One Reporter’s Life-Altering Psychedelic Trip

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroweff. This is The Daily on Sunday. Well, I'm glad I was coaching. I actually just I I had to share this with you guys. Last fall, as I was finishing up an interview with my colleague, the politics reporter Robert Draper, He very casually mentioned I spent Thanksgiving in Tijuana, Mexico undergoing Ibogaine psychedelic therapy. That he just returned from a marathon hallucinogenic drug trip. This was this was a radic thing. Ten hours. I felt nauseous, but they teach you these deep breathing exercises before you go in, and you use that to stave off, you know, any kind of nausea. Now, I should just say, Robert isn't exactly the kind of guy I'd have expected to tell me something like this. He's a seemingly staid veteran journalist who covers the American right and the MAGA movement. But he told me this drug was something he felt he had to try. Yeah. It was really, really interesting. I mean, the whole I have to find a way to write about it at some point. The drug in question is called Ibogaine, and it's illegal in The United States. But early research suggests it could be a game changing treatment for a range of conditions, things like PTSD, addiction, even cognitive decline. So today, Robert Draper and I talk at length about his experience on Ibogaine. It's Sunday, April 12. Robert, welcome to the Sunday Daily. It's great to have you here. It's great to be here. Thanks, Natalie. So I just wanna start by saying that I have so many questions for you about how you wound up having this experience. I am very excited to talk with you about it, and I wanna recognize that that might not totally be the case for you. This might be something slightly uncomfortable for someone who has made a singular career for himself as a journalist in profiling others. You are a reporter's reporter, Robert, and I recognize that talking about yourself is not something that you may be used to or find the most fun in the world. Is that fair to say? That's more than fair to say. Yes. I mean, I I think that my interest in learning about others is in inverse proportion to the interest I have in disclosing things about myself. Okay. Well, we're gonna proceed with caution in that case. I wanna just start with how you first came to know about Ibogaine. Just talk about how this got onto your radar screen in the first place. Yeah. I've I've first heard of Ibogaine from a kind of unlikely source, a former United States senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who had become aware of its usage in treating military veterans for PTSD and traumatic brain injury. Sinema decided to try it herself. She said, and these are her words, that it was the opposite of a pleasant experience, but it was a really transformative one for …