PODCAST
Listen to all our interviews, talks, and more, to do a deep dive on Bwiti and Iboga ahead of our summit.
The Iboga Leadership Summit, taking place in Gabon from 21–24 June, brings together dedicated voices around Iboga and Ibogaine. Bridging living Bwiti culture, advancing scientific progress, and time-honoured traditions, the summit offers a unique space for listening and learning. This podcast features reflections from speakers and conversations with guests who will speak at the summit, sharing perspectives that shape the gathering’s dialogue and vision.
In the fourth episode of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, harm reduction advocate Susan Ousterman offers insights into what speaking truth to power is like in a reality where it’s easier to access illicit substances than mental health care.
Susan is the Executive Director of the Vilomah Foundation. Vilomah: A Sanskrit word meaning “out of natural order,” which relates to the experience of losing a child, or another loved one, in a tragic, unexpected, or premature way.
After losing her son, Tyler, in 2020, Susan made a list of the issues that haunted her most; all the systemic intersections that had failed to save him. She wanted to address each one to prevent these tragedies from happening to others. The Vilomah Foundation has formed resultantly over the last five years and includes policing personnel, harm reduction advocates, grief educators, and Iboga/ine treatment providers.
In this conversation, Susan tells Ros Stone from the Iboga Leadership Summit team about how the nature of advocacy work changes when it’s done from a wellspring of love and grief; we explore working definitions of “addiction” within a policy landscape sculpted by social stigmas and racial prejudices, and how “hierarchies” of stigmatisation can affect treatment choices and availability.
We also discuss the Vilomah Foundation’s commitment to the North Star Ethics Pledge, and the need for the Global North to avoid repeating “what we’ve done to tobacco, cannabis, and opium” in relation to Iboga and Ibogaine. This includes resisting the treatment of Ibogaine as just another commodity or molecule, and instead recognising its interrelation with Iboga and its cultural lineage, protecting its sustainability, and ensuring that the communities who steward it are neither erased nor exploited.
Susan Ousterman will be joining the Iboga Leadership Summit, where she’s keen to understand “what responsible reciprocity really looks like.”
The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers and environmentalists. And everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.
On 21-24 June, in Libreville, Gabon
Details and tickets:
