Gabon has spent years trying to protect iboga from extraction. But ibogaine can already be produced from other African plants, while modern drug development can move further still — into synthetic analogues and digital information. As governments prepare for COP17, iboga exposes a basic problem for benefit-sharing: the value created from biodiversity is increasingly able to escape the species and territory from which it began. Law asks whether an obligation survives the journey. Reciprocity asks whether the relationship should.

In May 2026, Gabon adopted a decree regulating access to, research on, transformation and commercialisation of iboga, its derivatives and the traditional knowledge associated with it. Even the official title is unusually expansive. It places Tabernanthe iboga, compounds derived from it, scientific research, commercial activity and traditional knowledge within the same regulatory frame.^[1]

The measure followed years of attempts to exert greater control over the resource. In 2019, Gabon suspended exports of T. iboga, including raw and derived material, as part of an effort to protect and sustainably manage the plant.^[2] But controlling the plant does not necessarily control the molecule that makes the plant commercially interesting.

Ibogaine can also be produced semi-synthetically from voacangine, an alkaloid found at much higher concentrations in Voacanga africana. By 2020, researchers were describing V. africana root and stem bark as the primary sources of commercially available semi-synthetic ibogaine. A subsequent study set out an optimised route for extracting voacangine and converting it into the iboga chemical scaffold.^[3]

This matters because V. africana is not simply another local population of iboga. It is a different species distributed across a large part of tropical Africa.^[4] The same downstream molecule can therefore be reached through a different plant, potentially in a different country, without remaining attached to the particular species, territory or cultural history through which ibogaine acquired much of its international significance.

That is the real subject of this story.

Psychedelic drug development is usually narrated forwards: plant, compound, laboratory, mechanism, patent, company, clinical trial, medicine. Access and benefit-sharing law — ABS — forces us to read that chain backwards. Where did the biological resource come from? Who already knew something about it? Under what conditions was it accessed? What happened when research became commercially valuable? And as that value moved progressively further from the original plant, did anything meaningful travel back?

This October, governments will meet in Yerevan, Armenia, for the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, COP17, alongside the sixth meeting of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol.^[5]

COP17 is not a psychedelic conference. Iboga, ayahuasca, DMT and psilocybin are not being negotiated as psychedelic issues. That is precisely why it matters. The discussions concern genetic resources, associated traditional knowledge, commercialisation, digital biological information and the sharing of benefits across the wider bioeconomy. Psychedelic medicine provides an unusually clear case through which to see what happens when scientific and commercial value has a much older biological and cultural provenance.

The psychedelic story starts too late

The modern psychedelic renaissance is very good at recording the downstream end of innovation. We know which university published a paper, which laboratory identified a mechanism, which company owns a programme, which patent covers a formulation and how much capital has been raised to move a candidate towards clinical trials.

The upstream end is more easily compressed into a few sentences of history. A plant is “discovered”. An active compound is “identified”. A traditional preparation becomes an object of pharmacology. From that point onwards, scientific provenance is meticulously maintained: papers cite papers, patents identify prior art, chemical structures have identifiers and clinical trials have registration numbers.

The knowledge and biological relationships that preceded the laboratory can become much harder to see.

International biodiversity law was partly built in response to this problem. The Convention on Biological Diversity, opened for signature in 1992, established that states have sovereign rights over their natural resources. Under Article 15, authority to determine access to genetic resources rests with national governments and their domestic legislation. Access can be made conditional on prior informed consent and mutually agreed terms, including arrangements for the fair and equitable sharing of resulting benefits.^[6]

The Nagoya Protocol, adopted in 2010 and in force since 2014, developed that framework further. It covers research and development on the genetic or biochemical composition of genetic resources, and Article 5 expressly follows benefits beyond the original material into subsequent applications and commercialisation.^[7]

For drug development, that phrase is crucial. The greatest economic value of a medicinal plant rarely lies in the bark, root or leaves originally collected. Value accumulates downstream through research, purification, chemistry, clinical evidence, manufacturing methods, intellectual property and market access.

Nagoya tries to stop provenance disappearing simply because the form of the resource changes.

The framework also anticipates a change in purpose. Mutually agreed terms can address intellectual property, subsequent use by third parties and a later change of intent — important when material or associated knowledge enters academic research and eventually contributes to a patent, spin-out company or pharmaceutical programme.^[8]

Traditional knowledge adds another layer. Nagoya deals specifically with traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources, including the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities, their prior informed consent or approval and involvement, and community protocols governing access.^[9] Rather than producing one universal answer for every culturally important plant, these rules make the beginning of the research chain legally relevant.

For iboga, that beginning is now colliding with a pharmaceutical chain increasingly capable of moving somewhere else.

When the molecule escapes the plant

Gabon has an unusually close relationship with the Nagoya system. In 2011 it became the first Party to the Convention on Biological Diversity to ratify the Protocol.^[10] Its 2019 iboga export suspension therefore provides a useful experiment in what biological sovereignty can achieve.

As a conservation measure, controlling T. iboga at the border makes obvious sense. A threatened or heavily harvested plant is physical. It grows somewhere, somebody removes it, and material crosses a border.

Pharmaceutical value behaves differently.

Gabon can regulate:

T. iboga → export

while another supply chain can produce:

V. africana → voacangine → ibogaine.

The economically valuable molecule has escaped the plant.

There is no need to invent a story of deliberate evasion to see the problem. The alternative Voacanga route predates Gabon's restriction. Its significance lies in what it demonstrates.

Once the same downstream molecule can be produced through a different biological resource, the maps used by biodiversity law and pharmaceutical development begin to separate. One maps species onto territories and regulates acts of access. The other increasingly maps value onto molecules, biological functions, intellectual property and reproducible processes.

Species-level sovereignty is structurally ill-equipped to capture molecule-level value.

That is what makes Gabon's 2026 decree more interesting than a simple tightening of export controls. The official Gazette describes an instrument covering access, use, exploitation, research, transformation and commercialisation of iboga, its derivatives and associated traditional knowledge.^[1:1] In its account of the proposed framework immediately before promulgation, the Gabonese government explicitly connected it to Nagoya and to the newer WIPO framework on genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. It described prior authorisation, benefit-sharing with communities holding relevant traditional knowledge, protections relating to patent applications and the creation of a sovereign iboga fund.^[11]

There remains one reporting limitation. The official online Gazette confirms the final decree's existence, date and title, but its complete article-by-article text is not currently reliably retrievable. The detailed provisions above therefore reflect the government's description immediately before promulgation rather than a clause-by-clause reading of the enacted text.

Even with that limitation, the direction of travel is clear. Gabon is attempting to govern a much longer section of the iboga value chain than an export restriction can reach.

Substitution through Voacanga cannot presently be identified as the cause of the 2026 decree. What it demonstrates is why a broader instrument becomes necessary if the objective is not merely to conserve T. iboga, but to remain connected to value generated much further downstream from iboga-related resources and knowledge.

Then the molecule changes

Substitution through another plant is only the first problem.

Medicinal chemistry can move the value chain another step away from the original biological resource. Ibogaine's potential therapeutic effects have long attracted interest alongside serious concerns about cardiac toxicity and other risks. Researchers have therefore investigated whether aspects of its pharmacology can be retained while changing the molecule itself.

One prominent example is tabernanthalog, developed through what its researchers called function-oriented synthesis. Rather than extracting or simply reproducing ibogaine, they identified structural features thought to contribute to its effects and designed a simpler, non-hallucinogenic analogue that produced promising behavioural results in animal studies.^[12]

Commercial programmes are exploring similar territory. Equulus Therapeutics currently lists EQL-101 within its research pipeline as an ibogaine analogue in development for substance-use disorders and PTSD, and the programme has also been independently tracked within the psychedelic drug-development landscape.^[13]

At this stage, the legal relationship becomes heavily dependent on facts. Nagoya's definition of a derivative concerns naturally occurring biochemical compounds. A newly designed synthetic molecule is different. Whether an ABS obligation persists can depend on when and where the original material was accessed, the provider country's legislation, the mutually agreed terms, subsequent transfers and the precise relationship between the original utilisation and the later invention.

The broader transformation is easier to see. First, the same economically interesting molecule can be obtained from another plant. Then medicinal chemists can create another molecule designed to reproduce some of the properties that made the original valuable.

At each stage, provenance becomes easier to treat as historical background rather than part of the active commercial relationship.

What if the plant becomes information?

Modern biology pushes the same problem further.

Traditional access rules were built largely around biological material. A researcher collects something in one place and studies it somewhere else. Contemporary biotechnology increasingly allows organisms to circulate as information.

Genetic material can be sequenced and uploaded to a database. Researchers on another continent can use that information in synthetic biology, comparative genomics, metabolic engineering, protein design and commercial research without ever handling the original specimen.

A border regime designed around physical extraction starts to lose its grip when the economically useful thing travels as data.

This is the policy problem captured by digital sequence information on genetic resources, usually shortened to DSI. At COP15 in 2022, CBD Parties agreed to establish a multilateral system for sharing benefits arising from the use of DSI. COP16 subsequently operationalised the mechanism around the Cali Fund.^[14]

This differs from classic bilateral Nagoya agreements. Rather than attempting to trace every individual sequence through an individual access contract, the mechanism seeks to capture commercial value collectively.

Pharmaceuticals are explicitly included among sectors expected to benefit directly or indirectly from DSI, alongside biotechnology, cosmetics, nutraceuticals, breeding and data-related services, including artificial-intelligence applications.^[14:1]

Under the current framework, companies meeting at least two of three indicative financial thresholds — $20 million in assets, $50 million in sales or $5 million in profit, averaged over three years — should contribute 1 per cent of profit or 0.1 per cent of revenue to the fund.^[14:2]

That should remains a significant weakness. The mechanism is not a compulsory global biodiversity levy, and its impact will depend on whether governments create effective incentives or obligations capable of turning an international expectation into actual contributions.

At least half of Cali Fund resources are intended to support the self-identified needs of Indigenous peoples and local communities.^[14:3] The sums ultimately raised will matter more than the elegance of the mechanism on paper.

Conceptually, however, DSI marks an important change. Benefit-sharing is attempting to follow biological value even after physical possession of the organism is no longer necessary.

The chain has moved from plant, to substitute plant, to molecule, to analogue, and finally to data.

With each transition, geography becomes easier to lose.

When there is no single provider

Iboga demonstrates how value can move away from a relatively identifiable biological source. Ayahuasca reveals another problem: sometimes the beginning of the chain is itself difficult to map.

Ayahuasca-related practices span several Amazonian countries and many distinct Indigenous peoples and other communities. Relevant plants occur across political borders, while associated knowledge has circulated, developed and diverged across communities over long periods.

Nagoya's bilateral model works most neatly when there is an identifiable resource, provider state, user and access agreement. The Amazon does not arrange itself so conveniently.

Article 11 therefore addresses situations in which the same genetic resources occur in more than one Party, or associated traditional knowledge is shared by communities across different states. Article 10 goes further by contemplating a global multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism for transboundary situations and circumstances in which prior informed consent cannot readily be granted or obtained.^[15]

More than a decade after Nagoya entered into force, that Article 10 mechanism remains unfinished. The difficulty is deeper than administration: in some cases the question who is the provider? has no single bilateral answer.

The famous Banisteriopsis caapi patent controversy showed an earlier version of the problem. A US plant patent granted in 1986 for a claimed variety called “Da Vine” is still regularly described as an American patent on ayahuasca; it was actually a patent on a claimed plant variety. The controversy nevertheless became a powerful example of what can happen when biological material familiar within Indigenous traditions enters an intellectual-property system organised around novelty and invention.

A newer international agreement now tries to keep those origins visible. The WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted in 2024, creates disclosure requirements for certain patent applications based on genetic resources or associated traditional knowledge.^[16]

Disclosure is different from benefit-sharing, but the principle fits the same wider argument: transformation should not automatically erase provenance.

The treaty is not yet in force. WIPO currently records four deposited instruments — Malawi, Uganda, Albania and Peru — while fifteen are required for entry into force.^[17]

The state is not the community

There is a danger in reducing all this to an argument between provider countries and Western pharmaceutical companies.

The CBD begins with state sovereignty over genetic resources. Nagoya also recognises the importance of Indigenous peoples and local communities in relation to associated traditional knowledge and, in relevant circumstances, resources themselves.

Those interests can align without being identical.

Gabon may protect T. iboga, regulate research and commercialisation and attempt to retain more value nationally. It is also unusually visible inside the CBD system itself. Jean Bruno Mikissa of Gabon chaired the twenty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice, SBSTTA-28, held in Nairobi from 27 July to 1 August 2026. The meeting immediately preceded SBI-7 and produced scientific and technical recommendations for consideration at COP17.^[18]

There is no basis for connecting Mikissa's chairmanship causally to Gabon's domestic iboga policy. The coincidence is nevertheless revealing in another sense. In the same year that Gabon promulgated a far-reaching framework around iboga, a Gabonese official was chairing one of the CBD's principal subsidiary bodies as it prepared recommendations for Yerevan. Gabon is present at both ends of this story: as a provider state seeking greater control over a culturally significant biological resource, and as an institutionally capable actor within the international biodiversity regime.

Knowledge-holding communities do not necessarily possess comparable institutional reach.

That sharpens the harder question inside Gabon's domestic framework. Who identifies the relevant communities? Who represents them? Who negotiates? Who administers benefits? Who decides what constitutes a fair share? What happens when different communities or traditions have different relationships with the same plant?

The final text and implementation of Gabon's decree will matter here. Protecting a resource as national heritage and giving the people associated with it meaningful control are related objectives, but they are not interchangeable.

Indigenous representatives raised a similar concern during the August 2026 negotiations. The International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity welcomed progress in establishing legal frameworks while highlighting continuing problems with implementation, community participation, community protocols and the ability to monitor what happens after genetic resources enter research and commercial value chains.^[19]

The imbalance is easy to see. A biotechnology company can employ patent lawyers, chemists, regulatory specialists and business-development teams to follow a candidate through years of transformation. A state such as Gabon can build ministries, commissions, negotiating positions and representation within the CBD itself. A community associated with the knowledge that helped make the original resource scientifically interesting may have far less capacity to follow that same journey in reverse.

That is why benefit-sharing cannot be reduced to a royalty percentage. Nagoya recognises both monetary and non-monetary benefits. Research capacity, scientific training, conservation, technology transfer, participation in study design, local processing, access to resulting treatments and long-term commercial partnerships can all form part of the answer.^[7:1]

The more revealing question is whether people at the beginning of the chain retain meaningful agency in deciding what a fair relationship looks like.

What COP17 is really testing

The immediate backdrop to Yerevan came from two consecutive meetings in Nairobi. SBSTTA-28 ran from 27 July to 1 August 2026, addressing the scientific, technical and technological work feeding into COP17. SBI-7 followed from 4–12 August, including the second assessment and review of the Nagoya Protocol.^[18:1][20]

The findings are uncomfortable for a system now more than a decade old. Countries have built ABS laws, institutions and procedures, but implementation remains uneven. Recommendations heading towards the Nagoya meeting call for clearer procedures, functioning checkpoints, better information-sharing and fuller participation by Indigenous peoples and local communities.^[20:1]

More importantly, the assessment is shifting towards outcomes. It increasingly asks how much benefit has actually been shared, who received it and whether Indigenous peoples and local communities benefited.^[20:2]

That is a more demanding test than counting legislation.

Article 10 is also moving again. The August negotiations recommended further work on the possible global multilateral mechanism, with participation from Indigenous peoples and local communities.^[20:3] Yerevan is unlikely to resolve a structural problem that has remained unfinished since Nagoya was adopted, but renewed negotiations matter because the bilateral model weakens precisely where biodiversity and knowledge become transboundary or difficult to attribute.

The Cali Fund and wider DSI mechanism will also continue developing. Work ahead of COP17 includes the financial thresholds and contribution arrangements that determine which commercial beneficiaries are expected to pay and how much.^[21]

None of those discussions is specifically about psychedelic medicine. Psychedelics are useful here because their development makes the wider problem unusually visible.

Gabon can restrict T. iboga, but ibogaine can be produced from Voacanga africana. Ibogaine can become the inspiration for synthetic analogues. Biological information can increasingly travel independently of either plant.

The further the value chain moves, the easier it becomes for each new stage to present itself as a new beginning: the laboratory that designed the analogue, the company that financed development, the patent that defined an invention, or the database that supplied information.

Each claim may be legitimate. Together, they can make everything before them disappear.

ABS is an attempt to resist that disappearance.

Its success should not ultimately be judged by the number of permits issued, agreements signed or reporting systems constructed. The harder test is whether benefits can move backwards through the chain with anything approaching the efficiency with which biological resources, knowledge and commercial value move forwards.

That is what Gabon's new iboga framework makes difficult to ignore, and it is what sits quietly behind several of the negotiations heading towards Yerevan.

The psychedelic story has usually asked whether an old medicine can become a new therapeutic. Reading the chain backwards produces the harder question: when it does, how much of what made that transformation possible is still visible at the other end?

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Author's note

I spent approximately six months in Gabon and underwent a full Bwiti initiation involving iboga. That experience is part of why I am interested in how scientific and commercial uses of iboga relate to the communities and traditions from which its wider significance emerged. It also gives me a personal connection to the subject that readers should know about.

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Notes

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1. Journal Officiel de la République Gabonaise, Décret No. 0239/PR/MJSRCAVA, 22 May 2026, regulating access, use, exploitation, research, transformation and commercialisation of iboga, its derivatives and associated traditional knowledge. Official Gazette record ↩︎ ↩︎

2. Journal Officiel de la République Gabonaise, Arrêté No. 001/MFEPC/CAB-M, 4 February 2019, suspending export of Tabernanthe iboga and its derivatives. Official Gazette record ↩︎

3. Felix Krengel, Jonathan Dickinson, Christopher Jenks and Ricardo Reyes-Chilpa, “Quantitative Evaluation of a Mexican and a Ghanaian Tabernaemontana Species as Alternatives to Voacanga africana for the Production of Antiaddictive Ibogan Type Alkaloids”, Chemistry & Biodiversity 17 (2020), which describes V. africana root and stem bark as the primary sources of commercially available semi-synthetic ibogaine. PubMed record Bruno González et al., “Efficient Access to the Iboga Skeleton: Optimized Procedure to Obtain Voacangine from Voacanga africana Root Bark”, ACS Omega 6 (2021), 16755–16762. Open-access paper ↩︎

4. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Plants of the World Online, distribution record for Voacanga africana. Kew species record ↩︎

5. Convention on Biological Diversity, COP17 and concurrent Protocol meetings, Yerevan, Armenia, 19–30 October 2026. COP17 provisional agenda ↩︎

6. Convention on Biological Diversity, Article 15, Access to Genetic Resources. CBD Article 15 ↩︎

7. Nagoya Protocol, particularly Articles 2 and 5, covering utilisation, derivatives and fair and equitable benefit-sharing from subsequent applications and commercialisation. Nagoya Protocol text ↩︎ ↩︎

8. Nagoya Protocol, Articles 6 and 8, including mutually agreed terms and changes from non-commercial to commercial intent. Nagoya Protocol text ↩︎

9. Nagoya Protocol, Articles 7 and 12, concerning traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources and community protocols. Nagoya Protocol text ↩︎

10. Convention on Biological Diversity, announcement of Gabon's 2011 ratification of the Nagoya Protocol. CBD announcement ↩︎

11. Agence Gabonaise de Presse, 1 May 2026, reporting the Council of Ministers' presentation of the proposed iboga framework and its links to Nagoya, WIPO, patents, community benefit-sharing and a sovereign iboga fund. AGP report ↩︎

12. Lindsay E. Cameron et al., “A Non-Hallucinogenic Psychedelic Analog with Therapeutic Potential”, Nature 589 (2021). Nature paper ↩︎

13. Equulus Therapeutics currently lists EQL-101 under Research & Pipeline on its principal site, describing it as an ibogaine analogue for substance-use disorders and PTSD. The company does not currently expose that entry as a separate stable programme page, so the link points to the relevant pipeline section of the homepage. Equulus Research & Pipeline Independent pipeline coverage also lists EQL-101 as a preclinical ibogaine analogue. Blossom drug-development tracker ↩︎

14. Convention on Biological Diversity, Decision 16/2 on digital sequence information on genetic resources and the multilateral mechanism, including the Cali Fund. CBD Decision 16/2 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

15. Nagoya Protocol, Articles 10 and 11, concerning the proposed global multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism and transboundary co-operation. Nagoya Protocol text ↩︎

16. WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, adopted 24 May 2024. WIPO treaty overview ↩︎

17. WIPO Lex, treaty status. At the time of writing it records deposited instruments from Malawi, Uganda, Albania and Peru; fifteen are required for entry into force. WIPO treaty collection ↩︎

18. Convention on Biological Diversity, SBSTTA-28, Nairobi, 27 July–1 August 2026. Jean Bruno Mikissa of Gabon served as Chair. The meeting's recommendations were prepared for consideration at COP17. CBD report on the close of SBSTTA-28 See also the CBD SBSTTA Bureau. ↩︎ ↩︎

19. International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, statement on the second assessment and review of the Nagoya Protocol at SBI-7, August 2026. IIFB statement ↩︎

20. Earth Negotiations Bulletin, summary of SBI-7, Nairobi, 4–12 August 2026, including the second assessment and review of the Nagoya Protocol, Indigenous and local community participation, benefit reporting and further work on Article 10. IISD summary ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

21. Convention on Biological Diversity, preparatory work on entity thresholds and contribution rates for the DSI multilateral mechanism ahead of COP17. CBD review process ↩︎