In Waves and War.
The Netflix ibogaine documentary, reviewed.

What the film actually shows

In Waves and War is structured around three veterans — DJ Shipley, Marcus Capone, and Matty Roberts — whose military and post-military experiences left them with severe traumatic brain injury, PTSD, depression, and in two cases active suicidal ideation. Conventional treatment had failed them. Each ultimately travels to The Mission Within in Tijuana for ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT treatment.

The documentary is restrained by Netflix standards. It is not a hagiography. It shows the medical screening, the cardiac monitoring, the long pre-treatment intake. It shows participants vomiting, sweating, dissociating. It does not pretend the experience is comfortable. It does show outcomes that, by the participants' own accounts and in follow-up testimony, were transformative.

What it does well

The film's most important contribution is normalising a category of treatment that has, until recently, existed at the cultural margins. The participants are not seekers of consciousness expansion or wellness-influencer types. They are people who tried everything else and ran out of options. That framing changes how a general audience receives the material.

It also takes the medical infrastructure seriously. The Mission Within's medical team — and Dr. Polanco specifically — are shown doing rigorous cardiac screening, monitoring during the experience, and detailed integration work afterward. This matters because the documentary's reach will surface bad-faith providers riding the wave; viewers who watched carefully will know what real medical oversight looks like.

The film is honest about what ibogaine doesn't do. It is not portrayed as a cure. It is portrayed as opening a window — an interruption in the patterns of trauma and addiction — that the work afterward fills in. Marcus Capone's wife Amber, who co-founded VETS, has been particularly clear in interviews that the post-treatment integration work was as important as the dosing itself.

What it leaves out or underplays

The documentary mostly follows participants whose treatment went well. This is the natural shape of a film about transformation — the people willing to be filmed at length, and whose stories made it through editing, are people whose outcomes supported the narrative arc. The documentary doesn't pretend otherwise, but a careful viewer should understand that not every participant in not every clinic has Marcus Capone's outcome.

The film is light on the financial picture. Ibogaine treatment at clinics like The Mission Within, Beond, or Ambio costs $10,000–$15,000 or more. Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS), co-founded by the Capones, has funded over 1,200 special operations veterans through this — but the general veteran population, let alone the general civilian population with comparable trauma profiles, does not have that pathway. The film doesn't fully sit with the equity problem.

It is light on the cardiac risk specifically. Cardiac arrhythmia is the dominant fatality risk in ibogaine treatment, and most documented fatalities have occurred in unsupervised settings. The film shows good medical care, but it doesn't lean as hard as it could into the contrast between supervised and unsupervised use. People watching the film and concluding "I'll find some ibogaine and try this at home" are people the film inadvertently failed.

And it largely leaves out the broader picture: ibogaine treatment outside the veteran-special-operations community, ibogaine for opioid addiction (the primary clinical application historically), the Bwiti traditional context, and the substantial Mexican clinical infrastructure that exists beyond The Mission Within.

The clinical research underneath

In Waves and War was made in the same period that the Stanford ibogaine trial for special operations veterans with traumatic brain injury was being published. That trial, in Nature Medicine in 2024, reported an 87% reduction in PTSD symptoms, 88% reduction in depression, and 81% reduction in anxiety symptoms one month after a single ibogaine session paired with magnesium for cardiac protection. See the full data.

Effect sizes of that magnitude in a trial of this design are unusual. The sample was small (30 participants), the design open-label, the population highly selected. But the consistency of the effect across measures and the magnitude of the response have been hard to dismiss. The Trump administration's April 2026 psychedelic executive order specifically directed NIH funding toward ibogaine for TBI on the basis of this research.

What viewers should take away

In Waves and War is a serious piece of work and worth watching for anyone considering ibogaine treatment or trying to understand why this field is gaining institutional traction. It is not, however, a treatment recommendation or a how-to. If you are considering ibogaine for yourself or someone close to you:

• The clinical evidence base is strongest for opioid addiction and now, after the Stanford trial, for TBI/PTSD in veterans. Other applications are more exploratory.
• The provider matters enormously. Medical-grade clinics with cardiac monitoring and physician oversight are operationally different from non-medical ibogaine settings. See verified ibogaine clinics in Mexico.
• Integration support is not optional. The veterans in the film all had structured integration support afterward; that is part of what works.
• Our sister site ibogainetherapymexico.org covers ibogaine treatment in considerably more depth than we can here.

The film exists because a small number of people have, over the past two decades, kept doing this work in Mexico when nobody in the United States would. That history is worth understanding too.