Ibogaine advocate Howard Lotsof, 66, died January 31 in Staten Island, New York. Liver cancer killed him.

In 1962, Lotsof, a Bronx native, was strung out on heroin when he ingested a sample of the West African psychoactive substance ibogaine. Rocked by the hallucinatory experience, Lotsof was even more stunned when he realized that after ibogaine he no longer felt compelled to use heroin.

For 20 years after that, Lotsof went about his life in the television and movie business, but when an accident cut that career short, he returned to ibogaine and began working to make it available as an addiction treatment. In 1986, he founded a company, NDA International, and began treating clients in Amsterdam.

Lotsof originated numerous patents for ibogaine in treating addictions and provided data to the National Institute on Drug Abuse that laid the groundwork for still ongoing research on ibogaine and its use as an anti-addictive substance. More than 60 peer-reviewed scientific papers on ibogaine have been published so far.

Thanks almost entirely to Lotsof and his supporters, including Dana Beal and Cures Not Wars, an international network of ibogaine clinics is now in place and treating addicted clients. Lotsof was not a doctor or scientist—his college degree was in film—but an outsider who still managed to bring ibogaine in from the cold and win it academic and scientific respect.

He will be missed.

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