Processing negative experience - Concerned about retreat safety/legitimacy
TLDR: I believe I was given some kind of horrible synthetic hallucinogen at what I thought was a trusted Ibogaine retreat.
Sorry if this drags on, but I have to get all of this down in as much detail as I can. I'm still trying to make sense of my experience, and am so curious to know if others have experienced anything similar. If this sounds familiar at all please reach out to me. I'm not ruling out the possibility that I just had a bad trip, but certain things just aren't adding up and I'm not totally convinced that there was not some wrongdoing on behalf of the retreat. If that's the case then I'll do whatever I can to prevent people from being harmed by this place in the future.
Last weekend I visited what I thought was a reputable, high end Ibogaine retreat - it has outstanding reviews, luxury accommodations and what appears from the outside to be a solid reputation as a legitimate retreat facility. I was incredibly nervous leading up to my trip, but my worries were mostly settled upon arriving. The staff were lovely and accommodating - they seemed to have a genuine investment in each of the guest's individual healing journeys. There was no cause for concern until the first medicine session on the second day of the retreat. I started feeling the medicine pull me in around 1 hour after taking a boost dose - I felt nothing for nearly 2 hours after my flood dose and was worried nothing was going to happen. Suddenly my heart rate spiked - the 2 "nurses" (who struggled to figure out how to use the ekg/hook me up to the IV bag) came over to my side and took my pulse and seemed concerned about how fast my heart was beating. This lasted around 20 minutes. I'm pretty certain I was having a panic attack - from there the trip only got worse.
It's hard to put my experience into words; the only way I can think to describe the feeling is pure terror. I saw totally senseless, incoherent nightmare visuals on what felt like an infinite loop. This lasted for around 10 hours. No life review, no introspection, no spiritual insight, just terror. It felt as though my head had been split open and broken into a million pieces - this was an actual physical sensation that accompanied the trip that is still lingering with me now, kind of like my brain is constantly inflamed/being squeezed or something. The "medicine," or whatever it was they gave me, kept telling me throughout my trip that as a result of taking this drug I was now schizophrenic, and that it had done irreparable damage to my brain. I can't overemphasize just how terrifying and traumatic this all felt in the moment. I was completely convinced that my life as a knew it was over, and that I'd live out the rest of my life in a psych ward.
I emerged from the experience totally debilitated. I had never felt so much pain in my life, both physical and psychological. I was experiencing some of the symptoms typically associated with ibogaine use like nausea, confusion, ataxia, but to an extent that I didn't know was possible. It was like a million hangovers all at once. Then came the hallucinations, both auditory and visual for the next 6-8 hours - plants were jumping up and down and dancing, paintings were moving accross the walls, at one point I saw a dog appear in front of me in crystal clear detail, then suddenly vanish when I looked away. I don't know if any of this is unusual to experience post-ibogaine, but from the moment the trip started I knew something wasn't right - my brain kept telling me that what I was experiencing was not ibogaine. It felt like a terrible synthetic ibogaine imitation or something. I had no way of proving it but it all scared me so much that I demanded to be taken to the airport the following morning. I couldn't trust anything that the employees were telling me. It all felt so wrong and horrifying. I briefly spoke with some of the other guests that morning - it was nearly impossible for me to think clearly much less communicate so our interactions were pretty limited - but each person I spoke to had almost the exact same experience as me. They said it was nonstop horror and fear, nothing resembling a therapeutic experience in the slightest.
At this point I was convinced that the people working at the retreat had deliberately given us something toxic, and my fight or flight senses kicked in. I remembered how incompetent the medical staff was - no one seemed to know how to do their job correctly. It took around 20 minutes for the nurse to get the IV in my arm, and they repeatedly fumbled with the buttons on the ekg when it wouldn't stop beeping. The overwhelming feeling was that I was being scammed by this place. Again, I don't have verifiable proof of any of this - it's been 7 days since I took the drug they gave me, and this feeling hasn't wavered in the slightest. I'm also still feeling disoriented, dizzy, foggy and the same "squeezing" sensation in my head I described earlier. The staff eventually drove me to the airport - 3 staff accompanied me in the car, which felt so weird and unnecessary and just compounded my existing paranoia. I returned to the US and decided to get a blood toxicology report to see if anything weird or illicit showed up in my system. It was a 10 panel blood test, so it only checks for the more well known substances like cannabinoids, amphetamines, opiates, benzos etc. Nothing was detected from the test. It's all making me feel insane to be honest. All I know is that my gut has told me through this whole experience that the drug that they gave me was something destructive or dangerous. Why else would I feel worse, both physically and mentally, a week after taking it? None of it (besides the ataxia) sounds like ibogaine to me. I'm just so lost and so confused by all of this. If any of this resembles an experience you or someone you know has had, please reach out to me. Looking for any clarity I can get. Thanks.