![]() ![]() But researchers caution against inferring too much from any one subject’s experience according to analyses of recent surveys, as many as three-quarters of users have reported these reactivations, with most of them describing the flashbacks as positive or neutral. “I’ve been waking up in fear like I’ve died-pure adrenaline, heart racing, hyperventilating,” a woman wrote in a support group on Facebook, ten days out from smoking toad. Some people also experience flashbacks, called reactivations, after a trip. These can be dangerous for people with preëxisting conditions, which might be the case for those who are using toad after years of drug abuse. The drug’s effects come on within seconds, and it’s easy for a novice user to become panicked, which can manifest in reactions such as high blood pressure or tachycardia. But, for some, smoking toad can be nightmarish. Most people say that the experience is euphoric, even life-changing. Smoking toad has been likened, in one guide to psychedelics, to “being strapped to the nose of a rocket that flies into the sun and evaporates.” An account from the nineteen-eighties describes how, unlike most hallucinogens, which distort reality, toad “completely dissolves reality as we know it, leaving neither hallucinations nor anyone to watch them.” Michael Pollan, who recently wrote a book on psychedelic science, tried the drug after being warned that it was “the Everest of psychedelics.” He wrote that the “violent narrative arc” of his trip-terror and a sense of ego dissolution, culminating in relief and gratitude-“made it difficult to extract much information or knowledge from the journey.” In 2019, Mike Tyson said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that, ever since smoking toad, he’s “never been the same.” When I first spoke with Octavio, last year, he told me that his work was “the trigger for toad medicine to be spread all over the planet.” “That line has gone exponential.” Hunter Biden credits toad with keeping him off cocaine for a year. “If we were looking at popularity on a graph, the line was pretty close to the bottom for the past four decades,” Alan Davis, a clinical psychologist who studies psychedelics at Ohio State University, said. The practice, after decades of obscurity, is now entering the psychedelic mainstream. But two years later Vice made him the subject of a laudatory documentary, calling him “a hallucinogenic-toad prophet.” (The film has more than three and a half million views on YouTube.) Octavio became, as Klaudia Oliver, the organizer of the TEDx talk, put it, “the Pied Piper of toad.” By Octavio’s count, he has introduced toad smoking to more than ten thousand people. “Sooner or later, everyone in the world will have this experience,” he told an interviewer after the talk.Īt the time, Octavio, who was thirty-four, was virtually unknown within the world of psychedelics-as was smoking toad. He announced that he’d restored a lost tradition, and that he had a duty to share it with others. Through this work, he came to believe that smoking toad, as the practice is called, was an ancient Mesoamerican ritual-a “unique toadal language,” shared by Mayans and Aztecs-that had been stamped out during the colonial era. Afterward, he shared “toad medicine” with a tribal community in northern Mexico, where the rise of narco-trafficking had brought on a methamphetamine crisis. ![]() He told the crowd that, years earlier, he had overcome a crack addiction by using a powerful psychedelic substance produced by toads in the Sonoran Desert. In 2013, a charismatic Mexican doctor took the stage at Burning Man, in Nevada, to give a TEDx talk on what he called “the ultimate experience.” The doctor’s name was Octavio Rettig, and he would soon become known by his first name alone, like some pop diva or soccer star. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. ![]()
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