This story is produced in partnership with DoubleBlind, an independent magazine covering the psychedelic industry.
In October 2023, Lauren Levis arrived for the first time at Soul Centro—a simple yet sprawling 15-room psychedelic retreat in the northwest of Costa Rica—to take iboga.
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It’s not a drug made for parties or discotheques. Derived from a Central African root bark, iboga is so intense it’s known as ‘the Mount Everest of psychedelics.’ Iboga users—who typically cannot stand up for hours after the effects kick in—report being taken on white-knuckle rides in which they rewatch all the traumas of their lives as if they were a fly-on-the-wall in their own biopic.
That is to say, it can provide one of the most intense psychedelic experiences on Earth.
Those, like Lauren, who seek iboga desperately want to feel better in their bodies and minds. And the Westerners who lead iboga ceremonies have often shaken off serious addictions after taking the “holy root”—like one-half of Soul Centro’s founding couple, Chor Boogie, a well-known spray paint artist with a large tattoo of his adopted name on his back. When Lauren arrived at the retreat center, she was greeted by Boogie and his wife Elizabeth Bast, a former tantric sex worker who wrote a book about how she persuaded her husband to take iboga a decade ago to overcome his heroin addiction.
One thing more than anything else made Lauren uncomfortable: she was, remarkably, the only person on the retreat. In all three of the five planned ceremonies she was able to endure, she threw up dozens of times and “did not do well on the medicine,” according to her brother Arthur Levis. She ended up leaving halfway through the course of treatment and attempted to recoup some of the more than $7,000 she had paid.
“The only recourse that Soul Centro offered her was a credit, that had to be used within a year, to come back to the retreat and participate again,” Arthur says. She had previously suffered from addiction to drugs, and depression, but had turned her life around, obtaining a double master’s degree in 2022 and working as a social worker in her native New Mexico. Still, Lauren worried about lingering addictive tendencies and also lived with a chronic pain condition for which she took medication. She wanted to experience the deep healing that Soul Centro promised—and the benefits eulogized by many of those who have scaled the iboga mountain.
That’s why, in August this year, Lauren cashed in her credits. The 40-year-old returned to Soul Centro for a female-only retreat attended by a dozen women. She’d provided a heart scan in advance proving her cardiovascular health was in decent shape, something Soul Centro requests routinely due to the risks of taking iboga, which can slow down the heart rate. (The retreat also runs its own medical and psychiatric tests, and advises guests on what medicines, like long-acting opioids, can clash dangerously with iboga.)
When Lauren came to take iboga for the second time, Boogie was away in Gabon, the homeland of the psychedelic plant, where the Indigenous Bwiti spiritual tradition uses it in religious practices. (Boogie has another tattoo on his neck, saying “Bwiti jedi.”) Bast stayed behind to lead the retreat and care for their three-year-old son.
Little did Lauren know that if she had let her credits expire, she might still be alive today.
During the first all-night ceremony, on August 4, Lauren began to sweat profusely and became agitated, apparently due to dehydration, and requested an IV drip, according to attendees who spoke on condition of anonymity. “She said, ‘Everything is spinning,’” Sophie* recalled, adding that when the retreat doctor did arrive to treat Lauren, just before dawn, a vein for the IV could not be found.
There was no call to 9-1-1 at that point. Instead, according to Soul Centro attendee Naomi*, staff tried to cool Lauren down with a shower in her room. This is when she had a heart attack and emergency support was called for. Lauren received CPR, and an ambulance arrived half an hour later. Ultimately, though, the efforts were unsuccessful. Naomi says that Lauren died on Monday, August 5 in her Soul Centro hotel room.
You might think the Soul Centro management would’ve sought to be totally transparent with their guests. Yet according to the two attendees who spoke to VICE, Bast told them that Lauren was stable in hospital. Lauren’s family say that Bast did not immediately tell them about her death either, beyond sending an initial message to Lauren’s partner to confirm she was the emergency contact and asking her to call.
Lauren’s partner is named Juno Sisneros. On the morning of August 5, she called Bast after receiving her email out of the blue, but the Soul Centro founder didn’t pick up all day. Naturally, Juno became extremely distressed. The next day, she sent Bast an email which read: “I am worried sick and this is an unacceptable line of communication. I need to know what’s going on immediately! No more emails or texts. Someone must call me within the next 30 minutes or I will be calling authorities.”
At the same time, the Levis family began to do their own frenzied detective work, contacting local hospitals, morgues, and police, as well as accessing Lauren’s iCloud and messaging a new contact she had made on the retreat.
Bast replied shortly after: “Thank you for your responsiveness. There has been a lot happening here to tend to.” She introduced Juno to colleagues and a lawyer acting on behalf of Soul Centro.
After receiving Bast’s brief initial email, Juno called and texted “40-plus times that entire day into the next morning,” she recalls. “Because I had not gotten a response I called the police to make a missing persons report and that’s how I found out she had passed, 29 hours after the fact. Elizabeth [Bast] didn’t have the decency to communicate her death to me until August 24. Lauren is the love and light of my life and I miss her terribly.”
On August 6, Costa Rican police informed Lauren’s family that she had died. Three days later—in what was the first substantive communication between Soul Centro’s lawyer and the family—the representative is alleged to have falsely suggested during a Zoom call that Lauren had not participated in a ceremony. “They denied that Lauren had even participated in the iboga ceremony,” claims Juno. The lawyer then checked the Soul Centro website and accepted that Lauren had consumed iboga. “It was as if he was checking to see what we knew,” another member of Levis’ family said.
Soon, Soul Centro were receiving serious heat via their social media channels and Reddit. They promptly deactivated their Facebook and Instagram accounts, where they had regularly touted the powers of the dream-inducing psychedelic. The deadly incident didn’t stop them organizing another retreat later that same month, two people in the psychedelic community told VICE.
On August 19, Bast eventually made contact with the Levises. “I would like to offer my deepest condolences to you and your family and to Juno for your loss of Lauren,” she said, in a voice note shared with VICE. “I cared for Lauren immensely through our time together. I deeply apologize for the time it has taken to connect. I wanted to connect right away and my team strongly urged me to wait and have discussions to help me respond in the most thoughtful way.”
Then, the Costa Rican press got wind of what happened. On August 25, the country’s leading newspaper La Nación ran a front page article reporting the details of Lauren’s death, and revealing that many psychedelic retreats in Costa Rica aimed at treating drug addiction were operating without official authorization, though it did not name Soul Centro as one of these organizations. (There are an estimated 100 psychedelic retreat centers in Costa Rica, where psychedelics are unregulated.)
Bast and Boogie say that because they are in “a sensitive phase” of an ongoing investigation, there are legal limits on what they can say publicly. However, they did offer the following: “As facilitators and human beings who are deeply committed to healing and transformation, the passing of this sacred soul has profoundly shaken us, filling us with deep sorrow. We offer our prayers and deepest condolences to their family during this time.” (More cryptically, Boogie recently shared an image on Facebook with the caption, “Here’s the thing about spirits. We don’t let a silly thing like death get in our way.” It’s unclear what he was referring to.)
Bast also apologized to an attendee in an email on August 29 “for not being transparent with you in that moment” when denying that Lauren had died, despite being asked directly. “This was the greatest challenge and completely unprecedented territory for me as a space holder,” she wrote. “I was devastated about Lauren—while caring for all the women in the most delicate state, all while I had to interface with local authorities.”
Bast said that she had not told attendees because they were in a “profoundly delicate state” after staying up all night taking iboga. Some of the participants were psychedelic first-timers, she added. “When people are coming out of this experience with the holy root, they can be in some of the most sensitive psychological, emotional, spiritual spaces that they will ever be in their life, and very neuroplastic […] I felt that I needed to give them time to get home safely—and to ground.”
She conceded, however, that her attorneys had “strictly forbade” her from speaking to the Levis family and said they would “intervene” on her behalf. “They also said that I risked anything I said being misinterpreted in the wrong way—even if we had done everything right in terms of medical protocol,” Bast wrote. “They also warned me that our small child potentially being taken into government custody when I had no family here at that time [sic]. I was extremely scared and intimidated […] In retrospect, I should have listened to my heart even at my own risk and talked with the family immediately.”
The Levises have, however, been further aggrieved at allegations that Lauren had taken drugs other than iboga at or just before the retreat. On September 3, an acquaintance of Bast released a message attributed to her in a San Francisco Bay Area WhatsApp group. In it, Bast appeared to claim—without providing supporting evidence—that Levis had taken “substances other than the sacred medicine,” according to a screenshot seen by VICE.
Sophie says that attendees were not searched for drugs that could be contraindicated with iboga upon their arrival, but they were asked to hand over any such substances and signed a waiver acknowledging the risks of taking the psychedelic. “I texted Lauren asking if she was OK on Tuesday before I left the retreat but didn’t find out she had died until Thursday when her family contacted me,” says Sophie. “I was livid.”
In Costa Rica, scrutiny of Soul Centro—and the wider psychedelic industry—is not going away. On September 13, La Nación reported on a critical announcement from the country’s health department citing the death of Bente Soldberg, a 41-year-old Norwegian woman, who had a heart attack at Iboga House Center after consuming the drug back in 2014. This retreat was founded by Patrick Makala, an “nganga,” or Gabonese psychedelic guide. Confusingly, he also goes by the alias ‘Moughenda,’ and there are claims that he was the first to bring iboga to the West.
Makala says he was not present for the ceremony that led to Soldberg’s death in 2014 (the same year he helped Soul Centro co-founder Chor Boogie kick heroin). In the aftermath, Iboga House and Makala parted company from the Americans they’d previously worked with, who rebranded as Rythmia Life Advancement Center and began serving ayahuasca—explicitly promising their guests miracles. Famous Rythmia guests have included Scott Disick, the boxer Deontay Wilder, musician and rapper Andre 3000, and comedian Ron White. The retreat center—which was subject to a lengthy VICE investigation in 2022—is now constructing its own miniature town, with two-bedroom houses starting at $600,000, one organization leader told me last year.
Unwilling to give up the iboga dream, Chor Boogie and Elizabeth Bast found a new teacher named Binana, visiting Gabon several times to undergo training in the Bwiti tradition. It was there that Boogie was given the name ‘Gnyangou’ (“medicine of the sun”) before returning to the US to administer the promising yet perilous psychedelic in Airbnbs prior to the Soul Centro retreat center opening in 2022.
Despite Boogie’s visits to Africa’s west coast, his practice has raised eyebrows. “In our village, a drug addict would need five to ten years’ reformation, proving they can live a monastic way of life before serving iboga,” says one iboga facilitator initiated into the Bwiti tradition, and who lives in Gabon part of the year. “When you’re ‘walking with Bwiti,’ you cannot have a dual life. Chor Boogie’s an artist with kids who needs money and who wants to hang in Santa Teresa [a fashionable area of Costa Rica].”
I attended the Soul Centro center shortly after its summer 2022 opening, thanks to an invitation from Elizabeth Bast, as part of an article for VICE. If I had not been at the retreat, the other participant would have been alone, like Lauren was during her first visit in 2023. Boogie, who uses the word “motherfucker” liberally, was dressed as an Indigenous medicine man and played incessantly uptempo tribal music from a sound system in a room with an aluminum roof that he called a temple.
I ate chunks of the bitter iboga root bark mixed with honey, and was soon so overwhelmed I had to lay down. After gazing into the universe for several hours, and being given further doses of an iboga derivative, Boogie took me on a “soul journey” during which I connected with my late aunt, before throwing up and experiencing a state of extended bliss that had enduring effects. A previous Soul Centro attendee, Fletcher Burdick, told me his iboga trip finally helped him get sober after years of on-off addiction that led to the brink of death. “The medicine carried out a total mental detox of my brain and decluttered it all,” he said. “For the first time, I felt peaceful and calm.”
Still, I was concerned by the tempestuous relationship Boogie seemed to share with Bast, though Boogie was more sanguine between sessions when he was playing what seemed to be a cherished mouth harp instrument.
Not that he was there when the participants on Lauren’s second retreat gathered the morning after the fatal ceremony. There were, however, at least eight police officers across the center collecting evidence and interviewing staff, Naomi and Sophie said. It is not clear what Bast told police about Lauren but on August 24, she finally met with Lauren’s family, joining her lawyers on a Zoom call to confirm what they already knew.
“I was asking the lawyers right to their faces, ‘Why did you create this whole lie that she wasn’t at a ceremonial retreat?’” her brother tells VICE. “How can you say that to me, knowing that I know she was at an iboga retreat? The name of the place is ‘the Soul Centro iboga retreat.’ If we hadn’t gotten her phone information, we wouldn’t have had any witnesses.”
Lauren’s family are now awaiting the outcome of a postmortem toxicology report that could shed further light on her death. “We all grieve this senseless loss and collectively grapple with learning the truth behind the circumstances which pulled her charismatic smile and vibrant spirit away from us too soon,” her family said in a post advertising her memorial service. Boogie and Bast will face further questions, and Costa Rican law enforcement are continuing to investigate, though the family say they do not intend to launch a wrongful death lawsuit.
It is unclear whether Bast and Boogie will continue to work in the psychedelic world. But whispers about their trips to Gabon have traveled round parts of the psychedelic community. Boogie leads groups of people to become initiated into the Bwiti tradition—a grueling process that involves a three-day ritual with little sleep, and lots of iboga. “It was a very challenging experience,” Mike*, an attendee of one of the getaways, tells VICE. “It was not one where I felt really supported or held in any way. If you’re paying well over $10,000 for people to guide you through an experience in an African village, I did not feel guided at all. It was a weird vibe.” Another participant had a manic episode, Mike said, before becoming intimate with a Gabonese Bwiti initiate, who she took back to her hotel in the capital Libreville.
As much as it seems to offer unlikely respite from stubborn mental health conditions and addiction, controversy also tends to follow iboga, and its derivative ibogaine. Thirty-three deaths related to ibogaine have been reported publicly, according to a 2021 study, and in August Rolling Stone, in partnership with DoubleBlind, reported on the death of a 49-year-old man at an upscale ibogaine clinic in Mexico. But experts suspect the true figure of total deaths—especially with the number of people who have died from iboga added on—could be at least twice that.
Still, it would be a fraction of the people who have taken the psychedelics, with more than 10,000 globally thought to have used ibogaine alone. It’s clearly a risk worth taking for many. Anecdotal accounts like Burdick’s, and small studies, demonstrate that iboga and ibogaine deliver effective interruptions of drug withdrawal symptoms.
“This medicine seems like it could really be a potential help for people,” says Arthur Levis. “We are curious if Lauren was on anything that would be contraindicated to taking iboga in any form. If that’s the case, of course, it’s on her for not following the protocols. But she seemed to be taking it very seriously leading into her trip.”
The circumstances around Lauren’s death, and the messy aftermath, have cast a shadow over Costa Rica’s rapidly expanding world of unregulated psychedelic retreats. The question remains: Are these centers truly equipped to initiate people with serious mental health issues into the murky realms of such powerful medicines?
* Sophie, Naomi and Mike are names given to attendees pseudonymously to protect their identity.
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