In its natural state, the venom is toxic—a defense chemical sprayed by
the toad when it feels threatened. But when the crystals are volatilized,
the toxins are destroyed, leaving behind the 5-MeO-DMT. Rocío
vaporizes the crystals in a glass pipe while the recipient inhales; before
you’ve had a chance to exhale, you are gone. “The toad comes on quickly,
and at first it can be unbelievably intense.” I noticed that Rocío
personified the toad and seldom called the medicine by its molecular
name. “Some people remain perfectly still. Other people scream and flail,
especially when the toad brings out traumas, which it can do. A few
people will vomit. And then after twenty or thirty minutes, the toad is all
done and it leaves.”
My first instinct when facing such a decision is to read as much about
it as I can, and later that night Rocío e-mailed me a few articles. But the
pickings were slim. Unlike most other psychedelics, which by now have
been extensively studied by scientists and, in many cases, in use for
hundreds if not thousands of years, the toad has been known to Western
science only since 1992. That’s when Andrew Weil and Wade Davis
published a paper called “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad.”
They had been inspired to look for such a fantastical creature by the
images of frogs in Mayan art. But the only psychoactive toad they could
find lives far to the north of Mayan civilization. It’s possible that these
toads became an item of trade, but as yet there is no proof that the
practice of smoking toad venom has any antiquity whatsoever. However,
5-MeO-DMT also occurs in a handful of South American plants, and
there are several Amazonian tribes who pound these plants into a snuff
for use in shamanic rituals. Among some of these tribes, these snuffs are
known as the “semen of the sun.”
I couldn’t find much in the way of solid medical information about
potential side effects or dangerous drug interactions; little research has
been done. What I did find were plenty of trip reports online, and many
of these were terrifying. I also learned there was someone in town, a
friend of a friend I had met a few times at dinner parties, who had tried 5-
MeO-DMT—not the toad but a synthetic version of the active ingredient. I
took her out to lunch to see what I could learn.
“This is the Everest of psychedelics,” she began, portentously, putting
a steadying hand on my forearm. Olivia is in her early fifties, a
frankie
(Frankie)
#1