The chemical compound 5-MeO-DMT, secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad, has been dubbed the “Everest” of psychedelics, said Olivia Goldhill in New Scientist. Whereas LSD creates hallucinations, the “god molecule”, as some call it, “completely shatters all perception”. A trip lasts no more than half an hour but “creates a total obliteration of the ego”.
Smoking 5-MeO-DMT has been a fringe practice since the 1980s but it has recently become better known – with adherents including Mike Tyson, who in 2019 described taking the drug as “almost like dying and being reborn”. In “The Ego Trip”, the journalist Kimon de Greef charts its history, with a particular focus on one of its main popularisers, the Mexican doctor Octavio Rettig Hinojosa. The story de Greef tells is “often dark” but his book is “compelling”.
Rettig Hinojosa – or Octavio, as he prefers – “burst onto the Silicon Valley scene” in 2013, when he gave an online talk describing how 5-MeO-DMT had helped him kick his crack cocaine addiction, said Kristen Martin on Bloomberg. Presenting “smoking toad” as an “ancient Mesoamerican ritual”, he claimed to have been introduced to it by the Seri tribe, who live in the Sonora region of northwestern Mexico. Often dressed in “Seri garb”, he went on to “serve toad” to thousands.
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“If you’re familiar with the guru playbook, you know where this is going,” said Susannah Cahalan in The New York Times. Octavio “bragged about the number of clients he had bedded” and dosed children as young as five with his “medicine”. He was filmed “kicking and slapping a terrified man”, forcing him to take more hits of toad. At least two people have died after attending his ceremonies. De Greef offers an “enthralling and galling travelogue into the deeply weird underbelly of the psychedelic renaissance”.
“A different writer might have been tempted to go gonzo, to smoke toad himself, and to come back with stories of ego death, the space-time continuum and the rest of it,” said Oliver Bullough in The Guardian. Mercifully, de Greef resists that temptation. He remains “clear-eyed” throughout “The Ego Trip” (except when Octavio dupes him into trying an “essential oil” which proves to have been laced with an LSD-like substance). As well as charting Octavio’s story, de Greef offers “entertaining digressions”, including into “how pharmaceutical companies are harnessing 5-MeO-DMT for their own ends”. The result is a “highly enjoyable” book that sheds light on some extremely “grim” practices.
