#4 — Advocacy: An Extension of the Love We Have for Our Children with Susan Ousterman

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 Villomah 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 22-28 June, in Libreville, Gabon

Details and tickets: 

www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com