PROLOGUEOne does not lick toads. Doing so can lead to a painful death. One presses hard on their glands, which discharge explosively, like pimples. The substance that emerges is pale and viscous, hardening into brittle flakes that can be vaporized in glass pipes. This releases a powerful psychoactive compound called 5-MeO-DMT, also known as the God molecule. Its effects come on within seconds and are usually over within twenty minutes, although users frequently lose all sense of time, along with any awareness of themselves. “If most hallucinogens, including LSD, merely distort reality, however bizarrely, 5-MeO-DMT completely dissolves reality as we know it, leaving neither hallucinations nor anyone to watch them,” an early adopter attempted to explain in the 1980s. Many people experience ego death—a total, obliterating loss of identity—and a sense of pure awareness familiar to advanced meditators. Others describe mystical encounters or being engulfed by white light.
In the past decade, toad smoking, as the formerly obscure practice is known, has surged toward the mainstream, helped along by a wider renaissance in the use of psychedelics. “It’s gone exponential,” a clinical psychologist who studies psychedelics told me in 2021. Michael Pollan smoked toad after being warned that it was “the Everest of psychedelics.” Hunter Biden credited toad with keeping him clean from cocaine for a year. The former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Osama bin Laden has spoken about using 5-MeO-DMT as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Mike Tyson rhapsodized about smoking toad on
The Joe Rogan Experience. “I’ve never been the same,” Tyson said. “It’s almost like dying and being reborn.”
The source of these cosmic sensations is the Sonoran Desert toad, a hulking amphibian from the borderlands between Mexico and the United States. Adults can reach nearly eight inches in length, with pale bellies the girth of softballs. They range in color from olive green to mottled brown, bringing to mind all-terrain military vehicles. Their skins are conspicuously smooth for a toad, with bulging glands on their limbs and necks for secreting potent defense chemicals; these are popularly called toad venom but technically classified as a poison, not being injected via a fang or sting. When threatened by predators, the toads tilt their heads downward and their rears upward, as if shielding themselves with their glands. They have been known to hiss aggressively and leap in the direction of prospective attackers. In the 1950s, a pair of biologists tested the effects of the poison by discharging it into the mouth of a puppy. The dog frothed at the mouth, convulsed, and fell over.
All toads produce toxins—one scholar has described them as “veritable chemical factories”—yet the Sonoran Desert toad is singular in producing 5-MeO-DMT. How or why this became so is still not yet fully understood. Evolutionary biology is rich in mysteries, formed slowly and incrementally by life reacting to itself: an uninterrupted sequence of adaptation and chance reaching back more than three billion years. Although dangerous to swallow, the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad undergo a kind of alchemy when vaporized, becoming a catalyst for breakthrough states of transcendence. That such an otherworldly substance comes from a squat, earthbound creature—its scientific name,
Incilius alvarius, combines Latin roots for “bog” and “belly”—remains one of nature’s more improbable ironies.
The life history of the species is no less extraordinary. The Sonoran Desert is an inhospitable environment for amphibians, receiving about as much rain annually as the Sahara. “It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies,” a writer observed in the early twentieth century. Sonoran Desert toads have porous skins that offer little more resistance to evaporation than a glass of water. To escape the heat and aridity, they hunker in subterranean burrows for up to nine months of the year, neither feeding nor moving. In summer, when violent monsoons drench the landscape, they burst from their hideouts to mate and feed gluttonously, like monks abandoning their cloisters for a season of pleasure. Their tadpoles have only a few weeks to hatch and metamorphose before the water dries up; then the toads, along with their offspring, withdraw once more into the earth.
Biologists classify the Sonoran Desert as a pulse ecosystem, with long intervals of stasis punctuated by flashes of activity. When it rains, dry riverbeds flood, swarms of ants take flight, and wildflowers unfurl new blossoms. The roots of the saguaro—the iconic cactus of the desert, with its uplifted humanoid arms—can grow three feet within a day, shooting forth to capture rainfall. It might rain for twenty minutes, and not again for two years. Signaling the turn of the season, the air sharpens with aromatic compounds like petrichor and creosote. Some scientists believe this smell of rain rouses the toads from their dormancy, others that they sense the bass vibrations of thunder. Their blunted snouts pop up through the mud, followed by blinking eyes and stubby legs. As the desert stirs to life, the toads begin to sing.
The mating call of the Sonoran Desert toad, a low, rasping hoot, has been likened to a distant ferryboat whistle. After surfacing, they hop and scramble toward each other, gathering wherever there is water—ephemeral rain pools, river washes, ditches, cattle troughs, ponds, the rocky hollows known as
tinajas. Males clasp onto females with calloused thumb grips known as nuptial pads, squeezing them around the shoulders or armpits; they have also been known to amorously clutch at cans, bottles, and boots. Overstimulated males often grip other males in error, prompting a distinctive release call that sounds uncannily like clucking chickens. In the 1930s, decades before the psychoactive properties of 5-MeO-DMT were understood, a researcher described catching a large Sonoran Desert toad in Arizona: “How he did protestingly chuckle as we carried him off. His body under my hand was clammy with secretions.”
Once the toads have successfully coupled, the females lay glistening ribbons of eggs that can stretch twenty feet or longer. What follows is a merciless race against the sun. As many as four in five pools dry up too quickly, leaving tiny eggs and tadpoles encrusted in the dirt. Those that survive must develop quickly. Toads begin life with gills and tapering bodies; as adults, they breathe air and move about on four limbs. Connecting these disparate morphologies is a passage of extraordinary change: Lungs fill out, mouths widen, tails retract. A tadpole becomes a toad, yet remains the same animal.
In many cultures around the world, toads were invested with powerful symbolic meanings. Toads were associated with witches in medieval Europe. On the Indian subcontinent they were associated with Brahmin high priests. The Bambara people of Mali believed that toads shape-shifted into mice. In Moroccan folklore, toads were said to harbor the spirits known as djinns, or genies. Toads are generally elusive creatures, seldom seen in daylight; they often conduct long seasonal hibernations. Materializing suddenly, active by night, almost supernaturally changing form—little wonder toads became fixtures of folklore and myth. Yet the Sonoran Desert toad, uniquely, would become not only a metaphor but an agent of transformation, bringing on something like psychic death.
George Orwell once described a different variety of toad, following its winter hibernation, as “having a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.” Immediately after mating, Sonoran Desert toads begin to eat, fattening themselves for another underground fast. They have no teeth, hunting with raptorial tongues that dart out “with such speed that the victims seem to melt into thin air,” a naturalist noted in the nineteenth century. Their diet includes termites, beetles, wasps, centipedes, spiders, snails, rodents, and other toads. One of the toads was once discovered with a bullet casing in its stomach, raising the possibility, however remote, that it was witness to a shooting. Their growth rates are prodigious: A freshly metamorphosed toadlet measuring less than an inch can weigh more than a pound after three brief seasons of consumption. To accommodate their spreading bulk, they must repeatedly shed their skins, which they then swallow. “They’re putting on so much biomass,” a toad biologist named Brian Sullivan told me wonderingly. “Just growing like pigs.”
Faced with the desert’s punishing extremes, the toad not only endured but thrived for millennia, a testament to the adaptive force of evolution. But then the pace of change accelerated. The Sonoran Desert was reshaped by cities, farms, freight corridors, border fences, narco-trafficking routes, migrant trails, and myriad other human imprints. Within this altered landscape, the toad assumed a new role, becoming the source of a coveted psychedelic product. Toad collectors extracted its secretions to sell on the black market; tourists flocked to the desert in search of healing rituals; biotech entrepreneurs began developing 5-MeO-DMT into a psychiatric treatment. The Sonoran Desert toad, via the long arc of its evolutionary history, had been transformed into a target of human desire.
The chief instigator of this shift was a charismatic Mexican doctor who styled himself as a twenty-first-century shaman. He chanted Indigenous songs and proclaimed toad smoking to be “the medicine of the future.” In just a few years, he catalyzed a modern psychedelic movement, propelling the toad, and himself, into popular consciousness. Yet beneath the astonishing accounts of healing he shared lay a darker and more compromising reality. For all its revelatory promise, the God molecule also held the potential for harm; more than one person I spoke to likened the substance to Tolkien’s Ring, too powerful to be wielded without cost. A substance capable of inducing the most profound human experiences also opens the door to exploiting them. Such were the perils of the ego trip.
Copyright © 2026 by Kimon de Greef. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
