For many individuals and families throughout Florida, opioid dependence becomes a cycle of withdrawal, stabilization, relapse, and repeated attempts to rebuild life. Plantas Sagradas offers medically screened ibogaine retreats in Rosarito, Mexico, for individuals seeking a thoughtfully prepared, physician-supervised, and integration-centered retreat experience.

Why Travel to Mexico?

Each year, thousands of individuals travel internationally to explore ibogaine because it is not currently approved for opioid use disorder in the United States. For many, this journey follows years of living with opioid dependence, repeated attempts at detoxification, residential treatment, or long-term participation in medication-assisted recovery.

Medications such as methadone and buprenorphine have saved countless lives. They have reduced overdose deaths, improved treatment retention, and provided a critical foundation for recovery for many individuals. Their role in addressing the opioid epidemic cannot be overstated.

At the same time, some individuals reach a point where they begin asking a different question. Rather than focusing solely on maintaining stability or preventing relapse, they begin wondering whether it may be possible to move beyond long-term dependence on opioid medications and rediscover a fuller sense of emotional, psychological, relational, and spiritual participation in life.

For these individuals, traveling to Mexico is often not simply about accessing ibogaine. It is about exploring an approach that may offer the possibility of interrupting long-standing patterns while supporting a broader process of personal transformation. The medicine itself is only one part of that journey.

At Plantas Sagradas, our role is not simply to provide access to ibogaine. Our responsibility is to ensure that every participant is carefully screened, medically evaluated, thoughtfully prepared, continuously monitored, and comprehensively supported throughout the entire retreat process.

Not everyone who contacts us is an appropriate candidate for ibogaine, and not everyone who is an appropriate candidate is ready today. Every recommendation is individualized and guided by one of the core principles of our work: Capacity Before Intensity.

People Living with Opioid Dependence Are Asking Different Questions

For many people living with opioid dependence, the first questions are about survival. How do I stop using? How do I get through withdrawal? How do I avoid another relapse? These are essential questions, and for many individuals they remain the most important ones to answer.

But as stability begins to emerge, the questions often begin to change. Instead of simply asking how to survive, many begin wondering what life beyond opioid dependence might actually look like. Can I feel joy again? Will I ever feel emotionally alive? Who am I beyond opioid dependence? What would it mean to truly participate in my life again?

For many, it is this shift in questioning that begins the search for something more.

Safety First

Comprehensive Cardiology Screening

Every participant completes an independent cardiology consultation, electrocardiogram (ECG), and cardiac stress test before being approved for ibogaine.

Ibogaine can affect cardiac conduction, making careful cardiovascular screening an essential component of participant safety.

Continuous Medical Monitoring

Ibogaine is administered under physician supervision with continuous cardiac and vital sign monitoring throughout the experience.

Medical oversight continues throughout the retreat to ensure participant safety and appropriate post-experience observation.

The Plantas Sagradas Ibogaine Protocol

A Journey Designed with Intention

Meaningful transformation rarely begins with the medicine, and it certainly does not end there.

Our Ibogaine Protocol represents a carefully structured process that prioritizes preparation, medical safety, thoughtful administration, recovery, and long-term integration. Each phase has a distinct purpose, working together to create the conditions in which profound experiences have the greatest opportunity to become lasting change.

The protocol below illustrates how we guide participants from their very first conversation through continued support long after they return home.

Cardiac Screening & Stress Test

We offer a range of specialized services tailored to meet your individual needs. Our approach is focused on understanding and responding to what you require, providing effective and practical solutions.

Cardiac Monitoring During Administration

We offer a range of specialized services tailored to meet your individual needs. Our approach is focused on understanding and responding to what you require, providing effective and practical solutions.

Plantas Sagradas provides a structured medially supervised ibogaine protocol designed to support individuals seeking the discontinuation of opioids. Our approach integrates medical safety, physiological stabilization, and deep integration support before, during, and after your reatreat.

When Survival is the Goal

For more than two decades, medications such as methadone and buprenorphine (Suboxone) have transformed the landscape of opioid use disorder. There is no question that these medications have saved lives. They have reduced overdose deaths, improved treatment retention, and helped many individuals regain stability during periods when the alternative may have been continued fentanyl or heroin use.

These medications deserve respect for the role they have played, and continue to play, in addressing one of the most devastating public health crises of our time.

At the same time, another conversation deserves space.

Many individuals who have remained on maintenance medications for years describe a different kind of struggle. They are no longer living in the chaos of active addiction, yet they do not feel fully alive either. They often speak about feeling emotionally muted, disconnected from joy, creativity, intimacy, or even grief. Life becomes stable, but emotionally flat. Recovery begins to feel like surviving rather than participating in life.

This experience is not universal, and many people thrive on medication-assisted recovery. But for others, it raises an important question:

Is stability the destination, or is it the foundation from which deeper healing becomes possible?

At Plantas Sagradas, we do not view this as a debate between medications and plant medicine. We believe each has a place. For some people, medications remain the safest and most appropriate option. For others, after careful medical evaluation and thoughtful preparation, an ibogaine retreat may represent an opportunity to explore whether life beyond long-term opioid dependence is possible.

Our work is not centered on replacing one substance with another. It is centered on helping individuals reconnect with themselves, emotionally, psychologically, relationally, and spiritually.

Beyond Abstinence

One of the limitations of modern addiction care is that success is often measured by the absence of drug use.  But human flourishing involves much more than abstinence.

✦Can you experience joy?      ✦Can you feel grief without becoming overwhelmed?     ✦Can you connect deeply with another person?

✦Can you find meaning?         ✦Can you wake up feeling fully present in your own life?

Recovery is not simply about removing opioids. It is about restoring participation in life.

               ...Insight may reveal a path. Participation is what allows us to walk it.

Beyond the Experience

Why Integration Matters

At Plantas Sagradas, we believe the ceremony is not the destination. It is an invitation.

Ibogaine can create a profound interruption in familiar patterns of thought, emotion, memory, and perception. For many individuals, it offers an opportunity to step outside long-standing ways of experiencing themselves and the world. Yet even the most meaningful experience does not automatically become lasting change.

Lasting transformation requires something more. It requires the gradual reorganization of how we relate to ourselves, our relationships, our bodies, our emotions, our communities, and the lives we return to after the retreat has ended.

Our approach to integration is informed by Functional Systems Regulation Theory (FSRT), a systems-based framework that understands healing as more than insight alone. While moments of revelation may change what we see, meaningful transformation develops as new patterns are practiced, embodied, and sustained over time.

This perspective shapes every aspect of our work. Preparation begins before you arrive. Integration begins before the first ceremony. Both continue long after you return home. 

We believe the most meaningful question is not simply: "What did the medicine reveal?"  It is: "What has begun to reorganize?" Because meaningful healing is not measured by the intensity of an experience.

It is reflected in the life that gradually grows from it.

Continue the Journey

If the philosophy behind Plantas Sagradas resonates with you, we invite you to explore the broader framework that informs our approach to preparation, medicine work, and integration.

Many of the ideas woven throughout our retreats, including Capacity Before Intensity, The Readiness Question, and our understanding of integration as an ongoing process of reorganization, are informed by Functional Systems Regulation Theory (FSRT).

Whether or not you choose to attend a retreat, we hope these ideas encourage a deeper reflection on what meaningful healing can become.