HB1772

After reviewing several articles, it appears that this drug needs to have more testing before it is an accepted treatment.

The last thing needed for mental health is dosing with hallucinogenic drugs. Ibogaine is a psychoactive indole alkaloid derived from plants such as Tabernanthe iboga, characterized by hallucinogenic and oneirogenic effects. The psychoactivity of the root bark of the iboga tree, T. iboga, one of the plants from which ibogaine is extracted, was first discovered by forager tribes in Central Africa, who passed the knowledge to the Bwiti tribe of Gabon. It was first documented in the 19th century for its spiritual use, later isolated and synthesized for its psychoactive properties..

This legislation raises serious concerns not about the promise of ibogaine research itself, but about the appropriateness of state government as a vehicle for that research. The bill's own eligibility criteria make clear that any qualifying institution would already possess substantial research infrastructure, federal IND application status, FDA breakthrough therapy designation pursuit, and multi-state consortium partnerships. In other words, the entities capable of receiving these grants are already doing this work, already embedded in the federal research process, and already securing funding from non-state sources. This raises a straightforward question: if the research is already moving forward through the institutions and federal mechanisms designed for exactly this purpose, what does state money add, beyond state liability? Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services faces significant and well-documented unmet needs across behavioral health, substance use treatment access, child welfare, and long-term care — areas where state dollars have a direct and immediate impact on New Hampshire residents. Redirecting or reserving agency capacity and public funds for a research function that credentialed institutions and federal oversight bodies are already managing is difficult to justify on either fiscal or programmatic grounds. The state legislature's most responsible role here is to trust the scientific process already underway — not to insert the state into it with public dollars and the legal exposure that follows. A vote of Inexpedient to Legislate is the appropriate outcome: not a rejection of the science, but a recognition that this is not the state's work to do.