Rory Van Tuinen knows that, by any measure, he is lucky to be alive. The 34-year-old Waterbury native got hooked on opioids at 18 after he missed a phone call from his best friend, who died by suicide later that night. Racked with guilt and deep in depression, Van Tuinen got blackout drunk and drove his car into a tree. He awoke in an intensive care unit three days later with a broken neck and a morphine drip in his arm.
What began as pain relief spiraled into a more than decade-long substance abuse disorder marked by at least 15 overdoses, rehab stays, methadone treatments, and brief stints of sobriety followed by repeated relapses. With the support of a loving and understanding family, Van Tuinen had better odds than most to make a recovery. His father is a psychiatrist, and his mother is a nurse practitioner who worked for years in methadone clinics and alcohol treatment facilities. Nevertheless, Van Tuinen struggled to overcome his opioid dependency.
That is until he began exploring alternative treatments — specifically, psychedelic plant medicines — which he now credits for finally breaking the physical and psychological grip that drugs had on his life. Now clean and sober after more than a year and a half, Van Tuinen has just published a memoir about his path to recovery, called Awakening the Heart: Reclaiming Identity After Addiction. He will read selections from the book this Friday, June 19, at Zenbarn in Waterbury Center. The free event, called Psychedelics, Recovery & Community: An Evening of Conversation, Connections, and Exploration, begins at 6 p.m. and will also include updates on psychedelic policy reform initiatives in Vermont.
In 2021, Seven Days profiled Van Tuinen and his brother Ryan, who himself suffered through years of alcoholism, social anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Together, the brothers found an unconventional treatment for their substance abuse in ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogen used for thousands of years by Indigenous people in the Amazon Basin. As Rory Van Tuinen said at the time, “Ayahuasca showed me the potential that I had for change.”
The brothers formed a nonprofit, called Cultivating Connections, to help other Vermonters struggling with addiction, mental illness and past trauma.
Alas, Van Tuinen’s sobriety didn’t last. After the Seven Days story was published, he relapsed and overdosed again. But he says he’s finally found enduring relief through another plant medicine: ibogaine, a hallucinogen and stimulant made from the root bark of the Iboga shrub native to West Africa. In 2024, Van Tuinen traveled to Cancun, Mexico, for a two-week treatment of ibogaine which, like ayahuasca, is a Schedule I drug that is illegal to possess or use in the U.S.
Van Tuinen claims that ibogaine took away virtually all of his physical dependency. In effect, ayahuasca provided him with a spiritual transformation and ibogaine a physical one. “I don’t even think about it anymore,” he said, adding that for the first time since he was 18, he no longer fears another relapse.
The use of ibogaine for addiction therapy is not without risks. The scientific literature on its use cites numerous reports of dangerous and even fatal side effects that include seizures, psychoses, manias, comas and cardiac arrest. And Van Tuinen’s own ibogaine therapy didn’t come cheap. His two-week stay in a Mexican clinic cost $15,000, not including his travel expenses.
But public interest and scientific research into ibogaine as a treatment for addiction, traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder and mental illness has been strong in recent years, especially among veterans. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to establish a “pathway” for eligible patients to access psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine, and called on the FDA to expand clinical trials into the therapeutic uses of these psychoactive compounds. Trump’s order also directs the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to channel at least $50 million to states with ibogaine programs.
Van Tuinen was recently awarded a grant to distribute 200 copies of his book by MadFreedom Advocates, a Brattleboro nonprofit run by and for “psychiatric survivors, mad folks and others marginalized by the mental health system.” Copies of Awakening the Heart will also be available for sale at the Zenbarn event on Friday.
Learn more at roryvantuinen.com.