tied to the mindset that you're in when you take it and the place you're in when you take it. So that's called set and setting.
You can have a radically different experience if you are a college kid out with friends and you take psilocybin, and then maybe the next week you had— maybe more than a week. You had some sessions with a therapist to try to figure out, what do you want? What are you trying to deal with in your life? Maybe you're at a crossroads, and you want some insight, and you had a psilocybin experience in a controlled setting with a trained and licensed professional. You're going to have a totally different experience with it.
And that's what they have found is that the mindset and the setting that you're in are really important for the therapeutic impact and what you even experience when you take psychedelics. So we'll open it up for questions after this. How many tools do we need? We need a whole bunch of tools. We need every tool imaginable that can be helpful for people. Psilocybin is not going to work for some people. They might take it and come back and say, "I've still got all the same challenges I had before." But for some people, it is incredibly transformative, and I've met more and more Mississippians for whom that's the case.
I recently met a business owner in Richland. No one would ever know, and my guess is maybe one of you is similar. He went through a divorce a couple of years ago, began struggling with depression for the first time in his life, and did some research into like he didn't want to be on medication, and what else could he do? And he traveled out of the country. He went to a psilocybin retreat and said it was absolutely transformative, one of the most meaningful and helpful experiences of his life. And it was about three years ago. And he's continued on leading his business, doing all the things in the community like he did before.
And I only met him because he happened to tell a friend at a dinner that he had had this transformative experience. And when the friend heard me talking about this, he said, "I actually think you should meet this other friend." There's a lot of people for whom that has been true. He's never talked about it publicly, because part of what we try to do at End It For Good is make it possible for people to say, "Hey, I actually have done that." There's people from Mississippi that have gone to Oregon for treatment. There's a veterans organization based in Mississippi that's trying to figure out how they can get groups of veterans to Oregon.
What they really want is for psilocybin treatment available in Mississippi, so we don't have to send our veterans across the country to be able to get a treatment that could work for them right here at home. It would be far less expensive if it was locally available. So, ibogaine is a much longer lead time before that might be available. Psilocybin, it could be available either through a pilot program, short-term, narrow focus, or through some sort of legal access program like Oregon has, if the legislature decided they wanted to do that.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you see the political will for that to be possible?
CHRISTINA DENT: I think if people would've said, "Do you think Mississippi's going to be the first to jump on ibogaine?" People would've been like, "Are you out of your mind? That's a psychedelic." And yet the legislature, I think there was one no vote in both chambers combined on the ibogaine bill. It just was, "Hey, another tool. The folks in the Legislature who know a lot about addiction and mental-health issues are telling us this is helpful. Let's try it." So I think it is very possible.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And what would have to happen for insurance companies to cover this vital treatment?
CHRISTINA DENT: Yes. That is the next step for broad availability is for insurance to cover it. That's a whole long process. Now my belief is because insurance companies end up paying lifelong for a lot of these treatments, and they can be very expensive. Whereas psychedelic-assisted therapy often involves one treatment. Sometimes there are some places that will do two psilocybin sessions over the course of three days. So you have a session, and then a day off, and a second session. But if you look at it long-term, it is so much cheaper, and particularly when it can actually heal some of the issues instead of just continuing to go over and over again.
Because insurance companies are also paying $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 for people to go to an addiction treatment program. You can go and get psilocybin therapy, even at a concierge place, for $7,000 and potentially have far better and more long-lasting outcomes than from traditional addiction treatment. Yeah, Mike.
MIKE: So it's my understanding, not that I have any personal experience. That the experience is very related to the dose. I mean, how much you take. So, do they give you a little bit or a lot? You could really blow somebody's mind if you had enough.
CHRISTINA DENT: Yeah. So some places will do trial doses. So for some of the places that you come to, and you maybe stay for three days, it's kind of an interim cost. They might do a trial dose to see, which is low dose, to see just how much does it affect you before they determine your full dose. For most places, they can accurately assess what a full dose would be. There are some places that also specialize in sort of a half psychedelic experience. Maybe you're not ready to take a full therapeutic dose of it, but you want to see what something could do for you. There's a place that does that, particularly for mothers.
If you're a mom who's stressed out at the end of your rope. They do group sessions actually, where they'll have several facilitators and several people that are all doing it together. So there's all kinds of different... The business market is changing, and morphing, and figuring out how do we offer this, and they've got all kinds of different levels of that to be able to give to people if they're ready for a therapeutic dose or if they want to try something a little less. Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is there any benefit from this for dementia or Alzheimer's?
CHRISTINA DENT: There are studies for that. Yes. There are studies for Alzheimer's treatment, because ibogaine tends to reduce the age of the brain by a couple of years. That's the level of kind of reconnectivity that it gives. And so yeah, they are studying it for that.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: According to the slide that we saw, ibogaine seems to be more for opioid withdrawals, whereas psilocybin is for four or five conditions. Is this a one-time treatment, or is it continuous?
CHRISTINA DENT: Yeah. For most people, it's a one-time treatment. Very few people would do ibogaine again. It's possible you could. Most people don't want to. There is also no addiction potential. You just don't become addicted to a psychedelic like this.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: But they're Schedule I, right?
CHRISTINA DENT: They are Schedule I.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: That makes no sense.
CHRISTINA DENT: Which makes no sense. Yes.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Schedule I, my understanding is means highly addictive, no medicinal value. So that's nonsense.
CHRISTINA DENT: It's nonsense. Yeah.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Where is ibogaine legal besides Mexico?
CHRISTINA DENT: It is allowed in some European countries for treatment. But most people from here are traveling to Mexico, and there's very reputable clinics. They just have to operate across the border. Yeah. Thank you so much.
