🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that wouldn’t advise stacking our emails with our memes. The combination is simply too powerful. ⚠️

Victoria Wueschner would like to see some paperwork before you meet God. Call it (pearly?) gatekeeping if you must, but safety is her priority. As cofounder of F.I.V.E., she trains facilitators and educates the public about 5-MeO-DMT, in the hopes that fewer people will wing it with the most powerful psychedelic on earth.

We asked Victoria where she stands on the “ancient” history of bufo, why she's worried about the trend of stacking ibogaine and 5-MeO, and what she predicts will happen when the FDA approves this potent molecule.

This experience is a 6-day, 5-night women-only retreat in Fort Collins, CO with two psilocybin ceremonies, time in nature, breathwork, cacao and fire ceremonies, and guided self-inquiry. The October group is capped at six, and everything (meals, lodging, airport shuttle, and integration calls after you're back home) is included.

I got lucky and started with plant medicines early. My first ceremonial experience came at 19, when I was working at a cannabis grow on Vancouver Island. The person I was trimming weed with kept telling me about ayahuasca, and something about how mystical it sounded hit me. I flew to Peru and did a 12-day retreat with seven ayahuasca sessions, which was a lot for a first-timer.

I came out completely changed, like I'd been seeing life in black and white and suddenly there was color and dimension. I was also incredibly thirsty to learn more. Then years later, I found bufo in the mountains of Costa Rica. I was terrified going in, but I still consider that day the best day of my life.

Then I did three trainings in three countries. After the first two, I felt let down. I had so much respect for this molecule and walked away feeling like I'd learned nothing. What really lit the fire came later, though, when a friend in Costa Rica asked for my opinion about a woman serving 5-MeO nearby with no training and only one experience of her own, who saw facilitating as her ticket out of a job she didn’t like.

I offered to get on a call with her. My partner and I spent an hour walking her through the risks, where people have died, had psychotic breaks, been destabilized, and ended their lives. Her eyes glazed over. She was going to serve anyway. It broke my heart. But I also realized you can't police people. All you can do is educate, so they can consent to what they're stepping into. I was in the shower, beside myself, when the whole vision for F.I.V.E as an education platform arrived.

Anny Ortiz published a paper finding those claims are false, and she’s spent real time out in the field. No records have been found to verify that bufo is part of any ancestral tradition. But I had a call a few weeks ago with someone who lives in that area and is connected to these tribes, and they still very much hold that it's Indigenous wisdom. 

From what I’ve seen, the whole notion of an ancestral history seems to have started with Octavio Rettig, a controversial figure and practitioner in the 5-MeO-DMT space. In the 2010s, he traveled through the Sonoran desert, introducing the idea to the local tribes. He framed this molecule as a lost, hidden treasure of Mesoamerican culture.

Whether or not there’s a deeper history to it, though, it’s clear that living Indigenous people are now integrating bufo into their culture and using it to support their communities. I think that's great. I can't say I've spent much time down there to see firsthand how they're incorporating it, but I'd like to learn more.

I’ll start with integration because it’s one the reasons 5-MeO is truly atypical. At the peak of the experience, your sense of self dissolves completely. People usually come back with little or no memory of what happened. Unlike other medicines, you don’t have hours of content to unpack, so you can only reconnect to that experience somatically. I mention that upfront, because people need to understand that not remembering much doesn’t mean you got less out of it.

The analogy I often use is a volcano. When the mind goes offline, it stops holding your stories and traumas, and there’s a psyche dump. On the mat that looks like catharsis, including intense vibration, crying, laughing, or purging. But it’s not all at once. Like lava, that content keeps flowing for weeks, months, sometimes years. I think selling the so-called “God molecule” as fifteen years of therapy in fifteen minutes can be reckless, especially with heavier trauma and depression cases, where hard integrations are more likely.

That’s why integration is non-negotiable for us. Without a container, people have the big experience, go home, glow for a week or two, then nothing changes. We always include a month of integration afterward. We also teach our students that integration is a separate skill set. A 5-MeO facilitator isn’t automatically an integration specialist. After our retreats at Tandava, the whole team goes through each participant one by one to work out who’s the best fit for them.

Preparation is also highly structured and a major focus for us. It starts with a discovery call to check the fit both ways, then a long written screening form covering physical and psychological safety, medications, medical and trauma history, and substance use history. After that, there are private and group prep calls, where everyone coming to the retreat meets. The goal is that a participant knows everything they could want to know before they go offline. The last thing anyone should wonder as they lose control is whether they’re safe.

It does concern me. Those are arguably the two most powerful medicines on the planet, which each deserve their own container and process, and they’re being combined in a very short window.

What we’ve heard through the grapevine is that in these retreats, the 5-MeO is often treated like an afterthought. Participants are barely informed about what it is. It gets tacked on at the end of a long and difficult iboga process to make sure people get their miracle, because iboga can be brutal and 5-MeO can sometimes be blissful. That way everyone leaves feeling like they got their money's worth.

There are just a few people on the planet I would trust to be able hold this combination. I believe Drs. Martin Polanco and Joseph Barsuglia were among the first to stack these medicines, and they’ve produced good results. Certainly, the two molecules can have benefits together. But would you get a brain operation from someone who’s not a brain surgeon? From what I am hearing, the problem is that most of the providers offering this combination are not properly trained in both molecules, and there is no proper container for the 5-MeO experience itself.

For me, 5-MeO is such a huge and powerful medicine on its own that stacking with anything else, particularly as an offering to the public without significant training, feels dangerous and unnecessary. There are still too many question marks for me to feel comfortable experimenting.

Honestly, I’m excited about that future. Once this medicine is regulated, clinicians and therapists will be able to work with it without fear of losing their licenses.

At the same time, we have to be careful about setting the right expectations. Part of what pharmaceutical companies like about 5-MeO is that it’s “short-acting,” which makes it seem like it will fit more neatly into the existing healthcare system.

While it may be true that you can get patients in and out of the clinic within two hours (and back every few months for a topper dose), my concern is the container. I worry most about integration. Will the people offering this medicine have the knowledge and practical resources to carry someone through it afterward? We’re talking about a mystical experience that sits completely outside the clinical model.

That’s where I think many of us in the underground will come in. We may be the ones most equipped to help people through these processes. One of our missions at F.I.V.E is to get this medicine out in the safest way possible, so we’re preparing now to train the people who’ll be offering 5-MeO-DMT in regulated settings. I hope that day comes.

Head to F.I.V.E for 5-MeO-DMT education, integration support, and facilitator trainings.

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.