Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

Today’s lead story is a highlight reel of the workshop DoubleBlind hosted with Joel Brierre and Victoria Wueschner of Tandava Retreats — a center in Tepoztlán, Mexico devoted to 5-MeO-DMT — and co-founders of F.I.V.E, a harm-reduction and education platform for the medicine. Below are some of the most powerful and informational portions of our discussion — if Beehive didn’t cut off our newsletter after a certain word count, we would have published the entire Q&A. Alas!

Also, we want to hear from you! DoubleBlind and journalist Noah Daly organized an anonymous survey to help us report a story about the increasing frequency of serving 5-MeO-DMT after ibogaine sessions at retreat centers. Feel free to pass along to anyone you know who has experienced this combination.

Save the Toads 🐸💚🐸,
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

Most people drink ayahuasca a stranger hands them. They never saw the vine. Never cleaned a leaf. Never knew what was in the cup until it was already inside them.

At MahaDevi in Putumayo, Colombia, you spend two mornings making the medicine yourself, beside Taita Miguel, whose Camsá family has prepared it by hand for twelve generations. You smash the vine. You clean, you mix, you extract. Nothing mechanical, nothing rushed. Then night comes, and you drink what your own hands made.

You will be making crudo ayahuasca. It ferments within days and cannot leave the jungle, which is why almost no one who has sat with the medicine has tasted it.

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As the "God molecule" goes mainstream, Joel Brierre and Victoria Wueschner break down what the medicine actually demands.

Few substances in the psychedelic canon are shrouded in as much mystery as 5-MeO-DMT, a highly psychoactive compound found throughout nature, but most notably with the Sonoran Desert toad (also known as Incillius alvarius, formerly known as Bufo alvarius). At our most recent workshop, DoubleBlind sat down with two of the field’s most rigorous voices: Joel Brierre, who founded Tandava Retreats and co-founded the education platform, F.I.V.E; and Victoria Wueschner, F.I.V.E’s co-founder and Tandava’s director of education, to understand one of the most captivating animal medicines on the planet. And while both of them led with reverence, Brierre and Wueschner’s candor characterized the conversation. 

"5-MeO is the world's most powerful psychedelic experience," says Brierre. "Very short-lasting, 10 to 30 minutes on average with one dose, and an inscrutable, absolutely impossible-to-describe experience that can range from blissful beyond your wildest imagination to viscerally challenging and terrifying."

It’s exactly this ineffable power that’s captivated the public imagination. 5-MeO-DMT’s visibility has reached atmospheric heights as of late, thanks to the quasi-scientific psychedelic escapades of tech bro and biohacking entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who, in this phase of his career, has reinvented himself as a glorified wellness influencer. After live streaming a high-dose psilocybin session in November of 2025 — six hours of biometrics, celebrity cameos, a conversation with drug journalist Hamilton Morris, and a DJ set by Grimes — Johnson streamed himself taking 5-MeO-DMT in March of 2026 to an audience of roughly 700,000, catapulting toad medicine into a new realm of cultural awareness.

Some people find this exposure to be a net-positive for the psychedelic space. Raising awareness of the mental health benefits of [insert any psychedelic here] is the whole point of this movement, so the argument goes. But the amphibian from which 5-MeO-DMT is harvested is classified as a species of “special concern” and has not been documented in California since the 1970s, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Its conservation status is listed as “threatened” in New Mexico, according to the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. Its habitat in Sonora, Mexico, also has been fractured by roads, development, and the slow grind of modernization. Sonoran Desert toads rarely stray beyond a 50-meter radius in a lifetime, yet poachers pull them from that range, milk them for the 5-MeO-DMT secretion (which is their only chemical defense against predators, by the way), and sometimes store them in buckets to feed an unregulated market of insatiable new age, wellness, and longevity consumers. The species, unsurprisingly, is under severe stress.

This is the case for lab-made 5-MeO-DMT as the “ethical” way to consume the drug. But, the ethics around 5-MeO-DMT extend beyond environmental. There is another immediate concern impacting people wanting to heal: Retreat centers are administering 5-MeO after ibogaine sessions, which Brierre says has resulted in reports of severe destabilization and “reactivations,” or the experience of feeling psychedelic effects long after ingestion. 

Brierre and Wueschner unlocked a vault full of 5-MeO knowledge for us, and what follows are the questions that drew the sharpest answers, spanning what 5-Meo-DMT actually is, whether bliss can ever be promised, the genuine risks the medicine carries, the ethics of the toad, the proliferation of unregulated vape pens, and the perils of stacking 5-MeO atop an ibogaine session. 

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joel Brierre: 5-MeO-DMT is very different from N,N-DMT, or what most people would just call DMT— N,N-DMT being one of the active components in ayahuasca. The main way we can explain the difference — because they're both small molecules, both chemically structured very similarly, and yet the differences are quite profound — is this: with DMT, when it is smoked in its pure form, this is an experience where many people report going through a wormhole or some sort of passageway, entering into a different realm. Many people experience contact with entities or beings. It is a highly fractal-like, very psychedelic experience. 

With 5-MeO-DMT, the main difference is that rather than a journey somewhere strange, it is a dissolution of the sense of subjective self. It is a falling away of the sense of "I," or the ego, temporarily, allowing the awareness to break free from the confines of the individual structure, leading into something that is ineffable by nature. It gets its nickname, the "God molecule," because many people who experience this say they are merging into, or remembering oneself as the infinite or pure boundless consciousness.

They both quite powerful, but 5-MeO is going to be substantially more potent, more powerful. Whereas N,N-DMT, for many people, has been perfectly fine to do alone — a lot of us probably had our first experiences with DMT self-serving — with 5-MeO, this is one that we never want to self-serve. 5-MeO is the world's most powerful psychedelic experience. Very short-lasting, 10 to 30 minutes on average with one dose, and an inscrutable, absolutely impossible-to-describe experience that can range from blissful beyond your wildest imagination to viscerally challenging and terrifying — and maybe both at the same time.

Victoria Wueschner: This is a really important conversation when it comes to 5-MeO-DMT because there is a lot of expectation that people are coming to this medicine with. They've heard it's the biggest experience in the world, they’ve heard it's nicknamed the “God molecule,” maybe this is going to be the thing that fixes their depression, or whatever their expectation is. We're working against quite a few different things. There have been a lot of lofty headlines just promising the world like, "15 years of therapy in 15 minutes," things like that. A lot of sensationalism has really conditioned people to expect to have a bliss experience or be a magic bullet for their problems. 

So yes, of course, a bliss experience can happen for folks, but I think it's really important that we stop chasing that, and that as facilitators we give a lot of education around the fact that the opposite experience — what we would call a “challenging experience” is also just as likely if not more so. And it's not something we're trying to run away from, we're not trying to stop it, we're not trying to mitigate it. It's actually something we really want to welcome into the space, and reframe. 

As human beings, we're really conditioned to want to cling to what feels good and run away from what feels uncomfortable. So what we do with our participants is open up space for them to reframe what the challenge is, knowing that if we really want to work through something, we have to directly confront that thing. Sometimes we'll have the bliss experience, but sometimes it's grueling — absolutely grueling on the mat. It's challenging. It's terrifying. That can be because in that moment we are coming into direct contact with something we've been running away from our whole life. It could be something unconscious or something that's been othered; shadow parts of ourselves. It's a huge opportunity for growth.

Brierre: For physicality, we want a strong, healthy heart. We want a participant to be able to take a stress-test EKG with no warning signs. If that is ever in question, we have a participant see their cardiologist, get plugged up for a stress-test EKG, and then send the report to us. We're looking for no risk of stroke, aneurysm, or heart attack on the horizon. If there's been a recent heart attack or stroke, this may be a problem. 

Conditions like schizophrenia are a potential contraindication, even schizophrenia in the immediate family can be a contraindication. Several central nervous system disorders, too. While there is theoretical rationale to suggest there can be curative properties with 5-MeO that can aid things like multiple sclerosis, a 5-MeO experience can also trigger dormant multiple sclerosis. So it's a very tricky one there. And then medications — different medications may contraindicate in different ways. If you are looking to do 5-MeO, it's important that your facilitator has a very strong understanding of any pharmacological contraindications.

Psychologically speaking, we are looking for a foundational sense of safety and stability in a participant's life. A single mother who's just gotten out of an abusive marriage and is staying in a hotel with her infant, not knowing where they're going to stay the next month, probably should not be sitting with this medicine right now. We want the root-chakra stuff to be in order — a sense of safety, stability, food, shelter, those basic things. It's pretty important that an underlying survival signal is not guiding the process after 5-MeO-DMT and inadvertently cementing existing cognitive patterns more deeply during that time, because there's not the ability or bandwidth to work into the deeper integration.

Cluster B personalities, dark triad personalities, things like borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, bipolar I or II — these aren't automatically no’s all the time, but they do deserve a lot more conversation. For most facilitators, they should be a no. There are very few people I would consider qualified to work that kind of process with this medicine, because with those states of mania, other symptoms will likely inflame to a high level in the following days and weeks after the experience. It will likely intensify, and the facilitator and support team will need to have a very deep and intimate understanding of those kinds of psychological processes.

Brierre: A lot of people coming to Tandava are on medications. We have an in-house pharmacologist. One of the things you never want to tell someone as a facilitator is that you need to get off your medication. That is a red flag. If a participant is on a contraindicating medication, we have them check with their prescriber to see if it is appropriate to temporarily wean off the medication — with, of course, having a plan to taper back up as needed. But we never want to suggest that someone get off their medication if we are not a licensed prescriber and do not have an intimate understanding of their psychological profile. We would have them work with their prescriber.

Wueschner: I'll go a little further: if they do that, and somebody comes off their medication, you can become incredibly destabilized. And then going into a 5-MeO experience, things can get real hairy on the other side.

Brierre: A lot of people have been curious about what F.I.V.E's and Tandava's stance is. We are save the toads all the way. We are 100% synthetic. We promote use of synthetic over toad use all day, every day. There are three main reasons.

One: it's safer. The additional alkaloids in the toad secretion are not going to change the experience, but they do pose a heavier load on the heart. They do pose a higher risk.

Second: dosage specificity. Dosage specificity is not possible with Bufo. There have been samples with 5-MeO content ranging from 10% to 30%. That's a huge margin of error. So if you are working with a participant who is not in a safe place to go into a full release — let's say a combat veteran we're working with at low doses with IFS therapy — with toad, we cannot guarantee that we are going to give that person something that has less than the desired amount of milligrams in it. That's important.

And three: ethics and sustainability. The Bufo alvarius toad is about to be put on the endangered species list. It is a species under a lot of stress. People argue that the stress is not because of toad harvesting, and yes, most of that stress is due to modernization — roads being built in Sonora, property lines being brought up, walls being put up. And yet, why do we want to take a species that is so highly under stress and rob it of its only defense mechanism? Why would we want to do that? Also, taking the toads out of their habitat is highly unethical. We've heard that the Bufo alvarius toad generally doesn't leave a 50-meter radius of its birthplace, and there have been reports of it doing anything it can to try to get back home. So we don't want toads being bred in captivity. We don't want toads being stored in buckets when we have the perfect molecule readily available.

And funny enough — this is where the paradox comes in — 5-MeO-DMT is the one where synthetic use predates naturalistic and Indigenous use, with 5-MeO as we know it today. There is not a rich history of Bufo use here. There is history as early as the 2010s, when it got popular, but it was theoretically first smoked in 1983 by Ken Nelson. So for us, there is no reason to use the toad when we have the perfect molecule with us.

I want to address the other nuance here. On another hand, we are watching in real time the revitalization of Indigenous tribes in Sonora — in a very impoverished part of the world that has been hit really hard by the modern paradigm in a lot of different ways. We are watching this medicine get woven into different ancestral practices. Whether or not that should happen, I'm not even going to be a close part of that debate. I would say it is highly interesting, and something beautiful to witness.

Brierre: On one hand, vape pens are an extremely valuable tool for a trained and experienced facilitator. When vape pens begin to get out — as I said before, 5-MeO and ibogaine are the two medicines that just aren't necessarily safe to be outside of safe containers with trained facilitators. This is also a nuanced conversation, because many of us come from the psychedelic underground, spanning before Michael Pollan's book came out, before all this was popular and cool, and many of us had our first experiences in what would now be considered an unsafe container or unsafe ways. So there can be this argument of gatekeeping. However, it is important to note that we are in a different age now. Psychonauts from the '90s and early 2000s and before — we were psychonauts. There was a sense of exploration and resilience that had already been built up. We'd been whacked around by a strong, bad trip on God knows how much LSD, etc. These were spiritual seekers and people who had ventured into the void, into the unknown, and had that sense of resilience.

Now we are in a paradigm of psychedelics being used for mental health. People coming into contact with this medicine now do not have decades-plus experience with these altered states of consciousness and dealing with the initial content that can come up from the psyche. And then people are given pens, or sold pens, with promises of, "Oh, you can meet God in your living room. You can have a comfortable, safe experience." And then we have deaths, and we have destabilizations. This may be absolutely safe for 25 people, but then there's one person who ends up going into a full release on a low-dose pen and asphyxiates on their own vomit, lying on their back, and dies alone in their living room. Then there's someone who ends up going into a full release unexpectedly and goes into ontological shock, and their whole life gets reoriented without their consent, without their understanding. They're left with no resources on the other side, no real support, and no one who has a real understanding of how the psyche works.

Now the pen thing has turned into an issue where there have been a lot of injuries from pens — a lot of people being harmed by pen use, even in low-dose pen work. So again, pens do have a very safe place in this work, and that is in a container with a trained facilitator. I'm also going to differentiate again: a 5-MeO pen is way different from a DMT pen. People will say, "Oh, but low-dose pens are safe." Low-dose pens have the ability to bring stuff up from the subconscious that you may not be ready for. If people are working into mental health processes or using this for healing, it is not appropriate for self-service.

Brierre: This is a nuanced question, and it deserves a nuanced response. The combination of 5-MeO and ibogaine being used within the same container was pioneered by some amazing colleagues of ours many years ago, and this was for addiction interruption when fentanyl was on the rise. Ibogaine used to have, what was it, a 99% success rate of interrupting opiate addiction. That dropped down very quickly with the rise of fentanyl. So people who were also very familiar and very experienced with 5-MeO began doing the two within a container and started seeing some success. This combination was then later picked up by other practitioners and other centers — unfortunately, without an understanding of 5-MeO. Many centers now are offering this combination, and many people are being harmed. Over the past year, our integration specialists, our platforms, and a lot of our colleagues have been reached out to by a lot of people who are going into less than a week-long retreat and doing two very powerful substances, where 5-MeO is getting treated like an add-on at the end, and they're told it's a neural reset. 5-MeO is a stronger and more potent experience.

I'll give you an example. One young man went to a very well-known clinic, one of the big ones, and had a very successful experience with ibogaine. He was working into addiction with several substances and pretty significant CPTSD, but a really significant process with ibogaine. Then he was given 5-MeO at the end — no prep around it, no real understanding — and it just scattered everything for him. He started getting reactivations all the time. He went into acute anxiety, and it smeared his whole process. Unfortunately, a lot of these centers don't have staff who are well-trained with 5-MeO, and 5-MeO is just being relied on to give people the feeling that they got the bang for their buck if they don't have time to do more than one ibogaine session in their retreat. Either ibogaine or 5-MeO can be very sufficient, and we can get a lot done. Our question with mixing medicines is always: is it really a need, or are we relying on the profundity of the experience to replace skill sets that the integration specialists and therapists should have?

Brierre: 5-MeO is the medicine of the ego, and it goes both ways. When we dissolve away our ego temporarily, it just doesn't go away. It's pumping weights in the parking lot, waiting to come back and reestablish its dominance. Unfortunately, what started to happen years ago was that a lot of people started serving this medicine very prematurely, because — just like DMT — it seemed like it lacked an indigenous lineage of wisdom, like ayahuasca does, like mushrooms do, and it was way more accessible. So people felt like they could just get some. Let's say I'm a guy who has some narcissistic tendencies, and I'm trying to figure out my life — maybe I've been trying to do the life-coach thing but haven't really figured my life out yet — and I have a big experience on 5-MeO, and I'm like, "Wow, I want other people to have this." I get my hands on some 5-MeO, serve someone, maybe that person has a big white-light God experience, and they come out and look at me like I'm Jesus. They look at me like I just gave them that experience. Whether I'm aware of it or not, some part of me is getting fed by that idea. Some part of me is really inflating with that idea. Then next thing you know, you have dudes calling themselves a shaman, calling themselves a healer, calling themselves all types of things, and maybe they have an assistant, and they're just traveling around serving people. These are also the people who generally are not open to constructive feedback around the safety of their containers. We started seeing that back in the 2010s when people started dying and were called out very publicly, and there was a lot of defensiveness, a lot of, "Oh, you don't know, I am this," and so on. That continues today. I think people with narcissistic traits or tendencies will be more attracted to stepping into service of this, whether they're aware of it or not.

It's something we actually require in our facilitator training — that all students have ongoing therapy. Victoria and I both have big support systems for ourselves. We have our therapists, we have our mentors. It's something any grown human being should have. But a lot of these people are not necessarily getting an outward glance upon their own patterning, and are then bringing their own shit into other people's processes, and it's happening left and right. Long story short, this medicine absolutely can inflate the ego if you don't have support systems to help you check it — if you don't have a therapist to let you know when your head is going right up the old arse.

We're working on a story about a practice that's becoming increasingly common at ibogaine retreat centers: administering 5-MeO-DMT after an ibogaine session. If you've gone through this combination, we want to hear from you.

Our anonymous questionnaire asks about the whole arc of the experience — the preparation and safety information you were given, how staff supported you during and between the two sessions, the experience itself, and the integration afterward. It also digs into the things that matter most when two powerful substances are used back-to-back: whether the decision to combine them was clearly explained, how much recovery time you had between them, whether your consent felt genuine and informed, and how the dynamic with your facilitators felt. We want to understand what this treatment actually looks like on the ground — where care is being done well, and where (and if) people are getting hurt.

Your responses are confidential, and you can decide whether you're open to being contacted for the story.

Take the survey here.

Crudo ayahuasca cannot be shipped, dried, or bought. It ferments within days and cannot leave the jungle, so the only way to drink it is to be where it is made. 

At MahaDevi in Putumayo, you spend two mornings preparing it by hand with Taita Miguel of the Camsá lineage, cleaning, smashing, mixing, extracting, then drink it in ceremony that night. 

July, August, September 2026, and that's all for the year. Full medical screening required, apply now.

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