Dr. Octavio Rettig gave an unprecedented TEDx Talk in 2012 telling his own story of recovery from addiction to crack cocaine with an unusual treatment: smoking the defense toxins of the Sonoran desert toad.
After his recovery, he became a worldwide guru for “smoking toad.”
“This medicine, it really saved my life. It helped me to shift from the crack. I was a crack addict, and I was born as an addict,” he said in Zurich in 2018.
Rettig claimed the practice was actually part of the Seri Tribes’ long-lost native tradition. Kimon de Greef found it was a claim that turned out to be specious at best.
De Greef is the author of the new book, "The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence." The Show spoke with de Greef more about Rettig — and the story he told.
Full conversation
KIMON DE GREEF: He rose to prominence a few years later with this kind of irresistible story of not only his personal recovery, but that he had then used this toad medicine, as he started calling it, to treat addiction in an impoverished, remote tribal community in northern Mexico where the rise of narco-trafficking and cartels had spilled over into this methamphetamine addiction crisis.
And through that work, that he’d discovered that this extremely rare psychedelic practice was actually a long-lost tradition of the Seri Tribe, that it had been something that they had used pre-colonially and that it had been violently eradicated, stamped out during the Spanish colonial era.
So the TED Talk that he gave, which is at Burning Man in 2012, kind of outlined the story: healed myself, healed this tribe, resurrected their lost tradition, and now have their blessing to share this with humanity. And that’s kind of what he walked onto the stage with and what took him around the world. He became the most famous practitioner of toad medicine, and more than anyone else took this extremely obscure, hardcore psychedelic practice pretty close to the mainstream within just a few years.
LAUREN GILGER: Pretty close to the mainstream is a good way to put it. There is evidence — lots of evidence, right? — that this kind of drug can really help people, from veterans to addicts, right? Talk a little bit about the body of research here.
KIMON DE GREEF: So within just the last few years, there’s been great excitement among researchers, and more recently psychedelic drug developers, about turning this into a treatment for treatment-resistant depression, alcohol abuse disorder. There’s clinical trials going on at the moment using it as a treatment for postpartum depression.
All these kinds of conditions that are stubbornly resistant to modern psychiatry. In the kind of more underground, ceremonial, retreat space where toad and 5-MeO-DMT are used, combat veterans report overcoming PTSD and more.
LAUREN GILGER: So all of this brought you to Sonora in the end. And I want to talk about what was going on there, because it’s right in our backyard here in Arizona. And as this doctor kind of rises to fame, there’s sort of this industry that arises there, right? So talk a little bit about what that looked like. You called it kind of like psychedelic tourism happening.
KIMON DE GREEF: Yeah. So Octavio himself helped heal thousands in the end of people from addiction, from depression, from alcoholism, and so on. So his practice began to be traveling the world as this kind of neo-shaman. He incorporated these Indigenous rituals from the tribe that he’d connected with, their chants. He wore their beads and their clothing and would stage these ceremonies where 20, 30, sometimes 40 people would attend and smoke toad and have these rapturous experiences, many of them.
And word spread very quickly. And a kind of psychedelic tourism industry in Sonora evolved, where people came to seek out not only the toad and the experience of smoking toad, but consuming it in its putative ancestral home. People came looking for this thing, and I have no doubt that it caused them to have deeper experiences, believing that they were consuming this lost spiritual sacrament. ...
And what that looked like was people rocking up in this fairly God-forsaken pair of coastal villages, where poverty is extremely high, there’s trash in the streets, run-down concrete homes, suddenly started receiving people looking for spiritual enlightenment. And what happened from there is one of the stranger corners of this book, which has many strange corners.
LAUREN GILGER: Yes, it does. Tell us about that. There were some difficult consequences, right? Because you had people living in these impoverished conditions as you’re describing, going through dangerous cartel territory trying to track down these toads.
KIMON DE GREEF: Well, that is one of the consequences of this — is a massive surge in demand for the toad secretion itself, which means going and finding the toads, which used to be super abundant across the Sonoran Desert, including in Arizona. Only at certain times of year. Deserts are dry, toads need water, and so this species has a fairly remarkable adaptation where they go underground for nine months of the year. They just disappear. And then as soon as the monsoons start, they pop out, they mate, and they eat ravenously so that they can fatten up in time to go back underground with their baby toads.
And with the demand for toad medicine increasing, there’s been a massive increase in commercial toad collecting across Sonora, which involves people going out at night with torches and sacks, snatching up as many toads as they can, and taking them home to "milk," which involves squeezing their parotoid glands that explode sort of violently.
It has been very bad for the toads, although determining how bad is difficult because the area is so dangerous — most of Sonora — because of cartel activity that biologists can’t even go in and do the proper surveys required.
And I just think that’s a really cruel paradox. The search for enlightenment is feeding into this economy that’s harmful for the toads and the people who catch them, because many of the toad collectors crossing through cartel territory get beaten up, some have been murdered. It’s an extremely harsh environment to be obtaining this from.
LAUREN GILGER: Let me ask you before I let you go, Kimon, about the native people. You talked about Octavio kind of adopting their practices and their dress and their ceremonies and their chants and things like that. Did they use this substance?
KIMON DE GREEF: Well, that’s one of the other strange parts of the story, is that very, very, very few people in the Seri community use toad at all. Three-quarters of the community is Christian — evangelical Christians — and frankly seem to view the practice of toad smoking as something slightly demonic.
At the same time, the increasing flow of people to their territory — which is not just through Octavio now, but through all manner of psychedelic influencers and would-be neo-shamans — has become a kind of economic lifeline for the tribe.
Many people in Seri land dispute or reject the notion that toad smoking is an ancestral practice at all, and most of the evidence available seems to suggest that it’s not something that was used. But that’s sort of moot, because it’s probably what the tribe is best known for globally, and they have a long history of adapting to circumstances and taking advantage of what opportunities come their way.
And so there’s, again, this really strange, dissonant phenomenon playing out where there’s a community where very few people consume the substance, where people are arriving every day now, probably, to have this experience. nd it’s all just kind of downstream of Octavio himself connecting with these people and emerging with this narrative that I think suited him and served him more than it did anybody else, ultimately.
LAUREN GILGER: All right, we’ll leave it there. Kimon de Greef joining us, author of the new book, "The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence." Kimon, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for telling us about this and reporting this so deeply.
KIMON DE GREEF: Thanks for having me on. It’s my pleasure.
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