Prominent Cannabis and Ibogaine Activist Arrested in Idaho Speaks Out

If Irvin Dana Beal it’s one thing, in my view, it’s obviously a man on a mission. Case in point: the first time I met Dana was during a visit for Forbes Online in 2017 at the annual NYC Cannabis Parade (which only honored him with this last year), I went up to him in Union Square to ask for a photo and he immediately ordered me to get some guys to help lift the huge inflatable joint.

The next time I ran into him was about a year later at the annual World Cannabis Conference and Business Expo at the Javits Center in the media area, patiently waiting for him to introduce himself and offer some informational material on ibogaine to the returning Roger Stone. and back on the phone behind his security guys and charged a few days later. The third time I met him, about two years ago, he was handing out some free buds at a protest camp to house the homeless.

Since Beal’s arrest for allegedly marijuana trafficking Last week in Idaho, after a car breakdown in sub-freezing conditions, the longtime activist showed the same level unilateral devotion to his purpose – to provide processed ibogaine powder and/or consumer products to the masses for therapeutic use (and some cannabis, of course) – so far, despite being held in the Gooding County Jail on $250,000 bond.

His message also remained clear, albeit slightly tailored to his current circumstances.

“I want them to know that if they keep me here, there’s a good chance I’m going to legalize pot,” Beal said, sounding more or less (minus the crappy connection) his usual self, if maybe a little tired. at least partly due to a lack of potty to help him sleep.

“Right now they are legalizing [cannabis] at the federal level, and all states will fall. And if you combine it with ibogaine, it will definitely pass,” he added.

Now in his late 70s, with a heart condition among other ailments, Beal hopes his bail will be reduced to an affordable amount that will free him and his daughter from pretrial detention a fundraiser has started to help cover the costs of such a scenario.

As was often the case over the last year we were slowly working on a story before his arrest, Beal also gave me an unrelated assignment over the phone from prison recently: in this case, to relay information to another reporter about her potential of ibogaine to treat not only substance abuse and PTSD but possibly also traumatic brain injury and others neurological and/or psychological disordersapparently in comparatively lower doses than used in the past.

As for the US government, he added, “Ukraine is willing use this material against the Russians. Why are you not willing to use this material? to fight crystal meth and fentanyl overdose? Why won’t you study it?’

In fact, Beal is so passionate about the increasingly well-known, plant-based African entheogen, and what he believes is its potential to disrupt today’s medical and pharmaceutical industry, that he has bet his eventual retirement as well as a daily life in it.

“I’m a courier,” Bill said quietly over the slightly flared prison line. “That’s what I do”.

In recent years, he has worked to apply for an appropriate adult occupational license here in New York, where he has lived for decades. Beal has also co-founded his own ibogaine company, IboGrow, and related brands, and has procured and frequently transported (according to all relevant local laws) Voacanga africana-produced ibogaine from a processing plant in Ghana run by activist, author, former Black Panther leader and businessman Dhoruba Bin-Wahad.

During an interview for Forbes Online last weekend at Harlem’s spotless but flowery new Renaissance Hotel, Bin-Wahad, who was in town to visit his son and to receive terminal cancer treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, noted that he and Beal have known each other far longer than they shared jobs.

“I was friends with Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and the Yippies, so when I got out of prison, I had a little reception at William Kunstler’s stone in the Village, and Dana was there. So Dana walked up and said if there was anything she could do for me, she would, and she gave me his number.”

“I lived in Africa and my son you see here was born in Africa and I brought him back here [to the U.S.] when he was only four years old. We stayed 14 years, and I still went back and forth. What happened was, Dana had explained to me how Tabernanthe iboga, the root, the plant, was used by the Bwiti people of West Africa as a psychedelic ritual to communicate with the ancestors, but it has a side effect: it can help end all kinds of addictions, even smoking.”

“We went to Congress to try to get it removed from Schedule I. Of course the US government refused, because they’re involved in addiction treatment.”

“Since it was illegal in the US, Dana asked me to set up a processing center, maybe in 2015. At that time, I knew people who processed any kind of agricultural products.”

“Now, Tabernanthi it doesn’t grow in Ghana,” where his company Trans-African Agro-Processing is located, Bin-Wahad explained. “But a cousin of his, Voacanga, does. And we knew some people in South Africa and India who wanted it, so we processed it and sent it. And they had about an 87% relapse-free cure rate.”

Life got in the way for a few years, he said. “And then we revived it again in 2020, 2021. We got a chemist and he set up the new lab and started processing. That’s what we’re doing right now. We are looking for capital to expand the lab and we have a good business model.”

Regarding the U.S. government’s reluctance to study ibogaine thus far, Bin-Wahad added, “It’s striking that the state would block treatment unless it wants these problems to continue to fester.”