Climbing the Holy Mountain of Recovery

This story is about the development of my heroin addiction and my recovery from it. I struggled to escape from addiction for 17 years, but only succeeded after an ibogaine treatment. It is autobiographical, but I only describe traumatic episodes that contributed to addiction and sketch the highlights and milestones in my recovery. It is a memoir, as it offers a thematic view of my life and is moderate in scope; and a personal essay in which I offer insights about society’s role in addiction. My intent is that addicts and their loved ones may better understand the nature of addiction so their approaches to treatment are better informed and more compassionate. At 66, I am a gentleman/hipster/Seeker and scholar, but I’m not an armchair academic who wrote this book from a library: I was an addict for 22 years! Now I am blessed to be alive and have 18 years clean. My mission is to help addicts by educating the public and the professional community about addiction’s complexity and the efficacy of ibogaine for its treatment. I hope my story supports a change in social and medical attitudes so that the unheard voices of addicts will be honored, instead of just seeing them as social problems. Addiction put my life into suspended animation when I had a third of the credits I needed for a bachelor’s degree. 27 years later I returned to school; now I have bachelor’s degrees in Anthropology and Psychology and a Master’s degree in East-West Psychology (EWP). I am currently a PhD. candidate in EWP at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, California.