🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that secretes content like a gland on deadline. 💦

Kimon de Greef writes about the weirder corners of the illegal wildlife trade. Amidst the usual songbird smuggling and donkey rustling, he came across a psychedelic toad with a global fanbase and a charismatic champion. So he pulled the thread, and out popped his new book.

We asked Kimon what the Seri make of the man who says he revived their ritual, why he’d take synthetic 5-MeO-DMT over toad every time, and how to tell the best facilitators from the charlatans.

We like to make things simple around here.

Research and policy news, for sure. But that also goes for having a psychedelic experience of your own. We strive to make that process as straightforward as possible.

Which leads to our latest offering, Althea Direct, launching today.

Althea Direct is a private, one-on-one psilocybin session, matched and confirmed fast, with a facilitator our care navigation team has already vetted for you.

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(You’ll get enough of those from the mushrooms on journey day.)

I have a conservation biology background, and a lot of my reporting has been on poaching and illicit wildlife economies. In 2020, I found out about a seemingly dissonant trade in toad secretion, and psychedelic toad poaching was the frame I went into the story with. I thought it was unusual that the end user was often seeking transcendence and connection to nature, while the supply chain seemed so problematic.

I soon found out about Octavio Rettig, the figure who’d taken an obscure underground practice and turned it mainstream within a few years. He had this dazzling origin story. He'd healed himself from a crack addiction with toad, treated methamphetamine addiction among the Seri tribe of Sonora, and rediscovered toad smoking as their lost sacramental practice. My subsequent reporting indicates that this story, which sounds too good to be true, probably is.

By 2020, huge controversies surrounded him. A number of people had died in ceremony with him. There was video footage of him being aggressive with participants, pouring bucketloads of water into their faces mid-trip, blowing rapé up their nostrils, zapping them with tasers, and kicking and punching them into smoking more toad. I gravitated toward him because he embodied the tensions of the toad-smoking space, and of the psychedelic underground more broadly.

Before his rise to prominence, he was a crack cocaine addict with a medical doctor's license. In his telling, he hit rock bottom and was living on the street, selling drugs to support his habit. Then in 2006, a friend from medical school introduced him to the toad. From there, he started using it multiple times a day for about a year and got off crack completely.

For the next few years, he was the on-site doctor at a chain pharmacy in Hermosillo, sharing toad at raves and trance parties. In 2012, he was introduced to the Seri, whose lands lie in cartel trafficking territory. He gave toad to some people, then quickly emerged with the narrative that he'd found an ancestral practice anthropologists had speculated about for decades. 

Within a year, he was a full-time toad shaman, traveling the world and superimposing his ceremonies over existing Seri traditions. He'd wear their clothing, chant their songs, and carry documents authorizing him as a medicine man of the community. You can imagine how well that went down right as the psychedelic renaissance was gathering speed.

His first claim was that he'd staged an intervention that had healed a lot of methamphetamine addicts. That's unfortunately not true. There are still high rates of addiction in Seri territory, including among his former patients. But more than 75% of the community, according to lots of people I spoke to there, never touch toad and want nothing to do with it. Most of them belong to a Spanish-language evangelical church that regards the practice as basically demonic.

When I was there, around 1% of the Seri population was serving toad, which I found revealing given the poverty there and what an opportunity it is to make a buck off arriving gringos. When I first arrived as an outsider asking about toad, people naturally pointed me toward the toad people, because an economy has sprung up around psychedelic tourism. But then I talked to people from the church and traveled to a second Seri settlement, which is more remote and gets fewer tourists.

I'm not a spokesperson for an Indigenous community, but my sense was that many people found it amusing that visitors were having extreme trips and thinking they were engaging in a traditional Seri practice. The Seri have a beautiful record of song poems passed down over generations, describing their relationship with the desert. Octavio doesn't speak Seri, so he would mimic the sounds of those songs during ceremonies. There's one young local guy notorious for singing about sardines or birds or whatever crosses his mind. When asked why, he laughs and says no one knows the difference.

Our founder went through Numinus's certification pathway to become a licensed psilocybin facilitator. He already knew the research. This training gave him the practical skills to support someone through change.

In the 5-MeO space in particular, the good facilitators are the ones you don't hear about, because they aren't self-promoting. An orange flag is if someone's all over social media. I would say a red flag is public footage of their ceremonies. Octavio routinely had people filming, and I never saw any consent process.

The other flag is a cavalier approach to preparation and integration. Early on, he'd serve toad to drunk people at beach parties who didn't even know what the substance was. He'd run group ceremonies and move right along to the next city the next day. Be wary of anyone who doesn't create a container for what might shake loose a day or a week (or even longer) afterwards. One person's heavenly trip can be an unending hell for someone else.

My other piece of advice is that if you're interested in 5-MeO-DMT, it's always better to consume the synthetic than bufo from toads. I respect the worldview that natural substances carry a different energetic signature, even though I disagree with it personally. When you use synthetic, it's the same molecule hitting the same receptor. The toad supply chain is just horrific. Toads get captured en masse by migrant agricultural workers in cartel territory, who risk being beaten or murdered. If you believe there's a spirit of the toad, consider that these creatures asphyxiate in bags while they wait for the dealer to visit the collection camps.

With synthetic, you can also measure doses more precisely. Octavio (and many others like him) would eyeball his doses with sprinkles of toad from different sources, even though concentration varies considerably based on a toad's age and diet. So there’s no way of knowing how much you’re getting. This matters because there's a very fine line between an ego-dissolution dose and a dissociative white-out dose.

The psychedelic experience makes a person so intrinsically vulnerable that there's a big risk of facilitators buying into the ego trip of it all, hence the name of the book. 5-MeO is famously the drug that most reliably leads to ego death, and it also ironically gives people god complexes. People look at you after their trips as if you've delivered them into heaven. That has to be a difficult thing for a psyche to process.

The good news is that there are networks developing best practices. A secretive group called the Conclave operates a bit like Fight Club—nobody who is a member will admit they are—since this is still a Schedule I drug in the U.S. and many of the practitioners are American. But they have some great resources online. F.I.VE. is also doing great work to educate people about the molecule and train facilitators on safe protocols.

The other thing to sit with is the strange future this field is hurtling into, with 5-MeO-DMT at the center of a biotech arms race. The clinical data so far is remarkable for treatment-resistant depression and postpartum depression. But a trial therapist asked me what happens when someone is awake for a week in existential torment, convinced they're losing their mind. The current safety data doesn't capture that risk.

The pressure in the clinical trial model is to minimize therapeutic support, because the FDA doesn't regulate therapy and needs to see that the drug itself is efficacious. Once approved and delivered at scale, this medicine could bring a lot of healing, but it also seems inconceivable to me that some people won't get badly burned. And that’s not just my own opinion. It's concerning to every credible 5-MeO practitioner working today.

Pick up a copy of this book, The Ego Trip.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.