#6 — The Gobbledygook of Medicalization & Wonder of Plant Medicine with Simeon Schnapper

This interview with entheogenic entrepreneur and philanthropist Simeon Schnapper celebrates the “apparent oxymoron” of introducing the wonder and awe of Bwiti and, more broadly, Indigenous sacred plant medicine traditions into a medical context. 

Simeon is the founding partner of JLS, a pioneering plant medicine venture fund, and is widely recognised as the first psychedelic venture capitalist. In conversation with Ros Stone from the Iboga Leadership Summit team, he explores how business and entrepreneurship can holistically be put into conversation with plant medicine. He shares the ethos of the JLS Fund, an early-stage venture fund focused on brain health, mental health, and neurodegenerative disease, guided as much by impact as by returns, and by the question: “What impact did you make to lives, and souls, and healing?”

This conversation also discusses the complexities of defining “addiction,” and the interpolation of various ideas of what “recovery” can look like in relation to plant medicine, leading to reflections on the central role Bwiti ethics needs to play in all aspects of the potential medicalisation of Iboga and Ibogaine, and the need for genuine cross-pollination between Indigenous wisdom and clinical, psychiatric, and neurological perspectives. 

Simeon is already witnessing growing alignment between ancestral knowledge and biomedical research, and expresses cautious yet infectious optimism for the relational future of humanity (though not entirely extending to the potential impacts of AI). He also underscores the importance of engaging Bwiti intelligence and genuine reciprocity early in pharmaceutical and therapeutic development,  “not as a moral tax,” but as deep intelligence that could de-risk drug development if engaged from the beginning rather than as a neocolonial afterthought.

At the Iboga Leadership Summit in June, Simeon looks forward to exploring whether clinical acknowledgement of traditional Bwiti practices as the original protocols for working with Iboga and Ibogaine could be a key next part of science’s journey towards respectful collaboration. 

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