Gabon Moves to Ban Iboga Exports as U.S. Ibogaine Demand Builds

Gabon's council of ministers adopted a draft decree on September 18 prohibiting the export of iboga and every derivative, in any form, according to reporting published this weekend by The Guardian. The move follows a May decree that recognized traditional knowledge tied to the plant as national heritage, required benefit-sharing for commercial use and created an iboga sovereign fund financed in part by royalties.

The proximate pressure is American. Ibogaine, the alkaloid in the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga, has become one of the most talked-about candidates in addiction medicine, and the United States has begun building a regulatory and research pathway around it at speed. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that specifically named "ibogaine compounds" and directed federal agencies to create a treatment pathway for eligible patients — a shift we covered when it was signed. Texas has committed $50 million to a multicenter trial, with former governor Rick Perry among the treatment's most visible political advocates.

A plant that is older than the market for it

Iboga is central to Bwiti practice in Gabon, where ceremonies use the bitter root bark in controlled amounts under the guidance of initiates. Practitioners describe the plant as a whole rather than a molecule. "We don't heal only with ibogaine," Maman Djédjé, a temple keeper in Libreville, told the Guardian. "We heal with the whole iboga: the flower, the leaf, the bark, the trunk, the roots."

Commercial demand does not care about that distinction. Small amounts of root bark can be harvested without uprooting the shrub, according to a 2012 report by Yann Guignon, president of the conservation group Blessings of the Forest. Industrial extraction rewards a faster method: taking the entire root system, which yields more bark at once and kills the plant. The report documents collectors doing exactly that, without replanting.

For a species now discussed as pharmaceutical feedstock, the ecological record is thin. Lee White, who led Gabon's national parks agency before serving as environment minister, described wild iboga as "rare and poorly studied." His law enforcement teams found evidence of severe local over-harvesting between Libreville and Cocobeach, along with recurring problems around Mayumba and Lambaréné. White said he tried to start a study of the plant's distribution and genetic variation and could not secure the financing.

The clinical case is promising and unfinished

The American enthusiasm rests on a small evidence base. A 2024 study followed 30 male U.S. special operations veterans, most diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injury, who received ibogaine combined with magnesium. A month later, average PTSD, depression and anxiety scores had fallen by at least 81 percent, and disability scores had moved from mild-to-moderate impairment into the "no disability" range.

The study was small, uncontrolled and included complementary therapies, which means it could not establish efficacy. Its authors called for further controlled trials. The Texas initiative is aimed at producing that evidence; the federal pathway the executive order contemplates would sit alongside it.

A treatment economy already exists outside the United States. Beond, a clinic in Cancún, lists programs costing from $13,500 to $19,500. Not every dose of ibogaine consumed abroad starts in a Gabonese forest: the molecule can be produced semi-synthetically from voacangine, found in the related African tree Voacanga africana. The root bark, however, remains the raw material for ceremonial use and for extracts that carry several of the plant's alkaloids together, which is where the export ban bites. U.S. manufacturers have already begun positioning for a legal market, and federal regulators opened a public comment period on ibogaine trials this month.

Who decides what happens next

The May decree gave Gabon a legal frame: patent applications tied to iboga must disclose the origin of the product, and the sovereign fund is meant to capture a share of value that has historically been created elsewhere. The September draft goes further by stopping raw material from leaving at all.

It does not answer the harder question of authority. There is no central Bwiti church to consult for a single ruling, and the traditions that use iboga differ in practice and interpretation. Tah Mombo, a Bwété Dissumba practitioner working to corral views across those traditions, told the Guardian: "We speak about our things, from our home, for us and by us."

Gabon is trying to write terms before the international market hardens, in contrast to the ayahuasca economy, which globalized first and argued about Indigenous authority, commercialization and benefit-sharing afterward. World leaders are due in Armenia for COP17, where biodiversity funding and benefit-sharing are central to the negotiations, and countries with other bioresources will be watching how the iboga case resolves.

What this means for patients in the United States

For Americans considering ibogaine, the practical landscape is unchanged this week and unsettled for the longer term. The treatment is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, is not available through licensed U.S. treatment providers outside clinical research, and carries cardiac risks, including QT prolongation, that require medical screening. Our guide to medication-assisted treatment and the evidence behind it covers what is approved for opioid use disorder today.

The supply question is where Gabon's decision reaches U.S. patients. If the export ban takes effect and holds, extract-based products will face a smaller and more expensive raw-material base, while semi-synthetic routes from voacangine could absorb some of the gap. Either way, the country that considers iboga a national inheritance has now asserted a claim on the molecule's future — before the first controlled trial in the United States has reported results.