There is a little room in Playa de Tijuana where Charles Johnston’s life broke open.
He had taken a bus down from Las Vegas on his last school stipend, having been arrested in a Target on New Year’s Eve of 2012, stealing, like he had been stealing for months, to keep the heroin going. He was flunking out, losing everything. He had been riding freight trains through the Pacific Northwest when he could think of no other way to detox. He had made ayahuasca on his stove, smoked DMT many days in a row, tried everything his years with psychedelics had given him to try. A man in a park in Portland had mentioned ibogaine six months earlier. Said it had gotten him off heroin years back. Charles thought: maybe this is real.
The session in Tijuana gave him no visions. What it gave him was six hours in a little room with himself and nowhere to go.
“I hate myself,” he said. “I really, really hate myself. That’s the crux of all of it.”
He purged. He wept for hours. He had two rough days. On the third day he woke up. “I woke up and I was 2.0.”
That was early 2013. Charles Johnston is now in Paraty, Brazil, in the Atlantic Forest, running Nekawa Ibogaine Treatment Centers with his partner Tatiana Aya Tupinambá. Paraty is a colonial town wedged between mountains and the sea, three hours from Rio de Janeiro, one of the more beautiful places in the Western Hemisphere. They found a retreat center there, built into the jungle with rivers and trails, and began operating in June. Just three months ago. One person in June. A couple in July. Still figuring it out.
The ibogaine has to be imported from Africa by prescription. A physician writes the order, it clears, it takes a few weeks. When it arrives, patients drive to a hospital in town for the treatment days, monitored by cardiologists, then return to the jungle campus for what comes next. It is logistically complicated. It is also, Charles will tell you, the point.
The Missionary
Charles grew up Mormon in Appalachia. Left the church in his early twenties, discovered psychedelics, spent the next seven years trying to find what they could do. He studied anthropology and thought he might be a doctor. He read widely.
After ibogaine, he came back to Los Angeles, hired developers in India, built a website, and tried to start running people to Mexico: renting Airbnbs in Tijuana, hiring the nurse who had treated him, bringing friends and family through. He did that for six months, had a few clients, and ran out of money. Then he got recruited to work as the sales and marketing guy for a new clinic funded with Texas money. This was 2013, back when Crossroads and Clear Sky were the names everyone knew.
“It reminded me of when I was a Mormon missionary. But I actually cared. I actually cared about what I was doing now. I really believed in it.” Charles Johnston
The skill set was already there.
He spent the next decade working for other people’s clinics. Sales and marketing at one clinic until the owners fell apart. Then Crossroads, where he helped build the marketing operation as Tim Ferriss put the clinic on the map. Then a call from a man in Malibu named Gerry Powell, who was setting up a clinic in Costa Rica. Come be our psychedelic guy, they said. That became Rythmia.
What happened at Rythmia is one of those stories the ibogaine world doesn’t publish about itself. The clinic had brought in a well-known public figure to promote it, and when press attention followed, Charles found himself in the middle of it. The Costa Rican government found out. They raided. Rythmia pivoted to ayahuasca. Charles stayed five more months and then left.
He kept hitting the same wall, in different clinics, with different owners. He describes himself as the Scottie Pippen type: the glue guy, good at many things, can do a lot of things well. The framing sounds modest. It isn’t. He’s a man who makes everything around him work, who has built and rebuilt programs for other people for over a decade, who finally ran out of patience for someone else setting the limits on work he takes personally.
He came close to building something of his own once. Before Beond existed, he had been collaborating with a partner on the project that eventually became it. He left. Personal reasons, and a different approach to ibogaine treatment he wanted to pursue.
“I didn’t want to have another boss.” Charles Johnston
Beond went on to become well-capitalized and prominent. Charles went back to working with Tatiana, spending years going to the Amazon for dietas, the weeks-long fasting isolation processes in the jungle that shape his entire philosophy of how healing actually works. He worked with Mission Within for ten months as executive director, working with veterans. He liked the work. He couldn’t fully connect.
“They’ve been to war,” he said. “They have very different mindsets that I can’t relate to.”
He knew what his field was. He had always known. Addiction. The people who are where he was in that room in Tijuana.
