VICE (2013) s01e07 Episode Script
Addiction
This week on "Vice," Thomas heads to Indonesia, where they think smoking doesn't cause cancer, it cures it.
_ And I travel from New York to Mexico, where an addict tries to kick the most addictive drug in the world by using the scariest drug in the world.
I just want to be happy, you know.
I just want to wake up in the morning and, you know, not want to fucking blow my brains out every day.
That would be nice.
The world is changing.
Now, no one knows where it's going, but we'll be there uncovering the news This is World War III.
culture, and politics that expose the absurdity of the modern condition.
That little child has a huge gun.
This scene isn't really kosher by American standards.
I was interviewing suicide bombers, and they were kids.
This is the world through our eyes.
We win or we die! This is the world of "Vice.
" Hi.
I'm Shane Smith and we're here in the "Vice" offices of Brooklyn, New York.
For our first story this week, we go to Indonesia.
Lucy.
Yes, dear.
Get me a cigarette, will you, hon? Don't say cigarette.
Say Philip Morris.
Oh? Before we woke up to the fact that smoking is actually very, very bad for us, it used to be everywhere-- movies, TV, advertising, even doctors' offices.
Everybody smoked.
Then landmark legislation made it much harder to promote cigarettes here, and as a result, tobacco use is on the decline.
But there are still places in the world where no such legislation was enacted, and as such, smoking has been left to evolve on its own, completely unchecked.
So, we sent Thomas Morton to Indonesia to see what happens to a country that refuses to regulate its tobacco.
_ It's Thomas.
I'm in a clinic in Indonesia.
I'm being cured of my acne by smoking and having something sucked out of my ear.
This is also good for cancer.
Curing cancer, not causing it.
While smoking's been on steady decline in the West from close to half of all adults to 1/5 in the course of 40 years, the East still loves their cigarettes.
In 2005, Philip Morris bought Sampoerna Cigarettes, the third-largest cigarette maker in Indonesia, for $5 billion.
Why spend that much money on a runner-up tobacco company in a country on the opposite side of the Earth? Simple--because Indonesia is a smoker's paradise.
this in a country of a quarter-billion people.
And not only does everyone here smoke, it's also home to the biggest tobacco industry in Asia, so cornering the market is just a simple matter of buying in.
Roy Anise was senior vice president of Philip Morris during Big Tobacco's darkest hour, during the eighties and nineties.
It was a difficult period.
When the lawsuits came, restrictions came, taxation came, it was difficult for the company to really internalize because it was a legal product, it was recognized as having harm, but yet it was considered to be acceptable.
It started to become denormalized, and then demonized, and it moved much quicker than I think than many people had anticipated.
It just changed the game.
It needed to become more creative in a different way.
Unlike in the United States, where cigarettes had been declining since the early 1980s, in many other parts of the world, cigarettes were growing and growing quite well for Philip Morris International, and continue to do so.
Despite having some of the lowest cigarette taxes in the world, the average Indonesian household spends more money on smokes than anything else but rice.
It's a boom town for tobacco.
Tulus Abadi heads the National Commission for Tobacco Control.
He's one of the only guys in the Indo government fighting against smoking.
How big is the problem? How many Indonesians smoke? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ When this video of Indonesia's famous baby smoker hit YouTube, most Westerners were aghast, but Indonesians just shrugged.
By the time they're 16, one out of every 4 Indo teenagers is a regular smoker.
Half if you just count the guys.
_ The average pack of cigarettes costs less than a dollar here, and you can pick up loosies for a few cents.
So, most kids can afford them on their milk money allowance, like our 9-year-old buddy Rifki.
_ _ So, uh, Rifki's picking up his morning pack of cigarettes, and then we're off to school.
Do you think you'll ever be able to get Rifki to quit smoking? _ _ _ _ Why do you think Rifki started smoking? Like, who do you think is to blame for that? _ _ _ _ _ After school let out, Rifki and his pals took us to their neighborhood smoking spot, the old Chinese graveyard.
Just take a right at the cigarette-sponsored badminton court.
So, this is the-- this is the cool kids' spot.
So, what's up, guys? _ _ _ This is a real all-ages group.
This is like, kind of like the cast of, like, Indonesian "Little Rascals" here.
How long have you smoked? _ What do you like about smoking? _ _ Do grownups here care if you smoke? _ This scene isn't, uh, really kosher by American standards, but a number of adults have walked by and a couple of them have kind of, like, clucked, but nobody's--nobody's ringing the alarms.
While smoking is firmly entrenched with Indonesian males, only about 5% of girls have picked up the habit.
Oliva here is 12 and has been smoking since she was 9.
Why did you start smoking? _ _ _ What--what do you like about smoking? _ Do--do girls typically like boys who smoke? _ _ _ Smoking's manly image is reinforced by pervasive advertising.
American banned cigarette ads on TV and radio in 1971.
No, you don't see many wild stallions anymore.
Come to Marlboro Country.
Indonesia not only still advertises on TV and radio, they advertise it everywhere.
You see cigarette ads on every street corner, on playground basketball courts, on posters for major concerts and sporting events.
They even sponsor schools, like the Sampoerna Academy, named after the same family that sold Sampoerna Cigarettes to Philip Morris.
It's as if we had a school called Marlboro Prep.
We've seen Marlboro-branded baby clothes and toys.
Chris Bostic is deputy director of Action on Smoking and Health, one of the biggest anti-smoking lobbyist groups in the U.
S.
They can target children and use cartoons.
I mean, target children in ways that would be unstomachable here anymore.
How hard is it to, like, fight tobacco use? _ _ _ _ The government's kid glove approach makes sense when you consider tobacco here is a $100 billion a year industry and is the second-largest employer in the country.
They're basically too scared of disrupting their revenue stream to rock the boat, which makes the country a play place for foreign tobacco companies, especially ones used to the anti-smoking atmosphere of the West.
In the late eighties, early nineties, the United States was involved in several lawsuits against particularly Asian countries uh, about market access for big tobacco firms like Philip Morris, and won all of them.
Philip Morris buying Sampoerna in 2005 was a bit of a game changer.
Now as a foreign investor, Philip Morris can tap all those trade treaties.
So, even if Indonesia did want to suddenly move forward on tobacco control, they would face all the litigation under every treaty that Indonesia is involved in.
It must be extraordinarily frustrating trying to do this.
Like, how do you feel about the work you do? _ _ _ _ So, not only do Indonesians think smoking's, like, OK, a lot of them actually think it's good for you.
People here believe smoking cures toothaches, clove tobacco cigarettes are good for your breath, hookah water's an antiseptic.
And on top of all that, they have clinics that treat smoking-related illnesses with smoking.
This clinic practices a New-Agey sort of therapy called balur, which uses clove cigarettes to cure a whole host of diseases.
Dr.
Soebagio opened it in 2007 and has so far treated over 30,000 patients.
Is it OK? It's all right? Oh, yes.
Oh, thank you.
Cool.
What are these fancy cigarettes? _ _ _ _ _ Is it all types of cancer or is it just, like, specific ones? No.
All the cancer.
_ The clinic makes their own brand of cigarettes.
These Divine Kreteks are made from tobacco and cloves and have a special filter soaked in some sort of amino acid broth, which supposedly sops up all the free radicals in your bodies, which supposedly is what's causing all that cancer.
So, this is the prep room for my balur treatment, which is basically they rub stuff on you to open up your pores, and that breaks up the free radicals that are collecting in your cells.
At some point, the tobacco comes in and sucks it out and makes you healthy.
OK.
Um, so this is-- what am I signing? I guess I've signed it so it doesn't matter.
Ha ha! Yeah.
I was never really big on Eastern medicine, but so far, this beats my usual doctor's visit.
OK.
Ahh.
The traditional part of balur is pretty much just a vigorous full-body rub with Tylenol, red onions, and a few other household goods.
This clinic's balur, however, adds a few steps, like basting your skin and pores with divine cigarette smoke.
Then a second rubdown, this time with scalding hot water mixed with urea, the same urea that's in our urine.
This is so painful.
Hello.
Heh.
So, so, what is happening right now? _ _ OK.
Thank you.
Thank you, doctor.
Yeah.
While I was doing balur to try to clear up my embarrassing late-twenties acne, the other patients in the clinic were there for far graver illnesses.
So, what are-- what are you being treated-- Hodkin.
Oh, Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Do you do--do you do any other treatment? Do you do, like, chemotherapy or radiation? _ Can I ask you, are you a smoker? _ _ Um, do you have any problems with, with people who are critics of balur? _ _ _ All the free radical talk and baked potato foil wraps were already major red flags for pseudo-scientific hokum, but throwing miracles into the works really piqued my skepticism.
So, we asked a radiologist on one of Jakarta's biggest cancer wards to explain how legit this business really is.
Does this hold up against medical science? _ _ _ _ _ Even though it's not medically recognized or sound, the poor and gullible still flock to these clinics.
What--what happened with your son? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Despite the astronomical cost, both on healthcare and individual lives, it's unlikely that any effort is gonna get to quit smoking.
The only real way to break the cycle is to keep the next generation from starting.
As bad as it is now, they're actually at the beginning of their epidemic curve, because it has one of the largest youth populations in the world, and most people start smoking when they're youths.
So, you got a combination of a large youth population, absolutely no regulations on advertising, including advertising to youth, and a growing per capita income.
That is a recipe for a massive increase in the number of smokers in the next generation.
If you go back in time and try to find a tobacco company that has gone bankrupt, you'd be hard pressed to find one.
It's a business that's gonna continue to be successful for decades.
Heroin is bad.
In fact, it's so fucking bad that once you get hooked on it, you basically only have 3 options.
One, you can quit, which is almost impossible, as evidenced by the over 90% relapse rate; two, you can take so-called replacement therapy drugs like methadone, that are just as addictive; or 3, you can die.
And as such, hardcore addicts will do almost anything they can to quit.
But with so few options that are actually viable, they started turning toward more obscure and extreme cures.
One particular method uses super-powerful hallucinogens that shock the body so much that it actually interrupts the addiction to heroin.
_ Whoo! This is a Bwiti healing ceremony at a harm reduction center in Harlem.
Whoo! Whoo! And this is Dimitri Mugianis, and he cures people of heroin addiction.
He does so using a special voodoo ritual-- somewhat like this.
The main difference is, when it's for kicking heroin, he also incorporates one of the most powerful drugs on earth-- ibogaine.
What is ibogaine? Ibogaine is a hydrochloride, meaning a extract from a plant called iboga.
One of the properties of iboga that was discovered in the early sixties was that it interrupts physical dependency on opiates without withdrawal.
That happened for me.
I was a heroin addict and a methadone addict for 20 years.
How many times did you try to get clean before ibogaine? I probably went cold turkey 50 times.
Right.
So, the only thing that ever worked in 20 years The only thing that ever worked in 20 years.
OK.
So, was ibogaine illegal at this time? Ibogaine has been illegal since Nixon.
Ibogaine was made illegal in 1969 at the height of the hippie movement, and today, lives right along heroin as a Schedule 1 drug.
And although it's legal in most countries, ibogaine has some of the stiffest legal penalties here in America.
So, if you want to use it to get off heroin, you have to leave the States to do so.
After Dimitri used ibogaine to successfully beat his addiction, he became kind of an evangelist for the drug and illegally administered hundreds of treatments to addicts in hotel and motel rooms across the country.
But after a very close call where one of his patients nearly died Hey.
Hey.
Hey.
he realized that he had to find out more about his drug.
So, he went to Africa.
He traveled to Gabon and became an initiate in Bwiti, which is a religion that uses ibogaine, or rather iboga, the indigenous plant that ibogaine is made from, to talk to their ancestors through hallucinations, which in turn induces spiritual enlightenment.
Since then, Dimitri's been incorporating elements of Bwiti rituals while he illegally administers ibogaine to heroin addicts.
That is, until he got busted by the DEA in a sting operation, and since then, he's been conducting a kind of Bwiti self-help group every week at a drug clinic in Harlem with all of the freakiness but none of the ibogaine.
And I want you to open up! Even though Dimitri's ceremonies can look as though the lunatics have taken over the asylum, people continually seek him out to ask him for his help, because heroin is the most addictive drug on earth.
Now, take Matt, for example.
He looks like a linebacker for Purdue, but in reality, he's been a hardcore junkie for over 10 years.
I was sniffing in the back of the car on the way here.
In fact, Matt is so far gone that his own mother is willing to give him up to a bunch of New York voodoo fruitcakes and let them take him to Mexico and give him one of the most powerful drugs on Earth.
That's how bad heroin is.
We're very excited about this.
He's like our baby and we'll take really good care of him.
It's so sad to me, though, that it can't be done here, that it's--I--just angers me to my--bottom of my soul.
And when you see that level of desperation, you realize why people put so much faith in New Age healers like Dimitri.
Thank you, son.
We'll take good care of him, OK? All right.
Call us, too.
Anytime.
This is your new path, honey, and I can't wait to see the amazing things that are gonna happen in your life.
I love you with my heart and soul, baby.
OK, ma.
God bless you, baby.
All right.
To avoid prosecution by the American government, much of the ibogaine underground community has actually moved just south of the border to Mexico, where the drug is still legal.
So, we're about an hour south of Tijuana in a very upscale neighborhood.
It's interesting, because when you start doing a story about underground heroin clinics using sort of tribal African rituals You kind of have an image in your head of sort of dank basements on the Lower East Side, and then all of a sudden, you're in a really fancy Mexican villa by the sea.
It's not what I had in mind.
The reason we came down here is to work with Jeff Israel and his clinic, is because what we're gonna try to do is combine our ritual with the medical ritual.
Right.
Jeff Israel runs a more medical approach to ibogaine at his clinic, and as such incorporates a lot of safety equipment in case anything goes wrong.
If we don't like where the pulse is or starts to go low or gets irregular, we'll slap these on them with 3 leads.
If somebody vomits or aspirates, we can suction them out.
If somebody codes or anything like that, we have oxygen and if there is an emergency, you know, we have an intubation kit.
For Matt's treatment, they're gonna combine his clinical approach with Dimitri's ceremony.
And it was finally time for that ceremony to begin.
But first we had to pick up a longtime heroin user from Brooklyn named Nicole, who's a friend of Jeff Israel's and happened to be in Mexico and also wanted to use ibogaine to try and get clean.
For the first ritual, we had to find a tree by the side of the highway.
So, do you guys know what we're doing now? Uh, we're going to the tree, right? Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know exactly what we're doing there, but-- So, you give this as offerings to the ancestors and to the tree, because this stuff is good.
Everyone likes Fanta, everyone likes booze and candy, so, you offer it up.
I think that for a drug user, I mean, their whole life revolves around ritual.
The ritual of copping, of getting the drugs, procuring the drugs, getting the money, and I think that even problematic drug use is a quest for deeper meaning.
How many times have you tried to get clean? Uh, at least 30.
At least.
What do you hope happens now? I hope I stay clean.
I just--I just want to be happy, man.
You know, I just want to wake up in the morning and, you know, not want to fucking blow my brains out every day.
That would be nice.
Nice change of pace.
Are you worried about what you guys are doing? Are you worried that the rituals get sort of bastardized and--and morph into something else? Yeah, it is a worry, and it is a criticism of me, but that's what culture does, right? Right.
And the thing about an African religion and an African music-- it's very plastic, it bends and molds and shapes, and it'll be different.
Our Bwiti is different.
With all of this, the second they take a test dose, their withdrawal will be gone.
That is fucking for sure.
Every time.
The rituals of the afternoon fed into the ibogaine use of the evening, and that's when things started to get a bit heavy.
When the first ibogaine test dose was administered, Nicole, who was still suspected of being on heroin, showed little reaction, whereas Matt, who was already in full withdrawal, felt it immediately.
And after another quick round of medical tests to check his vital stats, they administered Matt the flood dose, and it was not an easy trip.
This is probably between and we gave it to him in, like, a cocktail, so it got in his system quicker without a capsule.
The most important bit of equipment in this place is the vomit bucket.
Bless you.
Probably 15 hours into this now.
Just gave him some more ibogaine.
This is common.
What he's experiencing now is 15% of what he would have if he was home trying to kick an opiate habit.
OK, this is nothing.
This is baby food.
Just thinking about, like, this crazy crazy life, you know, andI just kind of hope I don't have to go back to it anymore.
But as of right now, I mean, I don't want to.
That in itself is a miracle.
An addict goes from being completely numb physically and emotionally for, you know, one, 5, 10, 20 years to finally feeling their body again and feeling emotions again, and it's like, uh-uh, unacceptable.
With ibogaine, sometimes it's not a favor, you know, You get kicked in the face.
It's iboga saying, "Hello.
" Mama Bwiti saying, "Hello.
What's up?" You know, like a good parent telling you something.
This stuff is miraculous and he's doing--he's doing fine.
It's just, you know, it's just not a fun experience.
You know, there's no-- there's no easy landing.
Even with ibogaine.
Nicole, who was suspected of still being on heroin, did not take her flood dose that night, but instead opted to take her full dosage of ibogaine a few days later without Dimitri's Bwiti ceremony.
It was actually amazing to see the transformation of Matt.
He was healthy and smiling, and he hadn't used drugs since Mexico.
The ibogaine had done its job.
Everything looks so different.
It's just nothing looks the same.
It's weird.
You know, Matt was really suffering in his addiction.
But the difference is just profound.
Just the way he looks, his skin color, the way he's talking.
You know, this is sort of like a textbook example of what iboga can do for a suffering drug addict.
I must admit that at first seeing the rituals and craziness of Bwiti that I was bit skeptical.
But when I saw Matt literally reborn, I was happy to be proved wrong.
And I can only hope that he, like a lot of ibogaine users before him, stays clean.
You feeling good? Good.
Really good, man.
Really good.
_
_ And I travel from New York to Mexico, where an addict tries to kick the most addictive drug in the world by using the scariest drug in the world.
I just want to be happy, you know.
I just want to wake up in the morning and, you know, not want to fucking blow my brains out every day.
That would be nice.
The world is changing.
Now, no one knows where it's going, but we'll be there uncovering the news This is World War III.
culture, and politics that expose the absurdity of the modern condition.
That little child has a huge gun.
This scene isn't really kosher by American standards.
I was interviewing suicide bombers, and they were kids.
This is the world through our eyes.
We win or we die! This is the world of "Vice.
" Hi.
I'm Shane Smith and we're here in the "Vice" offices of Brooklyn, New York.
For our first story this week, we go to Indonesia.
Lucy.
Yes, dear.
Get me a cigarette, will you, hon? Don't say cigarette.
Say Philip Morris.
Oh? Before we woke up to the fact that smoking is actually very, very bad for us, it used to be everywhere-- movies, TV, advertising, even doctors' offices.
Everybody smoked.
Then landmark legislation made it much harder to promote cigarettes here, and as a result, tobacco use is on the decline.
But there are still places in the world where no such legislation was enacted, and as such, smoking has been left to evolve on its own, completely unchecked.
So, we sent Thomas Morton to Indonesia to see what happens to a country that refuses to regulate its tobacco.
_ It's Thomas.
I'm in a clinic in Indonesia.
I'm being cured of my acne by smoking and having something sucked out of my ear.
This is also good for cancer.
Curing cancer, not causing it.
While smoking's been on steady decline in the West from close to half of all adults to 1/5 in the course of 40 years, the East still loves their cigarettes.
In 2005, Philip Morris bought Sampoerna Cigarettes, the third-largest cigarette maker in Indonesia, for $5 billion.
Why spend that much money on a runner-up tobacco company in a country on the opposite side of the Earth? Simple--because Indonesia is a smoker's paradise.
this in a country of a quarter-billion people.
And not only does everyone here smoke, it's also home to the biggest tobacco industry in Asia, so cornering the market is just a simple matter of buying in.
Roy Anise was senior vice president of Philip Morris during Big Tobacco's darkest hour, during the eighties and nineties.
It was a difficult period.
When the lawsuits came, restrictions came, taxation came, it was difficult for the company to really internalize because it was a legal product, it was recognized as having harm, but yet it was considered to be acceptable.
It started to become denormalized, and then demonized, and it moved much quicker than I think than many people had anticipated.
It just changed the game.
It needed to become more creative in a different way.
Unlike in the United States, where cigarettes had been declining since the early 1980s, in many other parts of the world, cigarettes were growing and growing quite well for Philip Morris International, and continue to do so.
Despite having some of the lowest cigarette taxes in the world, the average Indonesian household spends more money on smokes than anything else but rice.
It's a boom town for tobacco.
Tulus Abadi heads the National Commission for Tobacco Control.
He's one of the only guys in the Indo government fighting against smoking.
How big is the problem? How many Indonesians smoke? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ When this video of Indonesia's famous baby smoker hit YouTube, most Westerners were aghast, but Indonesians just shrugged.
By the time they're 16, one out of every 4 Indo teenagers is a regular smoker.
Half if you just count the guys.
_ The average pack of cigarettes costs less than a dollar here, and you can pick up loosies for a few cents.
So, most kids can afford them on their milk money allowance, like our 9-year-old buddy Rifki.
_ _ So, uh, Rifki's picking up his morning pack of cigarettes, and then we're off to school.
Do you think you'll ever be able to get Rifki to quit smoking? _ _ _ _ Why do you think Rifki started smoking? Like, who do you think is to blame for that? _ _ _ _ _ After school let out, Rifki and his pals took us to their neighborhood smoking spot, the old Chinese graveyard.
Just take a right at the cigarette-sponsored badminton court.
So, this is the-- this is the cool kids' spot.
So, what's up, guys? _ _ _ This is a real all-ages group.
This is like, kind of like the cast of, like, Indonesian "Little Rascals" here.
How long have you smoked? _ What do you like about smoking? _ _ Do grownups here care if you smoke? _ This scene isn't, uh, really kosher by American standards, but a number of adults have walked by and a couple of them have kind of, like, clucked, but nobody's--nobody's ringing the alarms.
While smoking is firmly entrenched with Indonesian males, only about 5% of girls have picked up the habit.
Oliva here is 12 and has been smoking since she was 9.
Why did you start smoking? _ _ _ What--what do you like about smoking? _ Do--do girls typically like boys who smoke? _ _ _ Smoking's manly image is reinforced by pervasive advertising.
American banned cigarette ads on TV and radio in 1971.
No, you don't see many wild stallions anymore.
Come to Marlboro Country.
Indonesia not only still advertises on TV and radio, they advertise it everywhere.
You see cigarette ads on every street corner, on playground basketball courts, on posters for major concerts and sporting events.
They even sponsor schools, like the Sampoerna Academy, named after the same family that sold Sampoerna Cigarettes to Philip Morris.
It's as if we had a school called Marlboro Prep.
We've seen Marlboro-branded baby clothes and toys.
Chris Bostic is deputy director of Action on Smoking and Health, one of the biggest anti-smoking lobbyist groups in the U.
S.
They can target children and use cartoons.
I mean, target children in ways that would be unstomachable here anymore.
How hard is it to, like, fight tobacco use? _ _ _ _ The government's kid glove approach makes sense when you consider tobacco here is a $100 billion a year industry and is the second-largest employer in the country.
They're basically too scared of disrupting their revenue stream to rock the boat, which makes the country a play place for foreign tobacco companies, especially ones used to the anti-smoking atmosphere of the West.
In the late eighties, early nineties, the United States was involved in several lawsuits against particularly Asian countries uh, about market access for big tobacco firms like Philip Morris, and won all of them.
Philip Morris buying Sampoerna in 2005 was a bit of a game changer.
Now as a foreign investor, Philip Morris can tap all those trade treaties.
So, even if Indonesia did want to suddenly move forward on tobacco control, they would face all the litigation under every treaty that Indonesia is involved in.
It must be extraordinarily frustrating trying to do this.
Like, how do you feel about the work you do? _ _ _ _ So, not only do Indonesians think smoking's, like, OK, a lot of them actually think it's good for you.
People here believe smoking cures toothaches, clove tobacco cigarettes are good for your breath, hookah water's an antiseptic.
And on top of all that, they have clinics that treat smoking-related illnesses with smoking.
This clinic practices a New-Agey sort of therapy called balur, which uses clove cigarettes to cure a whole host of diseases.
Dr.
Soebagio opened it in 2007 and has so far treated over 30,000 patients.
Is it OK? It's all right? Oh, yes.
Oh, thank you.
Cool.
What are these fancy cigarettes? _ _ _ _ _ Is it all types of cancer or is it just, like, specific ones? No.
All the cancer.
_ The clinic makes their own brand of cigarettes.
These Divine Kreteks are made from tobacco and cloves and have a special filter soaked in some sort of amino acid broth, which supposedly sops up all the free radicals in your bodies, which supposedly is what's causing all that cancer.
So, this is the prep room for my balur treatment, which is basically they rub stuff on you to open up your pores, and that breaks up the free radicals that are collecting in your cells.
At some point, the tobacco comes in and sucks it out and makes you healthy.
OK.
Um, so this is-- what am I signing? I guess I've signed it so it doesn't matter.
Ha ha! Yeah.
I was never really big on Eastern medicine, but so far, this beats my usual doctor's visit.
OK.
Ahh.
The traditional part of balur is pretty much just a vigorous full-body rub with Tylenol, red onions, and a few other household goods.
This clinic's balur, however, adds a few steps, like basting your skin and pores with divine cigarette smoke.
Then a second rubdown, this time with scalding hot water mixed with urea, the same urea that's in our urine.
This is so painful.
Hello.
Heh.
So, so, what is happening right now? _ _ OK.
Thank you.
Thank you, doctor.
Yeah.
While I was doing balur to try to clear up my embarrassing late-twenties acne, the other patients in the clinic were there for far graver illnesses.
So, what are-- what are you being treated-- Hodkin.
Oh, Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Do you do--do you do any other treatment? Do you do, like, chemotherapy or radiation? _ Can I ask you, are you a smoker? _ _ Um, do you have any problems with, with people who are critics of balur? _ _ _ All the free radical talk and baked potato foil wraps were already major red flags for pseudo-scientific hokum, but throwing miracles into the works really piqued my skepticism.
So, we asked a radiologist on one of Jakarta's biggest cancer wards to explain how legit this business really is.
Does this hold up against medical science? _ _ _ _ _ Even though it's not medically recognized or sound, the poor and gullible still flock to these clinics.
What--what happened with your son? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Despite the astronomical cost, both on healthcare and individual lives, it's unlikely that any effort is gonna get to quit smoking.
The only real way to break the cycle is to keep the next generation from starting.
As bad as it is now, they're actually at the beginning of their epidemic curve, because it has one of the largest youth populations in the world, and most people start smoking when they're youths.
So, you got a combination of a large youth population, absolutely no regulations on advertising, including advertising to youth, and a growing per capita income.
That is a recipe for a massive increase in the number of smokers in the next generation.
If you go back in time and try to find a tobacco company that has gone bankrupt, you'd be hard pressed to find one.
It's a business that's gonna continue to be successful for decades.
Heroin is bad.
In fact, it's so fucking bad that once you get hooked on it, you basically only have 3 options.
One, you can quit, which is almost impossible, as evidenced by the over 90% relapse rate; two, you can take so-called replacement therapy drugs like methadone, that are just as addictive; or 3, you can die.
And as such, hardcore addicts will do almost anything they can to quit.
But with so few options that are actually viable, they started turning toward more obscure and extreme cures.
One particular method uses super-powerful hallucinogens that shock the body so much that it actually interrupts the addiction to heroin.
_ Whoo! This is a Bwiti healing ceremony at a harm reduction center in Harlem.
Whoo! Whoo! And this is Dimitri Mugianis, and he cures people of heroin addiction.
He does so using a special voodoo ritual-- somewhat like this.
The main difference is, when it's for kicking heroin, he also incorporates one of the most powerful drugs on earth-- ibogaine.
What is ibogaine? Ibogaine is a hydrochloride, meaning a extract from a plant called iboga.
One of the properties of iboga that was discovered in the early sixties was that it interrupts physical dependency on opiates without withdrawal.
That happened for me.
I was a heroin addict and a methadone addict for 20 years.
How many times did you try to get clean before ibogaine? I probably went cold turkey 50 times.
Right.
So, the only thing that ever worked in 20 years The only thing that ever worked in 20 years.
OK.
So, was ibogaine illegal at this time? Ibogaine has been illegal since Nixon.
Ibogaine was made illegal in 1969 at the height of the hippie movement, and today, lives right along heroin as a Schedule 1 drug.
And although it's legal in most countries, ibogaine has some of the stiffest legal penalties here in America.
So, if you want to use it to get off heroin, you have to leave the States to do so.
After Dimitri used ibogaine to successfully beat his addiction, he became kind of an evangelist for the drug and illegally administered hundreds of treatments to addicts in hotel and motel rooms across the country.
But after a very close call where one of his patients nearly died Hey.
Hey.
Hey.
he realized that he had to find out more about his drug.
So, he went to Africa.
He traveled to Gabon and became an initiate in Bwiti, which is a religion that uses ibogaine, or rather iboga, the indigenous plant that ibogaine is made from, to talk to their ancestors through hallucinations, which in turn induces spiritual enlightenment.
Since then, Dimitri's been incorporating elements of Bwiti rituals while he illegally administers ibogaine to heroin addicts.
That is, until he got busted by the DEA in a sting operation, and since then, he's been conducting a kind of Bwiti self-help group every week at a drug clinic in Harlem with all of the freakiness but none of the ibogaine.
And I want you to open up! Even though Dimitri's ceremonies can look as though the lunatics have taken over the asylum, people continually seek him out to ask him for his help, because heroin is the most addictive drug on earth.
Now, take Matt, for example.
He looks like a linebacker for Purdue, but in reality, he's been a hardcore junkie for over 10 years.
I was sniffing in the back of the car on the way here.
In fact, Matt is so far gone that his own mother is willing to give him up to a bunch of New York voodoo fruitcakes and let them take him to Mexico and give him one of the most powerful drugs on Earth.
That's how bad heroin is.
We're very excited about this.
He's like our baby and we'll take really good care of him.
It's so sad to me, though, that it can't be done here, that it's--I--just angers me to my--bottom of my soul.
And when you see that level of desperation, you realize why people put so much faith in New Age healers like Dimitri.
Thank you, son.
We'll take good care of him, OK? All right.
Call us, too.
Anytime.
This is your new path, honey, and I can't wait to see the amazing things that are gonna happen in your life.
I love you with my heart and soul, baby.
OK, ma.
God bless you, baby.
All right.
To avoid prosecution by the American government, much of the ibogaine underground community has actually moved just south of the border to Mexico, where the drug is still legal.
So, we're about an hour south of Tijuana in a very upscale neighborhood.
It's interesting, because when you start doing a story about underground heroin clinics using sort of tribal African rituals You kind of have an image in your head of sort of dank basements on the Lower East Side, and then all of a sudden, you're in a really fancy Mexican villa by the sea.
It's not what I had in mind.
The reason we came down here is to work with Jeff Israel and his clinic, is because what we're gonna try to do is combine our ritual with the medical ritual.
Right.
Jeff Israel runs a more medical approach to ibogaine at his clinic, and as such incorporates a lot of safety equipment in case anything goes wrong.
If we don't like where the pulse is or starts to go low or gets irregular, we'll slap these on them with 3 leads.
If somebody vomits or aspirates, we can suction them out.
If somebody codes or anything like that, we have oxygen and if there is an emergency, you know, we have an intubation kit.
For Matt's treatment, they're gonna combine his clinical approach with Dimitri's ceremony.
And it was finally time for that ceremony to begin.
But first we had to pick up a longtime heroin user from Brooklyn named Nicole, who's a friend of Jeff Israel's and happened to be in Mexico and also wanted to use ibogaine to try and get clean.
For the first ritual, we had to find a tree by the side of the highway.
So, do you guys know what we're doing now? Uh, we're going to the tree, right? Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know exactly what we're doing there, but-- So, you give this as offerings to the ancestors and to the tree, because this stuff is good.
Everyone likes Fanta, everyone likes booze and candy, so, you offer it up.
I think that for a drug user, I mean, their whole life revolves around ritual.
The ritual of copping, of getting the drugs, procuring the drugs, getting the money, and I think that even problematic drug use is a quest for deeper meaning.
How many times have you tried to get clean? Uh, at least 30.
At least.
What do you hope happens now? I hope I stay clean.
I just--I just want to be happy, man.
You know, I just want to wake up in the morning and, you know, not want to fucking blow my brains out every day.
That would be nice.
Nice change of pace.
Are you worried about what you guys are doing? Are you worried that the rituals get sort of bastardized and--and morph into something else? Yeah, it is a worry, and it is a criticism of me, but that's what culture does, right? Right.
And the thing about an African religion and an African music-- it's very plastic, it bends and molds and shapes, and it'll be different.
Our Bwiti is different.
With all of this, the second they take a test dose, their withdrawal will be gone.
That is fucking for sure.
Every time.
The rituals of the afternoon fed into the ibogaine use of the evening, and that's when things started to get a bit heavy.
When the first ibogaine test dose was administered, Nicole, who was still suspected of being on heroin, showed little reaction, whereas Matt, who was already in full withdrawal, felt it immediately.
And after another quick round of medical tests to check his vital stats, they administered Matt the flood dose, and it was not an easy trip.
This is probably between and we gave it to him in, like, a cocktail, so it got in his system quicker without a capsule.
The most important bit of equipment in this place is the vomit bucket.
Bless you.
Probably 15 hours into this now.
Just gave him some more ibogaine.
This is common.
What he's experiencing now is 15% of what he would have if he was home trying to kick an opiate habit.
OK, this is nothing.
This is baby food.
Just thinking about, like, this crazy crazy life, you know, andI just kind of hope I don't have to go back to it anymore.
But as of right now, I mean, I don't want to.
That in itself is a miracle.
An addict goes from being completely numb physically and emotionally for, you know, one, 5, 10, 20 years to finally feeling their body again and feeling emotions again, and it's like, uh-uh, unacceptable.
With ibogaine, sometimes it's not a favor, you know, You get kicked in the face.
It's iboga saying, "Hello.
" Mama Bwiti saying, "Hello.
What's up?" You know, like a good parent telling you something.
This stuff is miraculous and he's doing--he's doing fine.
It's just, you know, it's just not a fun experience.
You know, there's no-- there's no easy landing.
Even with ibogaine.
Nicole, who was suspected of still being on heroin, did not take her flood dose that night, but instead opted to take her full dosage of ibogaine a few days later without Dimitri's Bwiti ceremony.
It was actually amazing to see the transformation of Matt.
He was healthy and smiling, and he hadn't used drugs since Mexico.
The ibogaine had done its job.
Everything looks so different.
It's just nothing looks the same.
It's weird.
You know, Matt was really suffering in his addiction.
But the difference is just profound.
Just the way he looks, his skin color, the way he's talking.
You know, this is sort of like a textbook example of what iboga can do for a suffering drug addict.
I must admit that at first seeing the rituals and craziness of Bwiti that I was bit skeptical.
But when I saw Matt literally reborn, I was happy to be proved wrong.
And I can only hope that he, like a lot of ibogaine users before him, stays clean.
You feeling good? Good.
Really good, man.
Really good.
_