Fatalities temporally associated with the ingestion of ibogaine.
Journal of forensic sciences – March 01, 2012
Source: PubMed
Summary
While ibogaine is used for substance use, a review of deaths linked to its ingestion revealed no unique neurotoxic syndrome. An examination of 19 fatalities outside West Central Africa showed that most (12 of 14 with adequate data) were attributable to advanced pre-existing medical conditions, mainly cardiovascular, or the presence of other commonly abused substances. Risk factors also included seizures from alcohol/benzodiazepine withdrawal and uninformed use. This highlights the importance of medical screening.
Abstract
Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive plant alkaloid that is used globally in medical and nonmedical settings for opioid detoxification and other substance use indications. All available autopsy, toxicological, and investigative reports were systematically reviewed for the consecutive series of all known fatalities outside of West Central Africa temporally related to the use of ibogaine from 1990 through 2008. Nineteen individuals (15 men, four women between 24 and 54 years old) are known to have died within 1.5-76 h of taking ibogaine. The clinical and postmortem evidence did not suggest a characteristic syndrome of neurotoxicity. Advanced preexisting medical comorbidities, which were mainly cardiovascular, and/or one or more commonly abused substances explained or contributed to the death in 12 of the 14 cases for which adequate postmortem data were available. Other apparent risk factors include seizures associated with withdrawal from alcohol and benzodiazepines and the uninformed use of ethnopharmacological forms of ibogaine.