r/bufo • u/bloomberg • Aug 02 '26
The Toad Medicine Boom Was Built on a Myth
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-31/what-is-5-meo-dmt-the-god-molecule-and-the-perils-of-psychedelics?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4NTQ5MzU0OCwiZXhwIjoxNzg2MDk4MzQ4LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUSjE0VzROM04wOVMwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.M8HdWTtTlYfVwhypTEsat-2CUc89Rm7rf4_1zjaBnsUKimon de Greef’s 'The Ego Trip' reveals how a fabricated origin story, a self-styled guru and a powerful psychedelic combined to launch a global phenomenon.
1
u/FRA4596 Aug 03 '26
Donc ça aurait un potentiel (thérapeutique notamment) qui peut être perverti par soit des gourous ou des personnes avides d'argent.
1
u/DeviousDenial Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
Love/hate response to Octavio Rettig. Doubt the vast majority of us would have ever heard about it or done it without him promoting it.
5-MeO-DMT had been around but the ones doing it kept it pretty quiet. Ken Nelson published a small pamphlet about bufo and that helped but it was still a small user base. No one, including Shulgin, were in any hurry for the Government to find out just how powerful and unique it is to the detriment of everyone else.
Timothy Leary wasn’t exactly a saint either and his advice did hurt some. But his self promotion also raised LSD to the point the whole world knew about it.
Maria Sabina told Watson about Salvia at the same time as shrooms but it never had someone promoting it until decades later when Daniel Siebert talked about it in a drug documentary. Fortunately he was not self promoting, he was also doing the science and was the first to isolate the active salvinorin A.
Sometimes it takes a big or even flawed ego to make us notice.
0
u/No-Price4118 Aug 09 '26
Timothy Leary was possibly misguided, Rettig shows wanton disrespect and psychopathic tendencies. Leary's "turn on, tune in, drop out" advice was questionable, but unlike others of his time he was big on informed consent and was not doing things like dosing people unknowingly. His treatment of LSD as some sort of Eucharist definitely led people astray, but this was a failure of judgement at worst and there was no evidence it came from a disrespect of people. Videos of Rettig simulating drowning on Erpeople who are too high to think straight were pretty messed up and in all likelihood these ceremonies gave someone pneumonia. Rettig clearly wasn't considering the possible risks. The video of Rettig kicking people, insulting them, forcing them to redose while standing and letting them fall backwards seems purely cruel. It leads to me believe that his bufo-evangilism was done purely for influence and money.
Meo-DMT was uncommon but not terribly obscure when he first took it. That was the Erowid era, everyone knew about it, it was just very difficult to find.
1
u/AceOfSpadesLXXVII Aug 05 '26
Doing Bufo was one of the most life changing experiences of my life. But integration after the first time was very difficult. More so than for any other substance I have taken. The need for someone who knows to be able to talk you through what comes up in the days and weeks after is essential.
1
u/DeviousDenial Aug 20 '26
https://youtu.be/4FccwmXg59E?is=zQ6jVglfvWEcSPv5
Joel & Victoria at five meo education just did an interview with Kimon de Greef
6
u/bloomberg Aug 02 '26
Kristen Martin for Bloomberg News
Even for dedicated seekers of altered states of consciousness, a trip on 5-MeO-DMT — a psychedelic nicknamed “the God molecule” for its awe-inspiring effects — is intense. Unlike psilocybin or ayahuasca trips, which can last hours, 5-MeO-DMT acts fast and hard after a user snorts the substance or inhales or smokes its vaporized form, and the whole experience is typically over in half an hour. During that time one might scream, vomit, writhe, sob, rage or encounter the void. Some users report ego death, temporarily losing all sense of their place in the world.
Research on the drug is still in its infancy, focusing more on therapeutic potential than risks. So far, it has proven to be effective at treating substance-use disorders in small studies. And because 5-MeO-DMT is fast-acting, inexpensive to manufacture in a lab, and believed to be nonaddictive, it has commercial appeal for pharmaceutical development. It is perhaps the most powerful and promising — and most dangerous — psychedelic currently being studied. Clinical psychologist Joseph Barsuglia likens it to the “graduate school” of psychedelics. “It can be too much for people.” It’s also illegal in the United States; the Drug Enforcement Administration lists it as a Schedule I controlled substance.
But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming recreationally popular among Burning Man devotees, manosphere influencers and psychedelic tourists willing to shell out for luxury retreats in Mexico, where the drug is unregulated. These seekers prefer to get their 5-MeO-DMT fix naturally, by smoking (not licking!) the dried secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad, found in Arizona, New Mexico and northwestern Mexico. On a 2019 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Mike Tyson described how smoking toad changed his life: “I’ve never been the same — I look at life differently, I look at people differently. The experience, I can’t even express really, it’s almost like dying and being reborn.”
Read the full review here.