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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 Q&A with author Kimon de Greef about his new book The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence, which details the trail of harm a notorious psychedelic facilitator. Mattha Busby pens this week’s lead story. You can find it immediately below!

If you keep scrolling you’ll find a playlist to listen to while you read, and stories about the consolidation of Oregon’s psilocybin and medical cannabis programs, Lizard King mushroom strain, and what you need to know about Datura.

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Stay groovy 🌞,
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Journalist Kimon de Greef spent years investigating Octavio Rettig. His new book maps the reckless ceremonies, dubious healing claims, and multiple deaths behind the toad guru's mission.

By Mattha Busby

Humans and our ancestors have co-existed with toads for millions of years, yet only very recently, it seems, have we smoked the psychedelic secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad. There are several men principally responsible for popularizing this surreal and often transformative practice, but there is one toad neoshaman who looms large in Kimon de Greef’s shocking new book The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. 

His name is Octavio Rettig, and his gung-ho methods in serving up 5-MeO-DMT, which delivers an intense 15-minute “God molecule” trip often characterized as much by a painful ego death as supernatural bliss and oneness, are the stuff of legend. But the psychedelic field is still reckoning with the controversial neoshaman’s complicated legacy, and many people report being traumatized in those ceremonies. In the process of his instrumental role in turning the world onto psychedelic toad venom, Rettig’s reckless rituals led to the deaths of multiple clients, including, allegedly, his then-girlfriend. 

Along the way, the once drug-addicted pharmacist from Guadalajara promoted the spurious idea that the Indigenous Mexican Seri community had somehow lost an ancestral tradition of toad smoking, while claiming to deliver instantaneous healing to Seri people suffering from methamphetamine addiction—and in some cases appearing to succeed, albeit temporarily. 

The neoshaman’s star dramatically rose as he initially brought some semblance of recovery to the disadvantaged Seri community, and plenty of psychedelic tourists. But his apparently well-intentioned humanitarian mission curdled into a madcap tale more befitting of Walter White’s villain era—a cautionary tale for anyone who endlessly chases peak experiences with psychedelics, and seeks to hold ceremonies without ample training.

DoubleBlind spoke with de Greef about the years he spent chasing this story, why intentions don’t absolve consequences, and what following toads taught him about the human hunger for transcendence.

*This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity.

DoubleBlind: What drove you to go deeper down the toad-world rabbit hole over several years than anyone perhaps ever has done, studying ancient Spanish-language anthropology texts and speaking to countless people about Rettig and the origins of today’s global 5-MeO-DMT interest? 

Kimon de Greef: It's an extreme and fringe world, and yet the thematic matter is completely universal. People, probably since forever, have gone seeking meaning and healing. That hunger is so acute, so real, and so important. At an elemental level I found it fascinating to follow those impulses into a world in which people chase after these absurdly remarkable toads in the desert—in cartel territory, in the US-Mexican border lands—and squeeze their toxins out. There's such a sad paradox that this experience people report to be life-changing and deeply connecting to the natural world is built on an extremely exploitative supply chain, not only for the toads, but the people collecting them, who are risking their lives in cartel territory, getting beaten up, and sometimes murdered. 

Part of how Octavio became so successful is that he didn't just have the substance, but a mesmerizing story about using it to heal himself and the indigenous Seri community, and resurrecting a long-lost psychedelic tradition. I'm strongly confident that Octavio's claims of healing the tribe with toad are completely overblown, because there's tons of addiction there today, including among people who have smoked toad with him. Equally, there's very strong evidence to the contrary that the Seri people have any toad ancestry. 

(A recent paper published in the journal Psychedelics said claims that 5-MeO-DMT is an “ancestral toad medicine” represent a case of “fabricated ancestrality,” despite the well-documented use of plant-derived 5-MeO-DMT from the yopo tree dating back to the 15th century in Indigenous Caribbean and South American communities.)

DB: In the book, you report that at least four people died under Rettig’s care, including an ex-girlfriend who drowned at a cenote in Tulum after he served her bufo, and that he had blown rapeh up the noses of some of the others who died. When he was touring Bowen Island off the coast of Vancouver, you report he had sex with many of the women he had served. You must have pretty good sources?

KdG: Firstly, I should say that ultimately his intentions do seem mostly good. He genuinely believes in his mission, that he's helping to heal people, and I do think that there is an argument that the extraordinary potential of this molecule would not be reaching the audience that it is without his evangelizing efforts. Someone told me, ‘You needed an ego that big to bring bufo to the world.’ Octavio embodies a rock star or cowboy facilitator archetype, and that's appealing to some people.

At the same time, I don't think that intention is what really matters, and the consequences of Octavio's sometimes completely reckless approach to serving arguably the strongest psychoactive compound in the world included deaths and people being traumatized. The power that a facilitator has in any psychedelic kind of realm, but especially with 5-MeO-DMT—that's so extreme and fast-acting—comes with a great level of responsibility. But it gets a bad name because some of the highest profile people working with it are effectively tossing people out of helicopters without parachutes.

DB: You say that Rettig ultimately had good intentions, so was he just not grown up enough—or trained in facilitating—to hold safer ceremonies?

KdG: The nature of the ego dissolution experience that people have brings about a sense of cosmic wonder, of merging with everything, becoming one and experiencing God—and becoming God for many people. The issue seems to be that afterwards, when one's ego reasserts itself, that the belief they are divine can linger. Similarly, then administering and sharing that experience with others, there's a feedback loop where people look to the practitioner as someone who's done something completely life-changing for them. I tried to touch on the idea of spiritual transcendence in the book, and of people not integrating their full selves, but just identifying with the spiritual part of themselves. I think there's a particularly acute risk of that with 5-MeO because it's such a rapid shortcut to mystical experience. 

Sometimes people are changed for the better and addicts no longer feel their cravings after smoking 5-MeO. But the difficult inner work of dealing with one's shadows and wounds is more demanding, and I don't get the sense that Octavio has done a lot of that. It's like rocket fuel for spiritual bypassing.

DB: You detail how Rettig was keen for you to smoke it with him. You didn't relent, and even wore collared shirts every day you were with him to demonstrate your professionalism, but eventually he spiked you with some sort of natural LSD-like drug, right?

KdG: When I first met Octavio, I had an assignment with The New Yorker, and I couldn't think of anything worse, given the makeup of my psyche, than having the most extreme psychedelic trip of my life and then needing to subjugate that experience into writing about it. I did not want to compromise any attempt at objectivity, or at detachment, with either being traumatized at his hands or having a blissful experience. 

But one day I relented to him giving me the rapeh, which was just nightmarish. One of his followers started taunting me. And then months later, when I bumped into him for what turned out to be the last time, he was giving his daughter droplets of what he said was a rescue remedy natural relaxation agent. I didn't have any good reason to trust him by that point, but despite all of that, I found him charismatic, except when he got freaky, tyrannical and abusive in my company.

Anyway, I was like, 'Sure, I'll have some,’ and it turned out to be morning glory seed extract. I hated the experience because I didn't know what I'd taken, nor how long the effects would last, and I became deeply paranoid. Giving someone even a small dose of a psychoactive substance without informing them of its identity is an insanely stupid thing to do—especially when that person has spent the last few years reporting on and writing critically about you. I ended up processing the trip sitting on the beach and it became quite a deep personal experience for me. So, I guess someone like Octavio would say, ‘See, I gave you a positive experience.’

DB: But he would also give people toad without them knowing what an earth-shattering experience they're about to have too?

KdG: He had a mystical psychedelic experience with salvia and mescaline, I believe, in combination, where he heard a divine message saying, ‘Your mission is to save yourself and humanity.’ So I think at a fundamental level, Octavio does believe in what he's doing, and his worldview is that all routes into the 5-MeO-DMT experience are valid, and that the mission is just to get as many people into the experience as possible. I heard about him giving methamphetamine addicts in Seri territory little crack pipes of 5-MeO and not telling them what it was, and people absolutely flipping out. He's denied doing that, I should be clear, but I'm pretty confident in my sourcing. There's also accounts from around 2013 of him meeting drunk people at beach parties and being like, ‘You need to turn your life around,’ and while they’re inebriated, putting a pipe in their mouth.

DB: Wild. And so whether or not Rettig singlehandedly helped the Seri people resurrect a lost toad smoking tradition, he did spawn a real world psychedelic tourism industry for this struggling town. But the available evidence seems clear that a man named Albert Most was the first to smoke toad in the 1980s.

KdG: Albert Most went looking for the Sonoran desert toad because there was this long perplexing anthropological mystery. So in a way the search for the psychedelic toad might have manifested itself, because there was this idea from a misreading of the iconography that there was this ancient tradition of psychedelic toads. Then Most went and bravely found it with one of the most incredible psychopharmacological experiments in history. He read the chemistry literature from the guy whose work helped discover serotonin, Vittorio Erspamer, and read that 5-MeO had been found in the toad’s glands, and then he read the anthropological literature, just went and smoked it. It's entirely plausible that this white American guy in the 80s was the first human in history to get high on 5-MeO-DMT from the toad.

DB: You sketch out the human fascination with toads, their depiction in Mesoamerican iconography and western garden sculptures, and how their poison has also long been used for nefarious purposes. Beyond Sonoran Desert toads, how would you characterize the human relationship with toads?

KdG: Biologically, toads are such fascinating creatures. They appear out of nowhere, they change their bodies from little algae-eating fish into huge four legged land creatures with lungs. The metamorphosis itself is such a fundamentally strange and wonderful phenomenon, and it's something that inspires a sense of wonder for children. Even as an adult who studied biology, I can become inured to that wonder. Over the many years humans have coexisted with toads, it seems natural to me that all sorts of rich, symbolic and allegorical meanings would be developed. Toads across cultures represent change, summer rains, magic and rebirth. Then there's this one toad which as far as we know is the only animal in the universe that produces a psychedelic compound consumable by humans. 

I truly do believe that the Sonoran desert toad, and all toads, all living things, are in a very real sense magical, because they represent this long evolutionary history of life, of finding a way to adapt. And then there is this particular desert toad that is invisible for nine months of the year. It's like the most wondrous science fiction story in which this creature makes a chemical that can usher humans into the most profound planes of experience. I think that is so deeply miraculous and strange. I was a materialist atheist, and I don't know what I am now.

The Ego Trip will be published by the Orion Publishing Company on August 6.

In the Shipibo tradition, a healer can work on healing you without you physically being in the room and without you drinking ayahuasca. A surrogate healer takes on your name, your birthdate, your photograph, and a strict dieta, absorbing grief and pain that were never theirs so another maestro can trace what needs mending. It's called sustituto, and it stretches across distance, family lines, even generations of inherited wounds.

Western science is circling the same intuition, turning up early evidence that trauma can leave epigenetic traces that pass from one generation to the next.

This Friday, we take you inside a healing tradition that asks a cosmologically challenging question for Westerners: Can healing your own wounds now reach backward and mend the ancestors you inherited them from?

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