Psychedelic research timeline
Opioid Use Disorder (OUD): the psychedelic research timeline
OUD is the indication most closely associated with ibogaine, yet much treatment occurred outside conventional trials. The central editorial fact is the tension between a persistent interruption-of-withdrawal signal and a safety profile that blocks ordinary development.
Milestones are editorially selected from Blossom’s research catalogue. Future markers are limited to important trials with dated public guidance and are shown as planned, not promised.
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The observation
1962 to 1997Lotsof describes opioid withdrawal interrupted outside a clinical programme.1962
Lotsof observes opioid withdrawal interrupted
Howard Lotsof, then a heroin user in his teens, takes ibogaine recreationally and finds his withdrawal symptoms gone.
The founding observation of the entire anti-addiction case for ibogaine came from someone taking it for fun and noticing that something else had happened. He was not withdrawing, and he did not want the drug. Lotsof spent the next four decades trying to turn that into a medicine.
It is an unusually honest origin story, and it sets the pattern for what follows. The signal here has always been strong enough to keep people interested and never been produced under conditions that would satisfy a regulator. Fifty-one years pass between this moment and the first ibogaine trial in our database.
What would it take to test a claim like this properly? A randomised comparison against the current standard of care in opioid use disorder, powered for relapse rather than for withdrawal scores. That study has still not been run.
Small clinical studies
1998 to 2021Ketamine and ibogaine move through pilots while cardiac risk becomes unavoidable.1998-01
Ketamine psychotherapy for heroin dependence
A double-blind dose-comparison trial in Leningrad, running in parallel with the first depression work.
Two-year follow-up data from a randomised trial in a treatment population Western research would not reach for another two decades. It ran at the same time as Berman’s Yale study, with no contact between the two.
Addiction and depression separated into different research lineages here and stayed separate. The addiction line goes quiet for years and only resurfaces in the 2020s with the UK alcohol programme further along this canvas.
2014-11
Radboud University
Radboud opioid pilot runs for six years
An open-label, single-fixed-dose pilot in opioid-dependent patients takes six and a half years to complete.
Open-label means everyone knows who is getting the drug, so expectation cannot be separated from effect. Single fixed dose means no titration. It is a modest design, and it still took six and a half years to finish.
That duration is the point. Recruiting opioid-dependent participants into an inpatient study of a cardiotoxic Schedule I compound, in an academic centre with no commercial sponsor, is close to the hardest thing to do in this field. Meanwhile the clinics on the lane above were treating people continuously throughout.
The pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic results reached print in 2024, a decade after the trial opened.
2015-01
Frontiers in Pharmacology
ended earlyThe heart problem is named
A review sets out ibogaine’s effect on cardiac conduction, and the field acquires a mechanism for the deaths it already knew about.
Ibogaine blocks a potassium channel in heart muscle called hERG. That lengthens the QT interval, the window during which the heart’s electrical system resets, and a long enough QT interval can tip into torsades de pointes, an arrhythmia that kills. This is not a rare idiosyncratic reaction. It is a dose-dependent pharmacological property of the compound.
Ibogaine is also usually given to people with several of the things that make QT prolongation more dangerous: opioid dependence, methadone (itself QT-prolonging), electrolyte disturbance from vomiting, dehydration, poor cardiac health, and sometimes slow CYP2D6 metabolism. The risks stack.
Two companion papers in 2016 asked the practical questions that follow: how toxic is ibogaine, and what dose is safe? Neither could give a clean answer, and the honest reading is that the therapeutic window is narrow enough that dosing without cardiac monitoring, electrolyte correction and resuscitation capability is indefensible. Some clinics do all of that. Not all of them do.
2020-10
ICEERS
ICEERS methadone detoxification study
A Phase II study of ibogaine for methadone detoxification, run by a non-profit research institute.
Methadone is the hardest opioid to come off, because its long half-life stretches withdrawal over weeks. It is also the population where the anti-withdrawal claim for ibogaine would matter most, and the population where the cardiac risk is highest, since methadone prolongs the QT interval on its own.
ICEERS is a non-profit, which matters for what happens to the data. Work funded by a foundation rather than a sponsor tends to be published whatever it shows.
2021-08
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
ended earlyAdverse events systematically reviewed
An updated systematic review pulls the scattered ibogaine harm reports into one place.
Systematic reviews are how a field finds signals too rare for any single study to catch. This one covers 2015 to 2020 and updates an earlier review, which tells you something in itself: the harm literature has to be periodically re-gathered because it accumulates as isolated case reports rather than as trial safety data.
A companion observational study published in the same month reported on the safety of ibogaine administration during supervised detoxification. Both are worth reading together, because the gap between what happens under monitoring and what happens without it is the whole practical question.
The analogue strategy
2022 onwardsMedicinal chemistry tries to preserve anti-addiction effects without the cardiac signal.2023-02
Nature
Analogues disrupt opioid use without the cardiac signal
A new class of iboga alkaloids reproduces the anti-addiction effect in animals while dropping the hERG activity that makes ibogaine dangerous.
This is the most important scientific development on the canvas, and it is easy to under-read. Chemists rebuilt the molecule to keep the kappa-opioid and neuroplasticity effects while removing the potassium-channel block responsible for the QT prolongation. In animals, the anti-addiction behaviour survives the surgery.
If it holds in humans, ibogaine’s central dilemma dissolves: you would have the effect without the arrhythmia risk, and a patentable molecule that a company can afford to develop properly. Follow-on work through 2026 extends the same approach to alcohol drinking.
The caution is the usual one, and it is not small. Animal models of addiction predict human results badly, and a compound that is safer on paper still has to prove it works. Note also what this does to the ibogaine question itself: if the analogues succeed, the parent compound may never get the trial it has been waiting sixty years for.
2025-04
ended earlyA methadone-maintenance psilocybin study does not deliver
A registered psilocybin study for people with OUD on methadone maintenance does not produce the planned evidence, illustrating how thin the non-ibogaine record remains.
Opioid Use Disorder (OUD)
The ibogaine story, its cardiac constraint and the search for safer analogues
Research Landscape
What the registered trials connected to Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) look like when you line them up. Counts come from Blossom’s trial records as of August 2026.
How fast is Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) research growing?
SourcedRegistered trials by recorded study-start year; 2 earlier trials began before 2013. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total research effort: only registered trials with a recorded start date are counted (25 of 25 tracked). Recent years under-count because of registration lag; striped bars are still filling in or are planned starts.
What's live right now, and what stopped?
SourcedRegistry status of all 25 Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) trials Blossom tracks. Orange marks trials recruiting or opening.
Don't read stopped trials as failures: trials end early for funding, recruitment, and strategy reasons too. Status is as last synced from the registry; some 'recruiting' trials may already have finished.
Which compounds carry the Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) research?
SourcedTrials per compound. Orange marks the most-studied compound.
Don't read shares as adding to 100%: a trial testing several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. Trial volume signals research attention, not evidence quality.
Publication Landscape
How the 40 papers Blossom links to Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) line up by year, compound and journal. This is the psychedelic-relevant literature in Blossom's records as of August 2026, not the condition's full medical literature.
How has Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) research grown?
SourcedTracked papers by publication year; 4 earlier papers published before 2012. Click a year for the running total.
Don't read as total output: only the 40 of 40 tracked papers with a recorded publication date are counted, and these are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks, not a complete bibliography. The current year is still filling in.
Which compounds shape Opioid Use Disorder (OUD)?
SourcedTracked papers per compound. Orange marks the largest literature.
A paper studying several compounds counts once per compound, and placebo comparator arms are not shown. These are the psychedelic-relevant papers Blossom tracks.
Where is Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) research published?
SourcedTracked papers per journal. Orange marks the most-used journal.
Counts the journal recorded on each tracked paper; papers without a journal on file are omitted. Blossom tracks psychedelic-relevant papers rather than each journal's full catalogue.