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. 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. Afterward, he shared “toad medicine” with a tribal community in northern Mexico, where the rise of narco-trafficking had brought on a methamphetamine crisis. 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. He announced that he’d restored a lost tradition, and that he had a duty to share it with others. “Sooner or later, everyone in the world will have this experience,” he told an interviewer after the talk.
At the time, Octavio, who was thirty-four, was virtually unknown within the world of psychedelics—as was smoking toad. 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.
The practice, after decades of obscurity, is now entering the psychedelic mainstream. “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. “That line has gone exponential.” Hunter Biden credits toad with keeping him off cocaine for a year. 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.”
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.”
Most people say that the experience is euphoric, even life-changing. But, for some, smoking toad can be nightmarish. 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. 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. Some people also experience flashbacks, called reactivations, after a trip. “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. 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.
Only one species of toad, Incilius alvarius, is known to induce these sensations. Commonly known as the Sonoran Desert toad, it is found in the arid borderlands between Mexico and the United States. The toad spends most of the year burrowed underground, emerging to mate during the summer-monsoon season. In order to repel predators, it secretes toxins from its skin. Dogs sometimes die from ingesting the toad, and regional pet hospitals issue warnings about it. But, in the nineteen-sixties, an Italian pharmacologist published a chemical analysis of the toads’ skin, later inspiring Ken Nelson, a researcher from Texas, to conduct a series of daring experiments. He obtained the toads’ poison by squeezing, or “milking,” glands on their necks. (This process, which is not unlike popping a pimple, can be done without injuring the toad.) The poison dried into a crystalline substance, and Nelson realized that vaporizing it nullified its toxicity, producing one of the most powerful hallucinogenic agents on Earth.
The scientific name of this compound is five-MethOxy-N, N-Dimethyltryptamine, or 5-MeO-DMT, which many people refer to as the “God Molecule.” In 2011, the U.S. banned 5-MeO-DMT; it is also illegal in several other countries, including Germany and China. But, in recent years, researchers have become interested in its potential therapeutic applications. As with many other psychedelics, the compound can be synthesized in laboratories and is thought to be nonaddictive and low in toxicity; unlike with many other psychedelics, the trip is relatively short, typically lasting around thirty minutes. Davis believes that 5-MeO-DMT might be administered more cheaply, and to more patients, than substances such as psilocybin, which can remain psychoactive for up to six hours.
In 2018, Davis published a survey in the Journal of Psychopharmacology of some five hundred 5-MeO-DMT users. Of the two hundred and eighty-three respondents who struggled with substance abuse, roughly sixty per cent claimed that their condition had improved—around double the percentage that report improvement after more conventional therapies. Davis acknowledged that these findings could be biased toward positive outcomes: people who have had bad experiences may be less likely to participate in research. But after surveying fifty-one military veterans at a clinic in Mexico, where the drug is unregulated, Davis came away with an even stronger sense that the substance may have healing benefits. At the clinic, which is run by the psychedelic researcher Martín Polanco, veterans took 5-MeO-DMT and ibogaine, a hallucinogen originally derived from a central-African plant. Davis and his colleagues found “significant and very large reductions” in suicidal thoughts, cognitive impairment, and P.T.S.D. symptoms among participants. The first laboratory study of 5-MeO-DMT in a human subject also involved a patient of Polanco’s—an Air Force veteran who suffered from P.T.S.D. and alcoholism. Brain scans before and after treatment with 5-MeO-DMT and ibogaine showed changes in neural activity in regions of the brain that are associated with alcohol abuse. Three months in, the veteran had stopped drinking heavily.
There are many theories for why psychedelics might help treat addiction. A 2015 review of clinical research into hallucinogens highlighted “the role of mystical or other meaningful experiences as mediators of therapeutic effects.” Some clinical researchers believe that psychedelics, by provoking a dramatic shift in consciousness, can help people reprocess traumatic memories, arrive at new insights, and undergo profound and lasting changes in mood. And 5-MeO-DMT, as Polanco put it, is “the most reliably mystical of the psychedelics.”
A few years ago, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, a Texas-based nonprofit, began sponsoring 5-MeO-DMT and ibogaine treatments for veterans at health centers in Mexico. A host of biotechnology companies are now working on treatments that use 5-MeO-DMT. One British firm has raised more than a hundred million dollars in venture capital for developing, among other therapies, a 5-MeO-DMT intranasal treatment for depression. Yet even some clinical researchers who find the substance promising are wary of expanding access before it is better understood. “Everything in the beginning looks like it works really, really well,” Walter Dunn, a member of the F.D.A.’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee, told me. “But, once you run the big trials and you expose it to a broad swath of the population, those benefits always come down.” And then, he noted, you start seeing the range of adverse reactions. A handful of clinical trials are currently under way, and key questions—about optimal dosage, interactions with other medications, and so on—remain hotly debated. Meanwhile, among the many dozens of underground practitioners serving toad medicine and its synthetic equivalent, Octavio remains the most visible, and also the most divisive.
Polanco, who was introduced to toad by a former patient of Octavio’s, told me, “I owe my work with toad medicine indirectly to him.” But many researchers and toad practitioners also expressed grave concerns about Octavio’s approach, which includes serving toad to as many people as possible. As Polanco told me, 5-MeO-DMT can induce “a kind of ontological shock.” He sometimes warns his patients, “This can cure P.T.S.D.—or it can cause it.”
Last summer, I met Octavio in Sonora, a state in northwest Mexico where Incilius alvarius is found. He wore a trucker hat with a toad on it—a gift from a Mexico City policeman who had recently smoked with him. “How are you, bro?” he asked, clasping my hand. He is tall, fair-skinned, and muscular, with sinuous forearms and long, tousled hair. He seems to pour energy into his interactions, as if willing the people around him into his orbit.
Octavio had invited me to observe his toad-smoking sessions around the state. He serves toad to as many as twenty people at a time—“patients,” as he calls them. He tells everyone to show up sober and to fast for eight hours beforehand, and he charges roughly two hundred and fifty dollars a person. Octavio models his approach on shamanic rituals, though he acknowledges that this is highly interpretive, given that smoking toad is a “lost tradition.” He fills a glass pipe with flakes of toad secretion, lights it, and then instructs the patient to inhale deeply. As the substance takes effect, he picks up a wooden rattle and begins a series of Indigenous Mexican chants. “I could not do toad medicine without the chanting,” he once said.
Yet, for all this ceremony, the sessions can be unsettlingly casual. There is no restriction on bystanders’ watching, and some of them take videos that end up online. Octavio frequently smokes cannabis during sessions, leaving his patients in the care of assistants. Some people scream and writhe during their trips; others go still, or throw up, or become violent. People have had spontaneous orgasms. One day, I saw people film a woman who menstruated through her white shorts during a trip; later, she shared a photograph on Instagram of her and Octavio, adorned with an animated frog and the words “love you.”
Octavio grew up in Guadalajara, nine hundred miles south of Sonora. His mother, Bertha Hinojosa, ran a small bookstore, and he used to work behind the counter. His father, Werner Rettig, taught calculus at the local university. When Octavio and his younger brother, David, were kids, their parents divorced; later, Werner developed an interest in alternative medicine and became a successful homeopath. David seems skeptical of his father’s work, telling me that Werner was good at marketing himself. But Octavio considers Werner, who died in 1998, an inspiration. “I think that he will feel very proud of me by now,” Octavio said. “I think we could be very good friends.”
When Octavio and David were growing up, they attended a Catholic school, and for a while Octavio aspired to join the priesthood. He was a star student who had “a very special way of convincing people,” David recalled. On one occasion, Octavio persuaded a group of boys to give him their savings, insisting that he’d worked out how to win the lottery. In his teen-age years, he began experimenting with drugs. One afternoon, he got drunk, smoked pot, took cocaine, and swallowed a handful of benzos. He woke up the next day with no memory of what had happened. “I wanted something more,” Octavio recalled, in “The Toad of Dawn: 5-MeO-DMT and the Rising of Cosmic Consciousness,” his 2016 memoir. “That was the feeling then: a constant search, an insatiable hunger.” His mother had fired several employees for stealing from her bookstore; she eventually realized that Octavio had been the culprit. Still, she continued to support him, covering some of his living expenses so that he could study medicine at the University of Guadalajara, a six-year program. He graduated with passable grades: soon afterward, he got married, and his wife gave birth to a child. He continued using drugs, going on benders with Gerardo Sandoval, a former classmate. They drove across the country, taking LSD, mushrooms, mescaline, and other substances. On one acid-soaked excursion, Octavio fell in love with a hitchhiker. That was the end of his marriage.
Octavio also became addicted to crack during those years—a period that his mother described as “a living death.” She said that she bought a pharmacy for him to run, but he purloined the inventory to get high, losing the business. Then, in the summer of 2006, Sandoval introduced him to smoking toad, after hearing about it from two Americans who had come to Mexico in search of the substance. “As soon as I started to inhale these vapors, the cravings started to vanish,” Octavio recalled. “The toad medicine, every single time, brought me back to the same place—inner peace, calmness, love.”
Octavio and Sandoval travelled to Sonora, where they gathered up hundreds of toads and emptied their glands onto glass plates. Octavio began smoking toad multiple times a day. Within eighteen months, he says, he was off crack, although he continued to smoke toad and cannabis. He began serving toad at outdoor raves, among addicts, and to his friends, often free of charge. He moved to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, where he got a job as a general practitioner at a chain pharmacy, giving him access to a stream of potential toad clients. He told his brother that he was “doing research” with the toads. David recalled visiting Octavio’s apartment: “You would sit on a couch and a toad would jump out.” His family sensed a change in him. “When Octavio met sapito,” Bertha said, using the diminutive Spanish term for toad, “that’s when he found his mission.”
At around this time, Octavio began to wonder if Native communities in Sonora had ever used toad medicine. Mexico is home to numerous shamanic rituals involving psychoactive substances, such as psilocybin and peyote; farther south, communities in the Amazon have been brewing ayahuasca for centuries. Although the most concentrated source of 5-MeO-DMT is the Sonoran Desert toad, the compound is also produced by some plant species in Latin America, where it was traditionally used in snuffs. One of Octavio’s uncles was an archeologist who had excavated Aztec artifacts, and David was studying archeology, too. They told Octavio about a rich archive of iconography in Mesoamerica—pottery, paintings, pipes ornamented with toads. He became convinced that at least one of the tribes of Sonora had, at some point, performed rituals with toad.
His hunch was seemingly confirmed in 2011, when he was introduced to the Seri, a remote tribe on the eastern shore of the Gulf of California. The tribe’s territory falls within a drug corridor to the U.S., and there had been an increase in addiction among its members. Octavio claimed that he served them toad, and that several tribal elders then began speaking of a lost tradition. “None of these tribes remembered that this toad contains this medicine,” Octavio said, at a psychology conference in 2017. The Seri authorized him as a practitioner of their traditional rituals, and they began calling him el doctor sapo, or “the toad doctor.”
The Seri hold their New Year celebrations at the end of June, marking the onset of the summer monsoons. On the first day, I accompanied Octavio to a gathering at a house in Bahía Kino, a coastal town south of Seri territory. Down-tempo electronic music played from a speaker, and two dozen people milled around. I spoke to a young couple with a toddler and another baby on the way; when I asked where they were spending the night, they said, “We don’t know, we’re just following Octavio.” One of Octavio’s patients, a man who asked to be called J.R., sat on the outskirts of the group. He had come from Houston, where he had become hooked on meth and Xanax, after years of being a dealer. He’d been in rehab nearly a dozen times; his addiction had become so bad that he no longer cared if he survived. The night before leaving for Sonora, he told me, he woke up to rivals shooting at him. His usual response would have been to “kick down the front door and shoot everybody,” he said, but instead he rolled over and fell back asleep. Since arriving in Sonora, he had smoked toad with Octavio twice. “I know what it is to have a heart now,” he said.
Later that day, Octavio and his entourage drove fifteen miles to the Seri village of Punta Chueca. For thousands of years, the Seri were nomadic, roaming in small groups along the coast. From the sixteenth century onward, they came into conflict with settlers. In 1850, the Sonoran government began paying bounties for murdered Seri people, and within a few decades the tribe had been reduced to around two hundred members. In the twentieth century, the Seri slowly rebounded, but they struggled to find a foothold in the modern economy. Fishermen supplied the commercial market with sharks and turtles, and artisans sold curios to tourists in Bahía Kino. But, until recently, few outsiders visited Seri lands. “I opened the door,” Octavio told me.
At the entrance to Punta Chueca, a sign advertised ancestral toad medicine. We arrived at a gathering of several hundred people. There were stands selling handcrafts, and women who, for a fee, would paint your face with Seri markings. On a wall was an unfinished mural of psychedelic toads, one of several in the village. A tour guide told me that five buses, each carrying around fifty visitors, had arrived for the celebrations. “Tourism to Punta Chueca has really taken off,” he said. “It has a lot to do with the toad.”
That evening, as the setting sun turned the clouds orange, I saw three boys approach Octavio. He used a pipe to blow rapé, a tobacco snuff from the Amazon, up their noses. The youngest boy, who was fourteen, immediately began throwing up. Before long, his companions were emptying their stomachs, too, and a pack of emaciated dogs gathered to lap up the vomit. A middle-aged woman arrived with rolls of toilet paper; two of the boys were her sons, she told me, wiping their mouths. The youngest was addicted to meth. She said that the family had travelled nearly a thousand miles, from Léon, in central Mexico, to smoke toad with Octavio, and that the rapé was necessary for purging toxins. Her husband, a lawyer with Seri face paint, stood nearby. Octavio came over and flung an arm around his shoulder. “Man, I love this guy,” Octavio said, his eyes streaming from a hit of rapé. “He just got me free on a manslaughter charge.”
Araceli Ramírez Hidalgo, a housewife from Léon, was susceptible to losing money in pyramid schemes. That was the view of her husband, Jorge Villalpando Medel, who saw it as his duty to protect her. One time, he said, his wife got caught up selling dietary supplements; on another occasion, it was skin-care products. “They abuse people,” he said, of the companies. “But they also offer a sense of purpose and relief.”
The couple had been married for two decades when, in 2015, Ramírez’s mother died, and Ramírez fell into a prolonged depression. She turned to alternative healing, signing up for an ayahuasca ceremony. Villalpando was skeptical, but afterward Ramírez told him that she’d had visions of her mother at the event. An ayahuasca practitioner later told the couple about toad medicine. “You just have one puff, you’re going to experience ten years of therapy,” Villalpando recalled him saying. When Ramírez heard that Octavio would be in town, she was eager to attend a session. She reserved a spot, promising Villalpando that this would be her last experiment with psychedelics.
On October 5, 2018, Ramírez went early to the venue, a remote property on the outskirts of the city. She was friends with some of the organizers and planned to spend the day there; Villalpando would join them after work, and Octavio would serve toad in the evening. But at around noon Villalpando got a call. Ramírez had stopped breathing. Eyewitness accounts, gathered by justice officials, describe how the session unfolded: Ramírez inhaled toad from a pipe, and Octavio splashed water in her face and dosed her with rapé. Soon, she started convulsing. When she stopped breathing, Octavio began CPR. As Ramírez turned purple, Octavio grew frantic. Two participants heard him yell, “She died!” (Octavio denies this.) According to a deposition from Ramírez’s eldest son, she was still alive when she reached the hospital, but she died soon afterward. The official cause of death was an anaphylactic reaction to an unknown substance.
There have been only a few public reports of deaths associated with 5-MeO-DMT. In the early two-thousands, a twenty-five-year-old man was found dead on a camping trip, with elevated levels of the substance in his body. Last year, Nacho Vidal, a porn star from Spain best known for selling candles made from a mold of his penis, was charged with reckless homicide after allegedly presiding over a toad-medicine ceremony in Valencia, at which there was a fatality. (Vidal maintains his innocence, and the case has been put on hold.) By the time Ramírez died, in 2018, at least two other people had died shortly after smoking toad with Octavio. During a talk that year, Octavio said that an elderly patient of his had died, a few years earlier, after taking toad. “I think this person had a beautiful opportunity to transcend in love and in light,” Octavio said. He also mentioned the death of another patient—an alcoholic in his forties who had a pulmonary embolism during a toad session. Octavio blamed the man’s unhealthy life style.
In December, 2012, before Octavio rose to fame, a woman in her twenties named Ana Patricia Arredondo, widely thought to be his girlfriend, disappeared after going on a walk with him. Divers later recovered her body from an underground body of water. Odily Fuentes, a friend of Octavio’s at the time, said he told her that he’d smoked toad with Arredondo before she went missing. (Octavio denies this; he also denies that Arredondo was his girlfriend.)
Whispers of reckless facilitation have followed Octavio for years. In 2014, he was endorsed as a “carrier of traditional indigenous medicine” by the United Nations Association Venezuela, which is part of a group of nonprofits loosely affiliated with the U.N. A year later, he toured Australia with an ancient Indigenous medicine group. The promotional materials for his tours have featured a lightly edited version of the U.N. logo, the blue globe adorned with a leaf and a feather, so that it resembled a dream catcher. While Octavio was on tour, some of his clients struggled with reactivations. They tried to reach him, but he had moved on. “He’s too busy serving thousands of patients to take a phone call,” Dean Jefferys, a filmmaker who smoked toad with Octavio in 2015, told me. Jefferys founded an online support group to deal with what he called “the trail of destruction left behind by Octavio.”
“I haven’t slept six nights,” a woman in Dublin posted. “My situation is now serious.” Another woman, from Melbourne, claimed that during a toad session Octavio had left her husband unattended, unable to breathe. She suggested ways to make the sessions safer, such as limiting the number of participants and having a first-aid kit on hand. Octavio replied that “making rules, prototypes, and protocols” for his ceremonies was “judgmental and unfair,” adding that he couldn’t be held responsible for his patients’ reactions to toad.
In 2016, footage began circulating online of Octavio being violent during sessions. In one clip, he kicks and slaps a visibly terrified man on a beach in Venezuela while giving him no fewer than six hits of toad. “Don’t make me beat you up,” Octavio shouts, thrusting a finger in the man’s face. Later, the man tries to run away, sobbing, “Octavio, no!” In another video from Venezuela, posted a year later, Octavio repeatedly pours water down the throat of a man after serving him toad—a technique that he uses to “provoke a breathing response.”
Criticism of Octavio grew more strident, yet he maintained the support of many former patients. Some of his most ardent defenders were people with whom he’d been aggressive, including the man from the Venezuela beach, who appeared in a video denouncing the “blasphemies” of Octavio’s critics. Many previous clients still swore by his methods. One woman, who said she stopped breathing during a toad session with Octavio in 2015, recalled “pain and horror that cannot be described.” She posted on Facebook, “Is there anyone here who feels/felt that they were traumatized by aspects of the experience?” But, a year and a half later, she thanked Octavio for changing her life.
Octavio and his supporters have historically viewed traumatic experiences during toad sessions as a result of fear or resistance. The solution, they’ve often said, is to smoke more toad. “I need to push people until they accomplish the goal that they supposedly set before the session,” Octavio declared at a consciousness symposium in 2018. But other practitioners I spoke with were horrified by Octavio’s approach. He insists on using large, so-called breakthrough doses of toad, though one can’t be sure of precisely how much he serves, as he eyeballs the amounts. He performs minimal screening of patients, who he says range from five-year-olds to octogenarians, merely proffering basic release forms to them. In addition to pouring water on people’s faces, he used to administer small electric shocks; the purpose, he explained at the symposium, was to “really mind-fuck” patients who resisted the effects of toad. Even his old friend from college, Sandoval, who had gone on to become an obstetrician and a rival toad doctor, criticized Octavio’s fast-and-loose approach to me. (Similar criticisms have been directed at Sandoval.)
In 2018, a group of anonymous practitioners, who call themselves the Conclave, released a best-practices guide for serving 5-MeO-DMT, which amounted to an implicit rejection of Octavio’s methods. The guide advised practitioners not to “mechanically bludgeon an ego into submission with large doses of medicine.” It also cautioned, “Pouring water into the mouth, nose or throat to instigate the breathing reflex is an extreme tool that should be avoided.” Soon afterward, a man in central Europe was hospitalized after smoking toad with Octavio and spent several days in a coma. (He recovered.) Octavio’s girlfriend at the time, a psychologist studying psychedelics, recalls warning him that, unless he implemented safety measures, another person would get hurt. A couple of months later, Ramírez was dead.
For nearly two years, Villalpando, who has a law degree, collected evidence against Octavio, contacting eyewitnesses and paying for chemical analyses of toad medicine. Then, in September, 2020, Octavio was arrested and charged with manslaughter for Ramírez’s death. He appeared at a pretrial hearing in Léon, with his lawyer, the man I met at the toad session in Punta Chueca. Villalpando also attended the hearing, asking the judge to elevate the charge from manslaughter to murder, but he was unsuccessful. Octavio was told that he could pay a settlement in order to avoid a trial. Weeks later, he contacted Villalpando to negotiate a deal. The men agreed to meet at a diner in Léon. Villalpando told me that he had become obsessed with “stopping Octavio from hurting more people”; beneath his coat, he carried a gun. But, according to Villalpando, as his finger moved toward the trigger, a small boy, no older than five, came over from another table and tugged at his coat. The boy lifted his arms, as if asking to be held. Recounting this story, Villalpando began weeping and said, “I don’t believe in supernatural things.” He accepted a settlement of six hundred thousand pesos.
A common critique of Octavio is that he has used toad to amass a fortune. Last July, I visited him at his house in Hermosillo, which is about ninety miles east of Punta Chueca; aside from his two cars, one truck, and three high-end mountain bikes, there were few overt signs of wealth. He lives in a poor neighborhood with potholed streets. His house is two stories: upstairs, he sleeps and plays video games, usually first-person shooters; downstairs, he works out. Octavio often posts videos of himself biking and launching off of ramps. He had recently dislocated his shoulder, but he said that he was ready for even bigger jumps. “I can fucking easily break my leg or something if I don’t land properly,” he said. “I am fucking excited about it, because, if I do it, this will only increase my level of confidence.”
Behind the gym was a spartan dormitory with bunk beds and a communal bathroom. Octavio would sometimes take on longer-term patients, often addicts, who paid a four-thousand-dollar fee to stay with him and receive extensive “treatment.” The dormitory walls were covered with photographs of Octavio, framed certificates from university, and toad art. In an unlocked chest on the floor, he had thousands of release forms and testimonials, haphazardly thrown together.
I asked Octavio about the complaints against him. “My work has been misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused,” he said. He conceded that certain videos might look “barbaric or violent,” but he argued that this was sometimes necessary. “I cannot play by the same rules of conventional therapy,” he said. “Most of my patients already went to many rehab centers. They already tried many drugs. I don’t have time to fool around. I just need to be very straight, very direct”—he clapped his hands together—“to stop the bullshit.”
In Bahía Kino, I saw one of his patients, who was left unattended after smoking toad, throw up, choke, and slam his forehead on the floor. In Punta Chueca, when the fourteen-year-old son of his defense lawyer refused more rapé, Octavio had started shouting at him. “Come on! Shut up! I don’t want to hear it, man. Come on,” he’d said, calling the boy cabrón. Another day, a boat took Octavio and a group to an uninhabited island a half hour from Punta Chueca. As the boat headed back to the mainland, Octavio began serving toad. One man lay on his back, thrashing his arms, as seawater splashed in his mouth.
During that session, Octavio launched into a rant. “Where are all these dead people they talk about?” he asked. “I’ve never walked around with a pistol killing people. I’ve never walked around with a toad drowning people.” His acolytes stood by, nodding. One was a man named Brian, from Sri Lanka, who had sold his home to travel with Octavio. (Previously, Brian had been a devotee of Osho, an Indian guru who inspired a cult movement.) Brian had purchased two expensive cameras and was using them to document Octavio’s work. One day in Punta Chueca, Octavio initiated an impromptu photo shoot, putting on a Seri-style jacket and striking various poses. Without warning, he sprinted toward us and leaped at Brian, knocking him off his feet. Everyone laughed uneasily. Octavio strode away for more photographs. Afterward, Brian found me and pulled down his sleeve, revealing a tattoo of Octavio on his shoulder. He whispered, “Whoever gives you the milk, the mother becomes.”
When Octavio first came to Punta Chueca, in 2011, Jesús Ogarrio was conducting an ethnographic study of Seri rituals for his undergraduate thesis. Ogarrio, who is now a professor, remembers Punta Chueca as a ghost town, with government houses on the verge of collapse, and its few public spaces overrun by meth addicts. He estimated that, of the roughly four hundred residents, dozens were addicts. “It was a pandemic of addiction,” Ogarrio said.
The head of the Seri council of elders was a man named Antonio Robles, who spoke little Spanish and had at least two adult children who were addicted to meth. On Octavio’s first visit to the Seri, he served toad to one of Robles’s sons. Several tribal elders also tried the medicine, and some of them experienced penetrating visions. “When I had the toad, I remembered the history,” Pancho Barnett, whose late father was a venerated shaman in the community, told me.
Robles signed formal letters and certificates declaring Octavio a “medicine man” and allowing him to serve toad to the tribe. Octavio moved to Punta Chueca, where he and Ogarrio—the only outsiders in the community—shared a room. Initially, Ogarrio found Octavio “credible and trustworthy,” he said. “He was there to help with a very grave issue.” The village had no basic medical services; here was a doctor, offering treatment. But Octavio smoked toad several times a day and often seemed irritable and anxious—“like an addict,” Ogarrio said. (Octavio denies this.) Ogarrio was also distressed by Octavio’s attitude toward people in the community. Many of them were afraid of toad, and Ogarrio said that on several occasions he watched Octavio serve toad without explaining what it was, or by presenting it as another drug. One day, Octavio slipped a toad pipe to another son of Robles’s, Ogarrio said. The man “started to go crazy,” he recalled, throwing furniture and then running toward the desert. (Octavio denies giving toad to Robles’s son, or to anyone else without the person’s consent.) The man’s meth addiction grew worse, leading to his death, in 2019.
Robles has since died, too, but Octavio has continued to secure documents from the tribe. He has used these to legitimize the harvest and the transport of toad medicine across borders, and to validate his role to external organizations such as Ted and the U.N. Association Venezuela, which have given him a platform to broadcast his claims about toad medicine’s ancestral roots. Yet there are reasons to question this origin story, particularly as it relates to the Seri. Frogs and toads were ascribed a range of symbolic meanings in Mesoamerica, including death, rebirth, and the arrival of seasonal rains, which could explain why the animals were often depicted on pipes and other artifacts. Researchers on the Seri have recorded a rich set of medicinal and cultural traditions, and there is no clear evidence that toads were considered important, let alone sacred. In “People of the Desert and Sea: Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians,” a classic text on Native Mexican ethnobotany, Richard Felger and Mary Moser argue that toads were “inconsequential in Seri culture.” A few Seri people I spoke with said that they’d heard stories of a secret ancient toad-smoking practice. But, as Alberto Mellado Moreno, a historian from the Seri tribe, said, “It’s speculative even for us. Consider a society reconstructed from so few survivors. It’s impossible to know what might have been lost.”
One night in Hermosillo, I met with Odily Fuentes, who had helped introduce Octavio to the Seri. Fuentes is a swimming instructor, but in 2011 she and Octavio helped found an organization for the preservation of Indigenous Sonoran cultures, called OTA.C., which Octavio said was named after a sacred Seri word for toads. (Gary Nabhan, an ethnobiologist who has spent decades documenting Indigenous Seri knowledge and assisting the tribe with conservation efforts, told me that otac is a generic term: “It’s like saying ‘some frog.’ ”) Fuentes said that her partner at the time, Luis Ogarrio (a cousin of Jesús Ogarrio), had a long-standing relationship with some Seri, with whom he used to consume various psychedelics. Within weeks of meeting Octavio, Fuentes and her ex took him to Punta Chueca. Fuentes said she had written the original documents authorizing Octavio to work in the community; Robles had simply signed them. She told me that in 2013 the tribe rescinded its endorsement of Octavio, but he paid to have it reinstated, and has continued paying the tribe to renew the letters and certificates. (Octavio denies any falling out with the Seri and says he didn’t purchase the documents, but he acknowledges giving money and gifts to tribe members.) “We needed a tribe to protect and promote the toad,” Fuentes recalled. “Any Sonoran tribe embracing the toad would have been fine.”
Fuentes also helped introduce Octavio to another tribal community in Sonora, the Yaqui. According to Anahí Ochoa, a Yaqui activist, Octavio smoked a pipe during a meeting with tribal elders, and later brought a film crew to the village without asking permission. He began boasting about his relationship with the tribe, using a Yaqui word for toad. But, after Octavio had conducted a few sessions, Ochoa told him to stop using the tribe’s name to promote his practice. After that, Octavio stopped visiting. “He was looking for validation as a shaman,” Ochoa said. “But he’s nothing more than an actor—a fake.”
Today, around a dozen Seri practitioners offer toad ceremonies to tourists. Some of these take place at the home of a nephew of Pancho Barnett, which is known as the “hippie house.” When I stopped by one night, a jam session was under way, and dreadlocked white people came and went. A small pig was nosing through beer bottles and trash in the yard. Although some Seri have welcomed the toad boom for the revenue it brings, others resent the degree to which toad has come to define their existence. “It’s hurt our culture,” Gabriela Molina, a Seri activist who has studied Indigenous law, told me. “It’s out of our control.”
The toads themselves are also under threat, in part owing to overharvesting. There have been signs of the drug cartels moving in on the toad trade. The toads are being “wiped out from certain swaths of land,” Robert A. Villa, a herpetologist from Arizona, said. He is among a growing number of people advocating for the consumption of synthetic 5-MeO-DMT instead of toad secretion. Although a toad typically survives being milked, repeated handling places it under stress and exposes it to dangerous pathogens, making it harder for the animal to survive after being released back into the wild. Fernando Suárez Bleck, a toad practitioner who tried to set up a fair-trade organization for Sonoran Desert toads in Mexico, told me that most harvesters “don’t have a consciousness about the sacredness of the species.” He added, “It’s just a hustle business.”
For many years, the New Age ethos of radical nonjudgement that pervades the toad world helped Octavio avoid scrutiny. “I best serve the Sacred Medicine and myself by not adding to the infectious negativity and Ego on display by condemning or judging Dr.Octavio Rettig,” one person posted, in 2017. But the atmosphere has begun to shift. In 2018, at a toad conference in Mexico City, Octavio sat on a panel that descended into chaos. Octavio made a “star entrance,” an audience member recalled, but the panel, which was on the subject of ethical practice, turned into an “intervention.” Octavio was confronted about his methods, and he began “shouting angrily, charging around the room, and lashing out at those who raised objections.” Things became so heated that one woman screamed “at the top of her lungs.”
In early 2019, a public letter, written by a group of anonymous toad practitioners and users, circulated online. It detailed “reckless, unethical, and potentially criminal behavior” by Octavio and Sandoval. (Sandoval, who was accused of fraud and of sexual assault, among other offenses, denied the accusations.) The letter described Octavio’s approach as “high-volume, high-dose, haphazard, dose-them-and-then-leave,” and included reports of Octavio “manhandling people while they are in the medicine.”
Since then, his international travels have slowed. When I asked about this, he blamed it on the pandemic. He described the letter as a blessing for his work—now only people without fear would seek him out. “If I had any regrets, I wouldn’t be doing this,” he told me. I asked if he regretted the deaths in his care. He replied, “They made me a better human being.”
As we spoke, I recalled my conversation with Alan Davis, the psychologist from Ohio State. Warning me about a potential risk of taking psychedelics, he’d said, “When the ego is dissolved, and you are completely at one with what you’re perceiving as God or the universe, there is no difference between you and that thing. . . . You are that thing.” He’d added, “When you come back from that, and your ego reasserts itself, there is a potential to hold onto that belief—that there’s no difference between you and God.”
Octavio owns a piece of land on the outskirts of Hermosillo, which he is developing into a retreat center. He got it in 2011, in exchange for a Mustang convertible. Now his vision is to host people from around the world for toad ceremonies. I met him there one day, and he walked me past excavated pits of muddy water filled with thousands of Sonoran Desert tadpoles; they ranged in size from lentil to raisin, with spherical bodies and thin, whiplike tails. Soon, they would metamorphose and burrow into the earth.
A short distance away, some contractors were at work. Octavio has plans for dormitories, bathrooms, a communal dining area. The property is far from the city, with no neighbors and a padlocked gate. Once, at a conference, Octavio was challenged on his safety record. “The medicine, it’s safe,” he said. “Humans, we are dangerous.” ♦
