The Aussie veterans turning to ancient psychedelics in a last ditch hope of curing PTSD and drug addictions

The white navy dress uniform lay crumpled on the hotel room floor, as if the owner had dissolved into nothingness, leaving only the uniform and his medals.

And that’s how “Falcon”, the Navy medic, felt. He was in the dissociated, euphoric state that ketamine users call the “K-hole.” He had been running off to the bathroom to use it during his Anzac Day duties, and late that night, his mind and body felt detached.

Falcon looked at the medals he had earned with the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Bronze Star from serving with the US forces as if they were someone else’s decorations.

“I looked at the uniform and thought, ‘You fucking dog, how could you do this to your country, to your family?’ And that was it. I presented myself to the medical department the next day.”

More than once, Falcon had considered taking his own life.

He decided to live and to seek treatment. It was the start of a long journey of recovery that took him to Zimbabwe in Southern Africa.

In January, Falcon was in a car with two former comrades headed for Nyanga in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. The three veterans would spend two weeks in a remote cabin undergoing treatment with iboga, a traditional plant medicine sourced from Gabon in West Africa.

For millennia, the Bwiti people of Gabon have used this psychedelic drug in initiations and other rituals to attain self-mastery and a spiritual connection to their ancestors. Now it’s proving highly effective in treating post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.

A Stanford University study published in July 2024 found that military veterans with traumatic brain injuries treated with ibogaine, one of 13 alkaloids in the bark of the iboga root, experienced dramatic improvements in depression, anxiety, and cognitive function.

For Falcon, iboga was his last chance. Ketamine, that “putrid drug” had gotten him through his combat service, but now it was ruining his relationships and would eventually kill him, he believed.

After two unsuccessful stints in rehab, his ketamine use remained out of control.

‘I feel like I’m rotting inside’

For years, he had thrown himself into his work in a special operations unit focusing on domestic counter-terrorism, hostage rescue, and specialised maritime/aerial recovery. He even took on an extra part-time role with NSW Ambulance as a paramedic.

On the job, he projected strength and courage, like his Facebook avatar, a supermuscular Popeye. But it was ketamine, not Popeye’s spinach, that kept that mask in place.

“Hiding was one of my greatest skills. In intense situations, I was just super calm. I needed to be the rock for everybody else. It was humiliating to realise that I wasn’t the powerful person on the outside that I thought I was.”

Two weeks before coming to Zimbabwe, he had ceased taking the antidepressants he had been on for two years. The punishing withdrawals left him emotionally unstable, dizzy, and nauseous.

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The breaking point wasn’t the traumatic memory of combat experiences but “a moral injury”. A false and vexatious allegation was made against him, and his chain of command failed to afford him procedural fairness or provide appropriate support throughout the process.

“After 28 years of service — after repeatedly putting my life on the line — to have my command not stand behind me was devastating,” he said.

This injustice led to a spiral into PTSD that brought him to the ketamine binge on Anzac Day 2024. Owning up to his substance use was the first step to recovery, but it also ended his career. “Then you lose your job over it. I went in there and was told, ‘How does it feel to be in the penthouse and then to be in the gutter?’

“I feel like I’m rotting inside,” he said through tears.

Following comrades to Zimbabwe

His comrades, ex-special forces members Damien Mander and “Baz” were returning for another round of treatments. They had persuaded Falcon to come to Zimbabwe.

“Iboga is not a cure,” said Mander, who was on his fourth set of treatments. “It is not a fix. For me, it was a key. A brutal, uncompromising key that unlocked a door I had been actively barricading.”

For Mander, a former navy clearance diver and special forces sniper, it was “the most psychologically violent, demanding, humbling, and ultimately constructive process” he had ever faced.

“This was not an experience; it was a forensic audit of an entire life,” he said.

”In the military’s elite units, selection is designed to break you down before rebuilding what remains into something purposeful. Iboga was that process, accelerated beyond anything I thought possible. It cut through every cell of my identity, stripped away layers of armour, and forced me to confront who I had become rather than who I told myself I was.”

Mander had come back to continue his recovery from PTSD and a blast-related traumatic brain injury and to refocus on his post-military work in African wildlife conservation.

Iboga does not tell you what you want to hear

Baz had his first treatment in March 2025, and kicked his ketamine habit cold turkey. His ketamine use had begun recreationally and continued while he was in Iraq serving as a navy clearance diver with the Australian special forces in 2003.

By 2006, when Baz was working as a private contractor in Iraq, it had become an addiction. Ketamine became a means of switching off, like going into flight mode. Being in a combat zone was a lottery, he had been lucky to survive and had used ketamine to take the edge off and to sleep.

Ketamine became entrenched in his life, a reward for work and a replacement for the therapy that he needed. After one torrid night on iboga, the desire for it disappeared.

Baz was back again because his marriage was under strain due to his bad temper.

“When I get frustrated, I tell people exactly what I think, I read them their horoscope, so to speak. I want to get into the nuts and bolts of my anger. I want to be more stoic, especially after a few beers,” he said, wincing at the memory of a recent incident.

Through iboga, Baz now understands that his father’s abusive behaviour in the family was a trigger for his anger issues.

A few days earlier, the three men underwent detoxification with kambo, a medicine derived from the poisonous, waxy secretions of the giant monkey frog found in the Amazon Basin. This was burned into the surface of their skin to prepare for their iboga treatment.

A storm was about to hit as traditional healer Lewis Mbwela arrived in the dark. Mbwela had a long struggle with alcohol before beginning his journey with iboga three years ago.

He travelled to Gabon for training with a 10th generation shaman of the Bwiti people, and the rituals he performs are strictly traditional.

He screens each patient carefully; iboga is not right for everyone, especially those with heart conditions.

Mbwela is a shaman, not a doctor. This is a ceremony, not a consultation. Mbwela honours the custodians of iboga and the medicine itself, which he says has its own consciousness.

That night, he emerged from a back room dressed in traditional kente cloth and face paint, and he burned sage to purify the space of negative energy. He spoke softly about the “wisdom of the medicine” how it would “find its path “ through the men, and he advised them to “trust the process”.

Not a recreational drug experience

Over the next eight hours, the medicine would take an inventory of each man’s mind and the attachments they were holding onto.

He administered the first dose, several tablespoons of the coarse dry granules to each man. Trance-like music played on a speaker. It was a clatter of polyrhythmic sounds that were conceived by the Bwiti people from their experiences on iboga. The mood in the room turned quiet and reflective while outside the rain pelted down amid thunder and lightning.

“The soul-arse kicking has begun,” said Mander. Mander spoke of his first experience with iboga.

“With my eyes closed, my life detonated into motion. Memories firing at impossible speed, selecting moments at random, playing them briefly before discarding them. Fear. Ego. Trauma. Resentment. Addiction. Regret. Nothing was filtered. Nothing was softened. It felt like a hundred lifetimes of therapy compressed into a single night.

Mander had expected to be transported to the battlefield of Iraq but instead, it was his childhood and long-dead family members that appeared to him.

”Roughly 70 per cent of the journey was deeply confronting. Of that, a portion was so dark it redefined my understanding of suffering and the possibility of hell. The remaining fragments were moments of clarity. Early memories. My grandmother. Forgiveness. Gratitude. Purpose. Connection.”

Mbwela expected Falcon to go through a detoxing process in his first ceremony. There were no hallucinations or psychedelic effects; in fact, he was struggling to keep the medicine down. By the second or third dose, each man had vomited or defecated explosively, or both.

This was not a recreational drug experience. Mbwela continued to dispense more medicine until each man settled down to the parade of images and thoughts in his mind.

”Iboga does not tell you what you want to hear,” Mander said.

“It does not inspire. It does not reassure. It confronts. It demands accountability. The medicine becomes the teacher. Your conscience becomes the voice.

”Iboga did not fix anything. Only I can do that. What it offered was illumination, a path through accumulated experience, my own and those that came before me. It felt like being held by ancestors, not as a warrior or a leader, but as the child I once was, being reminded of the responsibility that comes with being alive.”

One part of a full treatment regime

Mbwela does not offer iboga as a miracle cure. The real work begins after the treatment, and the integration of the experience is critical to success. The medicine gives people the tools to make lasting change and his clients may return time and again for more treatment, he said.

The three vets would spend two weeks in the mountains and have a total of five treatment nights. Each treatment was different, with different thoughts, images, and messages.

To go through it together was a blessing, a kind of return to barracks for the three friends, and they debriefed each treatment amid farting contests and the recounting of old stories. A vial of ashes belonging to a friend who succumbed to ketamine was a reminder of the stakes.

On the second treatment night, I decided to try it for myself.

I experienced pins and needles in my arms and legs. The medicine was scanning my body, finding its way to where it needed to work, said Mbwela.

The second dose had a powerful and urgent laxative effect, and on rubbery legs, I nearly didn’t make the bathroom.

The candle flame cast tiny shadow figures on the wall, flitting and dancing at the edge of my vision. Baz reported that he saw little cartoon ducks, which I would have preferred.

I shambled back into the lounge room, flopped down on a mattress by the fire, and closed my eyes.

The Bwiti music seemed to connect with the medicine, and a slideshow began to play in my mind to its discordant tempo. I was taken to a cool green place by a lake and passed above the water through a lush curtain of vines that turned into wallpaper.

With each layer that opened to me, I felt I was bursting through the scenery of my memories, back to childhood: me in bed, Mum singing Teddy Bear’s Picnic, a golden retriever in the back garden, and then back to the jungle lake, now darker with shapes coming out of the gloom, a huge red snake eye and a hairy water goblin Zimbabweans call the tokolosh.

Then it was back to the layers of wallpaper, which began to spin violently, as the music reached a horrible jangling climax, bringing on the urge to vomit.

That achieved, I closed my eyes again, this time to a torrent of words in every typeface and font, coming at me too fast to read: words I took to be my own from 40 years of journalism, which now seemed insubstantial and fleeting.

Then I saw a photo stream of a new person in my life, rapid-fire snapshots of their every expression and mood, finally settling on a contented, smiling image that captured what I wanted to feel about them.

I then entered Mander’s “possibility of hell” phase and experienced several hours of juddering, shaking sensations through my arms and legs, waves of nausea, a pounding headache, and dark, disordered thoughts. The medicine was showing me all its faces, and it left me with the worst-ever hangover.

However, the next day, I experienced a pervasive sense of well-being, a feeling that all the inflammation in my body was gone.

The three comrades would have three more treatments with increasingly higher doses of the medicine, and all reported positive effects. Falcon has stayed off ketamine and antidepressants; he reported feeling lighter, and the rumination over the unjust treatment by his superiors has subsided.

Baz felt less prone to explosions of temper and able to regulate his emotions for the first time. He’s got a challenging new job, and he’s on the right path with his family.

For Mander, it was a reinforcement of the daily changes he made during his first experience.

“I have dealt with much of the shit that I had to deal with, and I can work toward self-mastery and some big goals in conservation,” he said

Mbwela’s practice is part of a burgeoning tourism industry based on sacred plant medicine. People are travelling the world to take medicines like ayahuasca and iboga, which are illegal at home.

Everyone Mbwela treats suffers from “an illness of the mind: trauma, PTSD, substance abuse, depression, and some are just seeking to self-master”.

“Some of us will get on anti-depressants or whatever substance to try to quieten the noise, and it’s not working,” he said.

The three veterans on this treatment had shown up with such authenticity and had scraped off their trauma layer by layer.

“What the medicine looks at is their willingness to let go, let go of the pain, let go of not loving yourself and it allows the medicine to go into the mind and delete certain files because we tend to make those experiences not only our reality but our identity,” Mbwela said.

“You’re a paramedic in the military, but that’s not who you are. You are there to serve, and you’ve saved so many people’s lives, but whatever you take on, that’s not you; it’s the residue of the work.”