Date: Mon, 16 Jun 1997 12:39:48 -0700
From: Chris Jenks <jenks>
To: Multiple recipients of list <ibogaine@ibogaine.org>
Subject: Another Promising Possibility


  Hello, Everybody.

  In the Friday, June 13, 1997 issue of the San Jose Mercury News, on page
12A, there appeared the following article:

Vietnamese drug touted as cure for addiction will get U.N. tests

Reuters
  UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations is stepping up testing of an herbal
medicine that Vietnamese doctors believe can cure addiction to heroin,
opium or cocaine in three to 30 days.
  Roy Morey, the Washington director of the U.N. Development Program, told
a news conference Thursday that the medicine, known as Heantos and
containing 13 traditional herbs, had been tested on 3,000 Vietnamese addicts.
  It is taken in liquid doses for three to five days and then in tablet
form for a month. The U.N. agency announced last month in Hanoi that it was
contributing $500,000 to the project.
  The trials in Vietnam reportedly have shown a high degree of success. The
recidivism rate is about 30 percent, and side effects are said to be
minimal. But Morey said full testing would "require another two years or so."
  He said Vietnamese scientists had appealed to the U.N. agency for funds
and technical advice, aiming to conduct further trials "in an
internationally recognized way" and see whether the treatment could be
tested elsewhere in the world.
  Follow-up studies are being conducted in Vietnam and the United States by
the Vietnamese government and the Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine in Baltimore.
  Dr. Lutz Armand Bahr of UNDP, who spoke about the drug Tuesday in
Copenhagen, Denmark, said the herbal cocktail had been developed by a
vietnamese specialist, Dr. Trang Khuong Dan, who had become a heroin addict
after his brother died of a drug overdose.
  Morey said applications would be submitted to the Food and Drug
Administration for clinical tests that Johns Hopkins may want to carry out
in the United States.