Dmitri Mugianis: Ibogaine, Addiction, and Fried Chicken in Space | Episode 172Dmitri Mugianis: Ibogaine, Addiction, and Fried Chicken in Space | Episode 172
Brain Shaman
Michael Waite speaks with psychedelic practitioner and former heroin user Dmitri Mugianis about addiction, ibogaine, and the importance of shared ceremonial space. The conversation questions medicalised, outcome‑driven models and reflects on how music, community, faith, and ritual can shape recovery.
1:20:33•3 Jun 2026
Ibogaine, Sacred Space, and Fried Chicken: Dmitri Mugianis on Addiction and Healing
Episode Overview
- Addiction is framed less as a fixed brain disease and more as a complex mix of pain, culture, community, and history.
- Ibogaine is described as helping Dmitri end decades of heroin and cocaine use, but he stresses that environment, ceremony, and ongoing support matter just as much as the drug.
- Ceremonial spaces using live sound, ritual, and community are presented as powerful, if messy, contexts for change, without guaranteed outcomes.
- Outcome‑obsessed, commodified psychedelic models and military involvement are criticised for dehumanising people and turning healing into a numbers game.
- Personal faith and Christian practice quietly inform Dmitri’s work, but he argues that ceremony should not impose belief systems on participants.
““The creation of space is far more interesting to me than any compound, any theory, any practice. The space that we create for one another is the thing.””
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety? This conversation between Michael Waite and psychedelic practitioner and musician Dmitri Mugianis follows a raw, often funny, and deeply human path through addiction, psychedelics, and spirituality. Dmitri shares his story of growing up in 1960s–70s Detroit in a politically left, creative Greek-American family, with chaos at home, freedom in the streets, and early exposure to drugs, music, and radical culture.
He talks about being labelled “slow”, struggling to read until his mid-teens, and how that bred a lifelong suspicion of institutions and rigid labels. From glue in paper bags with neighbourhood outcasts to decades of heroin and cocaine use, Dmitri traces how drugs, music, and community were always intertwined.
His turning point comes with ibogaine treatment in Amsterdam, which he says helped him stop heroin, cocaine and methadone and opened the door to grief, forgiveness, and a burning desire to “give this back”.
But instead of selling a psychedelic miracle cure, he questions the whole results‑driven, commodified model: “I really don’t care too much about psychedelics at all… the space that we create for one another is the thing.” He describes creating weekly ceremonies with active drug users in Harlem, where drums, altars, prayer and community formed a living ritual with no neat “outcomes” beyond people feeling held.
The episode is especially relevant if you’re sober‑curious, in recovery, or wrestling with the hype around psychedelics. Expect talk of harm reduction, ibogaine, psilocybin, sound‑based ceremony, Christian mysticism, trauma fatigue, and, yes, Harlem fried chicken. Rather than offering a tidy formula, this conversation asks what happens when recovery is treated as a messy, communal, spiritual practice instead of a brain optimisation project. Could a different kind of “space” be what you’ve been missing?
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