Kentucky’s Ibogaine Evangelist
W. Bryan Hubbard wants state governments to invest millions in ibogaine research efforts.
When W. Bryan Hubbard walked into the cafe, I almost didn’t recognize him. For months, I’d become familiar with Hubbard’s work through watching YouTube videos of Kentucky’s Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission, of which he was, until recently, the executive director. In those videos, he always donned a neat suit. But on this April afternoon, he wore jeans and a green hoodie, his long hair back in a low ponytail. He seemed a bit harried — a torrential spring downpour had snarled traffic as he drove from Lexington to Louisville to meet me. But he ordered a matcha latte and settled in to tell me the winding life story that transformed him into a somewhat unlikely evangelist for an obscure psychedelic substance called ibogaine.
In June 2023, Hubbard crafted a proposal that surprised Kentuckians and psychedelics advocates alike: that the state spend $42 million in state funds to study ibogaine, a drug found in plants like the iboga bush that grows on the African continent and has been long used in ceremonies by people in Gabon. The commission Hubbard chaired was formed to determine how to spend Kentucky’s $842 million settlement with companies that had manufactured or distributed opioids, which claim hundreds of thousands of lives annually. The problem has been especially acute in Kentucky; in 2020, when opioid settlements were being negotiated, Kentucky had the second highest overdose death rate in the country.
The announcement was met with skepticism: Why ibogaine? While drugs like psilocybin and MDMA are taking off, ibogaine felt like more of a gamble to spend so much money on. There’s relatively scant research on it, and the drug is known to induce cardiac issues, presenting more serious risks than better-known psychedelics like MDMA and psilocybin. (In some instances, those substances may cause heart issues as well.) And also: why Kentucky? I grew up in Louisville, and while I am always quick to defend my home state in the face of hillbilly stereotypes, the state isn’t exactly known for leading the way on progressive issues, least of all drug reform. In a state where hemp has long been a major cash crop, marijuana is still illegal. Ibogaine struck me as a dark horse psychedelic up for consideration in a dark horse state for leading-edge psychedelic science.
To Hubbard, that was the point. Once Kentucky’s Attorney General Daniel Cameron first approached him about serving as chair of the commission in 2022, Hubbard knew he wanted to spearhead what he calls a “Manhattan Project” for opioid addiction. Thousands of people have traveled to clinics in Mexico to take ibogaine; many have shared anecdotes about how the drug changed or even saved their life. Some groups, including the nonprofit VETS, help make arrangements for veterans to access the drug. While clinical research on ibogaine is still scarce, the handful of existing studies suggest that the drug can potentially help reduce opioid withdrawal symptoms and use.
And as Hubbard sees it, his ibogaine proposal wasn’t just a promising new approach to treating opioid addiction, but a chance to shake up the political old boys’ club that he believes upholds the status quo in our home state, and to sever the longstanding relationship between pharmaceutical company lobbyists and the Kentucky government. Existing opioid addiction treatments have come under fire for shady dealings; for instance, Indivior, the company that manufactures suboxone, which is used to treat opioid addiction, has paid out over $1 billion to settle antitrust allegations nationwide. Hubbard also wanted to change the sneering way the rest of the country often views Kentucky. “I told Attorney General Cameron, ‘If we do this, Kentucky will lead the way in showing the country how to beat opioid dependency,’” Hubbard told me. “What a wonderful opportunity for our people who are used to being mocked, laughed at, and scorned for being at the caboose of America.”
That sense of being at the caboose has long been part of Hubbard’s identity, a feeling that drives him. He grew up in rural Virginia, where both his grandfathers worked in the coal mines. Neither grandpa kept all his fingers, but they were proud, worked hard, and instilled a deep Southern pride in a young Hubbard who moved to Lexington, Kentucky to go to law school. His first job was at a personal injury attorney firm. As he told me about his early career, Hubbard spoke with the cadence and confidence of a preacher, and the emotion and conviction of one, too. There were tears in his eyes as he recounted stories of clients he’d met who had been prescribed opioids for work-related disability. He clenched his fists as he described how he saw lawyers, doctors, and government-assistance programs incentivize the prescription of these painkillers. Opioids created an ouroboros of disability for his clients who became more addicted and less able to work and function in the world.
Hubbard’s expertise led him to a string of government positions working on mine safety laws, the state’s child support and disability services programs, and investigating fraud and abuse in the state’s Medicaid program. In 2022, after Kentucky was awarded $842 million in opioid settlement funds, Attorney General Daniel Cameron assembled an advisory board to determine how to spend the money, and appointed Hubbard as its chair. Within the first four months the committee awarded $32 million to things like free naloxone and addiction treatment and recovery programs. While researching addiction, Hubbard came across the newsletter of a writer who detailed how her psilocybin experiences helped her in her recovery from opioids. Hubbard reached out to her, and she connected him with a bevy of other psychedelics advocates. Soon, he was tapping other psychedelics enthusiasts for their expertise, even flying to New York to meet with a brain trust assembled by Plant Medicine Law Group founder Adriana Kertzer, which included Jesse Gould of the veterans’ group Heroic Hearts, NYU psychedelic researchers Kenneth Alper and Kelley O’Donnell, psychiatrist Julie Holland, and Ligare founder Reverend Hunt Priest, among others.
Over the following months, Hubbard built his proposal to use opioid funds for ibogaine research, and he pushed hard for it as chair. He organized a committee hearing in October where veterans, psychedelic researchers, and even former Texas governor Rick Perry testified about the addiction crisis and the potential of psychedelic drugs like ibogaine to treat it.
But just as Hubbard’s plan began to gain momentum, the political winds turned. In November 2023, Attorney General Cameron, who appointed Hubbard as the commission’s chair, made a failed bid for governor, and in the process, vacated his position. Former FBI agent and U.S. Attorney Russell Coleman took his place, and Hubbard tried his best to woo him, asking for opportunities to present his ibogaine proposal to Coleman directly. In the end, though, Coleman decided to replace Hubbard with a former DEA officer named Chris Evans, and in December, the new Attorney General asked Hubbard to resign.
To Hubbard, the collapse of his ibogaine proposal was the work of the political status quo. In a scathing public resignation letter, Hubbard points to the state’s “inglorious history of systematic political corruption which has infected all aspects of its governance systems for well over one hundred years.” While support for his proposal was bipartisan, Hubbard wrote that “the largest common denominator of separation between supporters and detractors appears to be fealty to existing systems of exorbitantly expensive Big Pharma failure.” He notes that some of the plan’s critics were University of Kentucky researchers, who have received research funding and consulting fees from pharmaceutical companies that produce drugs to treat opioid use disorder. Coleman, Hubbard told me, is an “inheritor of an aristocratic dynasty of power structures that seeks to fortify their own walls more than they seek to serve anybody who stands outside them.” A line straight out of a Sunday sermon.
The night Hubbard got the news, he was at the Muhammed Ali Center in Louisville, attending a screening of Reborn, a documentary about former LA Lakers star Lamar Odom’s experiences with psychedelics to recover from addiction. Rex Elsass, a longtime conservative political strategist, was there too. After Elsass’s son Reid died of a heroin overdose in 2019, he started the Reid Foundation, dedicated to finding opioid recovery options. Elsass had testified at the Kentucky hearings as well, and the Foundation sponsored the movie screening. That night, Hubbard says Elsass asked him: “What’s your willingness to come and work with us in Ohio to try to salvage this, and achieve there what you tried to do here?” Hubbard’s reply: “I am committed to this mission and wherever there is a viable opportunity to take this framework, I will go with enthusiasm.”
In the end, Results Ohio, a public-private partnership program run through the Ohio treasurer’s office, is paying Hubbard to consult on projects related to the treatment of PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and substance abuse and mental health disorders. Initiatives run through Results Ohio are initially paid for by private funds, which are then reimbursed by public funds if initial results are promising and the state begins an official pilot program. One such program is a veterans mobile mental health clinic that could screen veterans for suicide risk and prepare them for intake using treatments that include psilocybin and ibogaine, says Hubbard. They hope to court a few groups including Elsass’s REID foundation, as well as the One Ohio Foundation, an organization which will distribute 55 percent of the state’s opioid settlement funds, and Jobs Ohio, which is funded by state alcohol sales revenue and aims to stimulate the state’s jobs economy.
A year after Hubbard introduced his proposal, ibogaine is increasingly visible, with the rise of ibogaine retreat centers abroad — especially those for veterans — and enthusiasm from high-profile psychedelics leaders including MAPS’ founder Rick Doblin. In a recent MAPS newsletter, Doblin said the organization is trying to raise $80 million for ibogaine research, and has reportedly raised funds to send the drug to the Ukrainian military. Still, ibogaine’s prospects in the U.S. are uncertain at best, and if it truly becomes the Manhattan Project of addiction treatment, it, too, could leave behind a complicated legacy. Compared with MDMA-assisted therapy, which could be approved by the Food and Drug Administration in August, and psilocybin, which is close behind MDMA in the clinical trial pipeline, ibogaine research is scarce. The drug’s association with cardiac issues may make it difficult for researchers to study. University of Kentucky opioid abuse researcher Bill Stoops told me in an interview that the drug’s cardiac profile would likely mean that any approved studies would have stringent safety screening requirements, to the point where it might be difficult to generalize results to the larger public. National Institute on Drug Abuse director Nora Volkow told the Washington Post in April that researchers will need to “isolate a version that does not disrupt the heart, or establish methods to determine who may be genetically at risk from the drug.” Indeed, companies are already at work developing analogs in hopes of finding one with fewer cardiac risks. Ibogaine will not be a quick fix for opioid addiction; if MDMA-assisted therapy is any indication, it would likely take decades to raise billions of dollars to support clinical studies and then carry them out before federal regulators would even consider approving the drug.
Stanford neuroscientist Nolan Williams told me that in a recent study he conducted using ibogaine to treat veterans with traumatic brain injury, there were “no clinically meaningful cardiac issues” and that risks may be mitigated by administering magnesium alongside ibogaine. Williams conducts his research at an ibogaine clinic in Mexico, where the drug is not regulated. “There is much more to learn about ibogaine, but its current listing as a Schedule I drug (a compound with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse, according to the US Drug Enforcement Agency) has been a major obstacle to further study,” he said.
I’d reached out to Williams in part to get a temperature check on Hubbard’s ibogaine efforts. How seriously do people in the field take this notion of a “Manhattan Project'' for opioid addiction? “What Bryan is doing in Ohio is extremely important for that state as well as an example of what other states may implement,” Stanford’s Williams said in an email. Tom Feegel, CEO of Beond, an ibogaine retreat center in Cancún, Mexico, says that ibogaine needs an effective leader to advance research, and that Hubbard’s experience in navigating government, law, and healthcare makes him the right guy to lead. “He’s a hero of mine,” Feegel told me. Like Hubbard, Feegel is deeply skeptical of the role pharmaceutical companies play in state politics. He, too, sees the rise of ibogaine treatment as a way to reduce dependency on the existing pharmaceutical solutions to treating opioids. “We need people like Bryan who truly think differently about the underlying nature of the opioid problem, and seek bold innovative solutions.”
Hubbard says he’s been contacted by legislators and policymakers in other states, including Washington, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. In April, Missouri legislators passed an appropriations bill for the state’s opioid settlement funds which originally included $10 million for studying ibogaine in treating opioid use disorder, but after the state’s Department of Mental Health raised concerns about ibogaine’s cardiac risks, the bill’s sponsors swapped out ibogaine for psilocybin. Hubbard said he spoke with those legislators while the bill was being developed and answered questions from the Missouri Department of Mental Health. “What is encouraging is to see the level of interest around it, and the amount of activity that is developing in these other states,” Hubbard says. “What I really believe is if Ohio flies the flag first, there will be other states that come along to join forces. It's that trepidation of being first and stepping out that is the big inhibitor.”
