Inside the lethal toad-smoking craze sweeping celebs from Mike Tyson to Hunter Biden
Celebrities are embracing a psychedelic trend by smoking Sonoran Desert toad venom, driven into the mainstream by a controversial Mexican shaman
A psychedelic craze has emerged among celebrities, with users smoking toxic venom from a Mexican toad(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
A psychedelic craze has emerged among high-profile celebrities with users smoking toxic venom – scraped directly from a Mexican toad. The bizarre trend involves 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful psychoactive compound dubbed the “God Molecule”.
Squeezed from the glands of the Sonoran Desert toad, the venom hardens into flakes before being vapourised and smoked in glass pipes like crack. Heavyweight boxing legend Mike Tyson confessed on The Joe Rogan Experience that taking the drug transformed his life, saying: “I’ve never been the same. It’s almost like dying and being reborn.”
Meanwhile, Hunter Biden, the son of former US president Joe Biden, claimed in his memoir that the intense trip kept him clean from cocaine for a year, and ex-Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill used it as a treatment for PTSD.
Heavyweight boxing legend Mike Tyson confessed that taking the drug transformed his life(Image: PG/Bauer-Griffin, GC Imagesvia Getty Images)
Apple Macintosh pioneer Bill Atkinson also described his trip as a “psychedelic bungee jump” that offered “training wheels to teach you a divine state of being”. The practice promises an explosive “ego death” and total loss of identity.
In his book, The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence, author Kimon de Greef highlights how “a substance capable of inducing the most profound human experiences also opens the door to exploiting them.”
The venom comes from internal “veritable chemical factories” inside the amphibians, which have bellies the “girth of softballs” and “bulging glands on their necks and limbs”.
Hunter Biden claimed in his memoir that the intense trip from the toad’s venom kept him clean from cocaine(Image: CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
De Greef explains that “although dangerous to swallow, the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad undergo a kind of alchemy when vapourised, becoming a catalyst for breakthrough states of transcendence”.
The global explosion of the drug was triggered by Octavio Rettig Hinojosa, a “charismatic Mexican doctor” “who styled himself as a 21st-century shaman”.
After experimenting with “a prodigious array of psychedelics”, Octavio claimed 5-MeO-DMT cured his own cocaine habit. He began treating addicts in Mexico, earning the title el doctor sapo — the toad doctor.
Octavio quickly built a cult following, rising to fame as a “psychedelic superstar” and the “Pied Piper of toad”.
By 2014, the United Nations Association of Venezuela even endorsed him as a “carrier of traditional indigenous medicine”.
However, reports soon surfaced regarding his erratic behaviour. Footage later emerged allegedly showing him slapping terrified clients.
The trend is claimed to have taken a fatal turn amid reports that at least four people died during his ceremonies. Octavio was arrested by Mexican police over one death, though he was never convicted and denies wrongdoing, insisting: “My work has been misunderstood, misinterpreted and misused.”
Tribal leaders have since denounced him, with one Yaqui activist telling de Greef that Octavio “was looking for validation as a shaman, but he’s nothing more than an actor – a fake.”
Despite the fallout, medical researchers are now running clinical trials with the compound for addiction treatment.
