How to Change Your Mind

psychedelic guide, inviting me to meet her friend Rocío, a thirty-five-
year-old Mexican therapist whom she described as “probably the world’s
leading expert on the toad.” (Though how intense, really, could the
competition for that title be?) Rocío is from the state of Sonora, in
northern Mexico, where she collects the toads and milks their venom; she
administers the medicine to people both in Mexico, where its legal status
is gray, and in the United States, where it isn’t. (It doesn’t appear to be on
the official radar, however.)
Rocío worked in a clinic in Mexico that treated drug addicts with a
combination of iboga, a psychedelic plant from Africa, and 5-MeO-DMT
—apparently with striking rates of success. In recent years, she’s become
the Johnny Appleseed of toad, traveling all over North America with her
capsules of crystallized venom and her vaporizer. As my circle of
psychonauts expanded, most anyone I met who’d had an encounter with
the toad had been introduced to it by Rocío.
The first time I met Rocío, at a small dinner organized by our mutual
friend, she told me about the toad and what I might expect from it. Rocío
was petite, pretty, and fashionably dressed, her shoulder-length black
hair cut to frame her face with bangs. She has an easy smile that brings
out a dimple on one cheek. Not at all what I expected, Rocío looked less
the part of a shaman or curandera than that of an urban professional.
After going to college and working for a few years in the United States,
five years ago Rocío found herself back at home in Mexico living with her
parents and without direction. Online, she found a manual about the
toad, which she learned was native to the local desert. (Its habitat extends
the length of the Sonoran Desert north into Arizona.) Nine months of the
year, the toad lives underground, protected from the desert sun and heat,
but when the winter rains come, it emerges at night from its burrow for a
brief orgy of eating and copulation. Following the instructions spelled out
in the manual, Rocío strapped on a headlamp and went hunting for toads.
“They’re not very hard to catch,” she told me. “They freeze in the beam
of light so you can just grab them.” The toads, which are warty, sand
colored, and roughly the size of a man’s hand, have a large gland on each
side of their necks, and smaller ones on their legs. “You gently squeeze
the gland while holding a mirror in front of it to catch the spray.” The
toad is apparently none the worse for being milked. Overnight, the venom
dries on the glass, turning into flaky crystals the color of brown sugar.