MAPS Just Published Everything It Knows About Ibogaine. Here’s What the Document Actually Says.

For the past decade, a serious researcher who wanted to design an ibogaine trial faced an awkward problem. The scientific literature was scattered across hundreds of journal articles, many of them small observational studies from clinics in the Netherlands and Mexico. The safety data that actually informed clinical practice, the protocols that had kept people alive across tens of thousands of real-world treatments, lived mostly in the heads of experienced practitioners. None of it was compiled anywhere you could hand to an IRB.

That changed on July 1, 2026.

MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, published the first-ever Investigator’s Brochure (IB) for ibogaine. All 207 pages are freely available at maps.org. The document pulls together everything in the published scientific record: preclinical studies, human pharmacokinetic data, clinical trials, adverse event reports, dosing parameters, contraindications, and best practices. It’s the kind of document that pharmaceutical companies typically spend millions producing, then keep proprietary. MAPS put it online for free.

“As part of a longstanding commitment to Open Science, community health, and public benefit,” the preface reads, MAPS developed the brochure to support academic inquiry, clinical research, and evidence-based advocacy. They’re not developing an ibogaine drug product. They just thought the field needed this.

So what does it actually say?

On safety, the document is honest about what’s known

The cardiac risk is real and well-documented. Ibogaine and its primary metabolite, noribogaine, both inhibit hERG potassium channels. That inhibition prolongs the QT interval, which can trigger torsades de pointes, a potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmia. The document notes 34 documented fatalities, most involving cardiac complications. Several of those deaths were linked to substances patients hadn’t disclosed to their providers.

The tricky part is the metabolite. Noribogaine has a half-life of 28 to 49 hours. Ibogaine itself clears in roughly 38 hours. But noribogaine sticks around, and deaths have been reported as late as 76 hours after ingestion. That window is wider than most people realize. The brochure explicitly ties this to the metabolite: “the disparity between the elimination half-lives of ibogaine and noribogaine implicates the metabolite as a principal driver of delayed cardiotoxicity.”

The document also notes that these risks are manageable in clinical settings. The brochure’s answer is rigorous gatekeeping: screen out heart disease and impaired liver function, monitor ECGs on a schedule, keep the patient in a low-stimulus environment for several days after the session, and adjust dose for gender and CYP2D6 metabolizer status. The death rate among well-screened patients at clinics with rigorous protocols has fallen even as overall use has grown. That’s not an accident.

On dosing, the picture is murkier

Clinical studies have used everything from 8 to 12 mg/kg (Mash et al., reporting on 191 participants) to roughly 19 mg/kg (Brown and Alper, 2017) to the MISTIC protocol at Stanford, which started at 2 to 3 mg/kg with a second dose up to 14 mg/kg total, alongside IV magnesium to reduce cardiac liability. There is no standard dose. The IB documents these ranges, but it doesn’t resolve the question of which approach is best or for whom. CYP2D6 genetic variation means identical doses produce meaningfully different blood concentrations depending on who’s taking them. That’s a known variable without a clean answer yet.

What the document doesn’t capture is worth reading carefully

MAPS says it plainly in the limitations section: “The current body of peer-reviewed literature does not reflect this community-based clinical knowledge on how to potentially reduce risks and maximize therapeutic benefits.” The Mexico clinic ecosystem has been refining protocols for decades. Practitioners there know things about 7-OH kratom, fentanyl combinations, and opioid switch timing that have never been published in a journal. The IB is built entirely from peer-reviewed literature, which is a significant constraint.

MAPS closes the limitations section with a warning that using the brochure alone “could result in unnecessary risks and/or suboptimal outcomes” and recommends that any academic researcher planning a trial engage directly with traditional practitioners, experienced clinicians, and community-based experts before designing their protocol. It’s an unusual admission to put in a document you just published, and it’s the more credible for it.

So who benefits from making this public?

Researchers finally have a starting point they can hand to an IRB. That’s not a small thing in a field that has moved slowly partly because nobody could point to a single compiled document and say: here’s what we know.

But the roadmap is now available to anyone. Including pharmaceutical companies that are very good at converting open-source safety data into proprietary IND applications.

MAPS has been explicit that they’re not developing a drug product. They believe the knowledge should be public. Whether that generosity ultimately serves patients or accelerates IP capture by whoever moves fastest is an open question. The brochure doesn’t answer it, and nobody does yet.

Source: MAPS Ibogaine Investigator’s Brochure, Version 1, June 2026 (PDF)