Iboga has an unusual second life. In 1962 an American with a heroin dependency took ibogaine, the principal alkaloid, and reported that his withdrawal symptoms vanished and his craving with them. The observation has been repeated many times since in unregulated clinics around the world, and interrupting opioid dependence with a single dose is now iboga's best known property outside Gabon.
The claim is taken seriously and remains poorly evidenced. Ibogaine is cardiotoxic, it prolongs the QT interval, and deaths have occurred in clinics operating without medical screening or monitoring. Rigorous trials have been slow, partly because the compound is a controlled substance in many jurisdictions and partly because a treatment given once does not fit the commercial model that funds drug development.
Two consequences run back to the plant. Tabernanthe iboga is slow growing and confined to a limited range in Central Africa, and demand from outside has driven overharvesting of wild stands; Gabon has restricted export in response and declared iboga a national treasure. And the Bwiti have watched a sacrament, whose meaning is initiation into a community of ancestors, reclassified elsewhere as a pharmaceutical for a condition, with no return to the people who kept it.
The atlas records the medical claim as reported and unsettled, and the conservation and consent problems as established.