S5E27: Sonoran Toads and the Dirty Business of Ego Death

[00:00:00] Chris Clarke: This episode is made possible by listeners just like you and by

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[00:00:12] Kimon De Greef: There's people who are practitioners of toad smoking, and they all say the same line. They say, "I get my stuff from a shaman, an indigenous shaman who collects responsibly."

[00:00:23] Kimon De Greef: That person does not exist.

[00:00:34] Joe Geoffrey: You think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again.

[00:00:43] Joe Geoffrey: It's time for 90 Miles From Needles, the desert protection podcast.

[00:00:55] Chris Clarke: Thank you, Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and regular listeners will be pretty familiar with the argument we make often that a lot of people see the desert solely as a place to mine whatever it is they want at the moment, whether that's gold or silver or borax or gravel or even groundwater, and it's increasingly true of sunlight as well, as the solar industry makes further inroads into the desert.

[00:01:24] Chris Clarke: But if you're like me, you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about people that come to the desert to mine enlightenment. But it's happening, and it's taking down a really remarkable species with it, namely the Sonoran desert toad. A new book entitled The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, A Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence by Kimon de Greef has been making the rounds.

[00:01:49] Chris Clarke: It is an excellent read available at 90milesfromneedles.com/books. We are so fortunate to have the author Kimon de Greef with us in the studio. Kimon, welcome to 90 Miles from Needles. Thanks for joining us.

[00:02:05] Kimon De Greef: Such a pleasure. Thank you for having me here.

[00:02:07] Chris Clarke: I am a big fan of your book, The Ego Trip. I'm curious how the topic came to you. How did you land on this as something you were interested in writing about? Was it a book at first, or did you think it was gonna be something shorter when you started out?

[00:02:24] Kimon De Greef: Yeah. I'm really surprised that I've spent six years working on a book about psychedelics. It's not something I would've imagined myself doing, not for an absolute lack of interest. I'd say I have a passing interest in psychedelics and altered states and things like that, but I'd never done any reporting on psychedelic stories.

[00:02:44] Kimon De Greef: My background is in conservation and ecology. That's how I got my start in journalism, was writing about kinda niche wildlife trades and illicit economies. And in 2020, came across stories of psychedelic toad poaching, which seemed dissonant and ironic-

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: and strange. And I began reporting and making some calls.

[00:03:09] Kimon De Greef: I was living in New York at the time, and I envisaged maybe doing a 2,000-word feature story and moving on. I had absolutely no idea that it would lead in the directions that it did and become as kind of large and all-consuming as it did, but that's how I fell into it.

[00:03:28] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm. I suspect that given the niche we occupy as a podcast among people that spend a lot of time thinking about the deserts, that people are roughly familiar for the most part with, uh, at least the concept of what's often called in the media licking toads.

[00:03:45] Chris Clarke: But could you give us the 101 on what exactly the situation is with these toads?

[00:03:52] Kimon De Greef: Yeah, absolutely. They are, well, just remarkable creatures from an evolutionary biology perspective. They're large, fleshy toads around the size and weight of a freshly plucked chicken, is one of the sort of memorable accounts in the psychedelic literature.

[00:04:10] Kimon De Greef: And they live in one of the driest landscapes in the world, the Sonoran Desert, which wasn't always as dry and as hot. Mm-hmm. It was like a more toad-friendly, more amphibian-friendly place many thousands of years ago. And as the climate shifted and the desert became a desert, the toads seem to have hacked a way to survive and, and now have this really curious life cycle where they're invisible for nine months of the year, hiding out underground where they aren't really moving or feeding, doing much at all, maybe meditating.

[00:04:49] Kimon De Greef: That's what some of the, the end users of psychedelic toads like to sort of imagine, them meditating. And it, it's, it is kind of apt, even if it's anthropomor- morphizing to quite a-

Chris Clarke: Yep.

Kimon De Greef: large degree. And then when the summer monsoons come and the desert becomes wet and alive again, they burst out and have an extremely short window of opportunity to, to be amphibians really and lay their eggs, find mates, eat, hatch tadpoles, and have the tadpoles become little toadlets in time to burrow underground before the temporary pools where they were cavorting in dry up.

[00:05:32] Kimon De Greef: I just think they're magnificent and strange creatures and such a testament to the adaptive force of evolution and the way that life can find a way to express itself and manifest itself in almost any extreme circumstance. Aside from that natural history being so striking, this toad is the only toad in the world that secretes a very particular chemical in its defense toxin.

[00:05:59] Kimon De Greef: Toads are notoriously warty. They're not that agile like frogs, so the way that they defend themselves is by manufacturing poisons and having these large glands that hold the poisons. And so toads across cultures throughout human history have been associated with magic, with poisoning, with the dark arts.

[00:06:20] Kimon De Greef: The Sonoran desert toad, Incilius alvarius is its scientific name, but it used to be called Bufo alvarius, its defense toxins include a chemical called 5-MeO-DMT. I won't even attempt the full nomenclature of, of the molecule. And-

[00:06:37] Chris Clarke: I'll look that up and splice it in, so-

Kimon De Greef: That would be good ... just so peop-

Chris Clarke: We do have some chemists listening, I believe.

[00:06:44] Chris Clarke: Here's future Chris. I looked it up, and 5-MeO-DMT is a short way of saying 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. That's basically a verbal schematic of the design of the molecule. Really quickly, there is a pair of carbon rings, one with six carbons and one with four, and one nitrogen. That's called an indole ring.

[00:07:11] Chris Clarke: And there are two substantial chains coming off that pair of rings, one of which is coming off the six-carbon ring, and one of which is coming off the pentagonal ring with a nitrogen. The 5-methoxy in the name means that there is an oxygen and methyl attachment at position five on the six-carbon ring.

[00:07:30] Chris Clarke: N,N-dimethyl means there are two methyl groups attached to the nitrogen, and tryptamine is the underlying shape of the rings and the side chains that are attached to them. The more you know.

[00:07:44] Kimon De Greef: This compound is intensely psychoactive if consumed the right way. It's not active orally. You can't swallow it, and the toad-licking myth would get people in a lot of trouble, because if you lick this toad, you'd consume a lot of toxic substances and likely be hospitalized or die.

[00:08:03] Kimon De Greef: But other routes of ingestion, such as smoking the dried secretions of this particular toad, flood the brain with 5-MeO-DMT, which is one of the most powerful psychedelics in the universe. And so this toad, after surviving and adapting over however many thousands of years, in the last 15 years really fell into the crosshairs of the global psychedelic aficionado set and witnessed a real boom in, in interest in, in toad smoking, which is kind of the departure point for the book that I wrote.

[00:08:44] Kimon De Greef: It hasn't worked out super well for the toads.

[00:08:47] Chris Clarke: Is the, the involvement of the s- sort of the main character of the book connected with that burst in popularity over 15 years, or is he just sort of going along with the zeitgeist, or what, what's your sense there?

[00:09:01] Kimon De Greef: Yeah. Well, so the central figure in the book, "The Ego Trip," is a charismatic Mexican doctor named Octavio Rettig Hinojosa, but kind of like Elvis, people know him by his first name, Octavio.

[00:09:16] Kimon De Greef: Octavio was introduced to the practice of toad smoking in 2006, 2007, and at the time was a crack cocaine addict. He'd struggled with addiction to various substances for a number of years. I believe he was 30 years old at the time, and had sort of hit rock bottom in his tally, and he was living on the streets of Guadalajara, digging in trash cans, selling drugs to support his habit when he was introduced to this substance, this 5-MeO-DMT, which has such powerful and singular psychedelic effect, and credited that with his recovery.

[00:09:54] Kimon De Greef: So he then began serving toad and sharing it with people that he knew. The practice of toad smoking dates back at least to the early 1980s. That's the first documented toad smoker in history, was an American man who figured out via a sort of circuitous and interesting route that I go into probably too much depth in, in the book.

[00:10:21] Kimon De Greef: But he worked out that you could do this and wrote a pamphlet, and this pamphlet was kind of circulating on the psychedelic underground. But there was no big craze about smoking toads. Mm-hmm. It was super niche, very underground. You kind of had to know, and many people were kind of turned off by the idea.

[00:10:40] Kimon De Greef: Again, I think the sort of toxic reputation of toads, the extremity of the trip, various factors. It was a thing that you did after you'd done a bunch of other psychedelics if you were adventurous. Later, Michael Pollan would quote someone in his book that kind of marked such a sea change in the psychedelic renaissance as the Mount Everest of psychedelics, and I think that was kind of its reputation.

[00:11:04] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: Not for everyone, remote, extreme. But Octavio, in his finding of the medicine, as he called it, and sort of evangelizing of the experience, set in motion this sequence of events that, uh, that completely changed the global profile of toad. And I think it probably would have happened without him, and there was a zeitgeist unfolding, as you say, but he was really the protagonist of this particular molecule's rising in, in popular consciousness.

[00:11:34] Kimon De Greef: And, and the way that came about was that a few years after coming clean from his addictions, or at least his drug addiction, he was introduced to an indigenous community in northern Mexico, the Seri tribe. Numbered fewer than 1,000 people at the time, um, were and still are an extremely marginalized, impoverished community living in cartel-controlled territory.

[00:12:02] Kimon De Greef: We're talking about the Sonoran borderlands, where industrial volumes of drugs move every year, where the migrant crisis unfolds, where the guns move around. And the Seri had almost been wiped out in a colonial genocide that-

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: went on for hundreds of years. At the early 20th century, there were fewer than 200 of them surviving, and by the time Octavio met them in 2012, the tribe was confronting a crisis of methamphetamine addiction, which had spilled over from the drug traffickers and taken root in these circumstances of desperation.

[00:12:38] Kimon De Greef: And so Octavio began using the toad to treat, or offered it as a treatment to people in the community, and super, super quickly emerged from that encounter with a narrative of not only kind of healing the tribe of addiction to meth, but of resurrecting a lost psychedelic tradition that had been used in ancient times, but been eradicated during the violent contact with Spanish and later Mexican outsiders, and that he had brought it back to life.

[00:13:14] Kimon De Greef: And that narrative of finding the indigenous source of this potent psychedelic experience, I think really changed how people engaged with the idea of toad smoking. It wasn't just a weird creature with a mind-bending trip, but something that had been used for spiritual and shamanic reasons and purposes.

[00:13:40] Kimon De Greef: And so 2012, 2013, once he had that kind of story, he got some letters from tribal representatives certifying him as a Seri man of medicine, and then he was off traveling the world. He did a TED Talk at Burning Man in 2013, possibly 2012. By 2015, he was traveling hundreds of days of the year, dressing up in Seri traditional clothes, singing these ostensible chants of the Seri people.

[00:14:10] Kimon De Greef: And, well, I would say that that story in many ways was too good to be true. Right. But it's hard to imagine the popularity of toad smoking happening without it, for me. Of course, history only, like, happens in one way, but this particular history was very consequential. And the reality of the encounter and the ways that it's played out are super strange and fascinating to me and something I spent a lot of time trying to sift through during my reporting.

[00:14:41] Chris Clarke: And I'm hesitant to reveal a lot of things that can be learned from reading the book, 'cause I wanna encourage people-

Kimon De Greef: Thank you.

Chris Clarke: to read the book.

[00:14:49] Kimon De Greef: That's kind.

[00:14:50] Chris Clarke: A question that I think needs to be asked here is, was the narrative that the Seri had been using toad in times immemorial, was there any evidence for that?

[00:15:02] Kimon De Greef: So the positionality of being like a white South African guy saying what is and isn't Seri tradition is a delicate place to be. And so I wanna be mindful not to be a spokesperson for this community. But I will say that there are multiple lines of fairly strong evidence to suggest that the Seri did not use toad ancestrally.

[00:15:24] Kimon De Greef: To take one, they have a very rich and well-documented set of ethnobotanical traditions. These were nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in this extreme environment and whose survival depended deeply on ecological knowledge of a very high degree of mastery of the lived environment, and much of that has been preserved.

[00:15:50] Kimon De Greef: Many of your listeners will know of the writer Gary Nabhan, who has done work on Seri ethnobiology. Richard Felger, the botanist, did incredible work with the Seri. And so just on that front, the idea that such a singularly powerful psychedelic experience would've been lost and forgotten while these thousands of other names and uses for plants and animals would've been preserved seems unlikely.

[00:16:21] Kimon De Greef: The other weird part of delving into this part of the story for me was that Seriland today is largely populated by members of an evangelical Spanish-language Christian church. I would say 75 to 80% of the Seri community are members of this church-

[00:16:43] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm ...

[00:16:43] Kimon De Greef: which does not take kindly to psychedelic ritual.

[00:16:48] Kimon De Greef: A small, tiny minority of people in the community today serve toad, even though there is, in the wake of Octavio's narrative, a steady and increasing stream of psychedelic tourists going there looking for the original shamans. And so it's absolutely not something that the majority of people are engaging in commercially, which I find telling given the poverty levels in the area, and even more so engaging in personally.

[00:17:17] Kimon De Greef: Like most Seri people have not smoked toad before and have no seeming desire to. And the act of being a reporter and going and asking about this is an interesting one because there is also a kind of community investment in the narrative because it brings tourists in.

[00:17:34] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:35] Kimon De Greef: And the Seri have a long and quite incredible history of adapting to different opportunities, and this is what they're most globally famous for now, is being a community of toad smoking shamans.

[00:17:50] Kimon De Greef: And so as a reporter, as a gringo-looking fellow arriving and saying, "I want to learn about toad smoking," it was natural that I was steered towards people with kind of skin in the game.

[00:18:02] Chris Clarke: Right.

[00:18:02] Kimon De Greef: And it took a little bit of persistence to kind of get behind that, not because I had any agenda of disproving, but because I had a sense that a distorted and oversimplified story was being presented to the world through a very small number of gatekeepers, and benefiting people like Octavio, who's not the only one, but there's all sorts of outsiders who profit off this more than any Seri do because they bring people in for ceremonies, and they hook them up with accommodation, and then they leave, and then they go and they do psychedelic therapy sessions.

[00:18:34] Kimon De Greef: They run ceremonies in Germany or Sweden or the United States and charge hundreds of dollars saying that they're certified indigenous practitioners with the kind of original toad smoking clan. And when I spoke to people with skin in the game. Sometimes it was borderline amusing, but the stories of how toad smoking was done in the past and how it was reintroduced to the community were completely discordant and at odds with each other.

[00:19:04] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: So, you know, I stopped short in the book and I'll stop short on this podcast of saying what I believe happened, because the past is kind of unknowable, and it's certainly possible that this community worked out how to use these secretions. I mean, stranger things have happened. Ayahuasca-

[00:19:23] Chris Clarke: Right ...

[00:19:23] Kimon De Greef: used in places in the Amazon requires the specific combination of two completely different plants that don't look the same because the DMT in the one vine is orally inactive without an enzyme that makes it absorbable, and somehow people worked out how to combine those two.

[00:19:44] Kimon De Greef: So it's theoretically much easier to imagine people working out that this toad had psychoactive properties. But long-winded answer, the evidence against it does seem stronger.

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: And what I became more interested in than coming down one way or the other was reporting it out, telling some of the story of how it came to be, and focusing on what the impacts and consequences of that story have been.

[00:20:15] Kimon De Greef: Because the really peculiar thing to me is not whether or not this happened ancestrally, but what's happening today as a consequence of that story. And that's frankly some of the strangest reporting I've ever had the opportunity to do, is hanging out in this, like, Mexican borderlands fishing camp community with a stream of kind of bead-wearing psychedelic seekers arriving in search of this pure psychedelic shamanic experience that, to my mind, doesn't exist, at least not to the degree that the people seeking it want it to.

[00:20:52] Kimon De Greef: A really strange, really tense, discordant, fascinating kind of 21st century anthropology skit playing out-

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: in Sierra now, and I try to put some of that in the book. I think many more books could be written about, about it all, 'cause it's very rich and, and, and absorbing and odd.

[00:21:13] Chris Clarke: Yeah. It's almost never good news when a lot of people that look like me descend on a native community.

[00:21:19] Kimon De Greef: Yeah. There's a lot of fantasy and projection and sort of idealizing of what indigenous people are and aren't, and I think that many indigenous communities in that situation kind of go along with it because it serves them to a point. But as I try to capture in the book, I think there's also a bunch of negative consequences of that kind of encounter, and I don't think the benefits are equally shared.

[00:21:47] Kimon De Greef: I think that the people getting the most out of this story are ultimately not the Seri. And that's-

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: sort of sad, but also predictable because that's how these things tend to go and have gone. You know, this isn't the first kind of psychedelic gold rush to a Mexican indigenous community. I wrote a little bit about Carlos Castaneda's teachings of Don Juan, which sparked a whole caravan of people going and looking for a psychedelic tradition that was never practiced by the people who were being sought out.

[00:22:18] Kimon De Greef: So it's kind of history repeats itself in weird ways. Mm-hmm. And I think it says more about the seekers and the things that they're looking for than about the communities being kind of inundated.

[00:22:30] Chris Clarke: Yeah. Yeah, as someone who was taken in by Castaneda's writing, I guess it was about 50 years ago exactly at this point.

[00:22:38] Kimon De Greef: Wow.

Chris Clarke: Um, it's a really disturbing tendency, you know, to transplant wishful thinking or your grift or whatever it is onto these cultures. It struck me as I was reading that people that don't know the Seri in the context of the toads, if they have heard of the Seri, almost without exception, would associate the Seri with ironwood carvings, which is-

Kimon De Greef: Yes.

[00:23:07] Chris Clarke: um, an art form, again, is not, so far as we know, a traditional, like prehistoric pastime of the Seri. You know, people know who was the first modern Seri to start carving and, and selling. But, uh, and I'm a big fan of these carvings. I've collected a few.

Kimon De Greef: Mm-hmm.

Chris Clarke: Almost, almost without exception, portray animals, quail and dolphins and sharks and roadrunners and snakes.

[00:23:38] Chris Clarke: Turtles. It's, it's, it's an art form that is almost entirely based on the local fauna and the people's relationship with them, and they're usually very well observed because people live with these animals. And it struck me as, you know, if you were gonna pick a nation to associate toad smoking with and say that they had lost all the records of it, there's probably better ones than Seri for that, just, just because the Seri are so well documented in, in ethnobiological terms, but also just in their, their own cultural expression in the present.

[00:24:16] Kimon De Greef: Yeah, it's, it's true. And one of the other main-- I mean, this book is so full of oddest things, so I'm gonna keep saying one of the oddest things. But speaking to people who know this area from before their association with the toad story, including people who were in and out of Seri land doing research or doing community development work during the emergence of the toad story, without exception were absolutely flabbergasted when they found out about the toad story, some of them from me, like years later.

[00:24:48] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm

Kimon De Greef: You know, 2012 this started. I started reporting in 2020, and I'd talk to people who considered themselves fairly versed in Seri cultural history. And so there's this community who means completely different things to different generations of outsiders who've come into contact with them, and the kind of astonishment and sometimes anger and sometimes hilarity that people expressed hearing about this toad phenomenon.

[00:25:16] Kimon De Greef: Oh, I also spoke to people who were there when it got started and just saw through it from the start and were like, "Here's this kind of white-looking Mexican guy coming in here, and there's a few people, hippies trailing along," and like, "What the hell are they up to? This is some weird fringe thing." I, I don't think anyone expected that this would become so central to Seri life.

[00:25:37] Kimon De Greef: Again, not in a practical sense that people are doing it all the time, but in that that's sort of what this area are known for. And the ironwood carving story was such a fascinating history for me to read about because there are many echoes between the toad boom and the ironwood story, where an outsider kind of brings something.

[00:26:02] Kimon De Greef: At least this is-- I mean, that was the other weird thing, is people in the community and Octavio were both like, "This was lost and forgotten, and Octavio's reintroduced it." But then other people will say it's, "We kept it secret. It wasn't forgotten." But then it's like, why did you decide to share it when this guy came?

[00:26:18] Kimon De Greef: There's all these kind-of-weird inconsistencies. But the ironwood story had-- And, and there's varying origin stories. Basically, one super charismatic, peculiar, idiosyncratic, and gifted Seri man started carving ironwood, like at the suggestion of some American tourists. And very quickly, I can't remember the exact number, but like, you know, more than three-quarters of the community were carving ironwood and became excellent at it.

[00:26:44] Kimon De Greef: Mm-hmm. To the degree that outsiders started copying them, to the degree that the ironwood started vanishing and the resource became scarce. And much of that is played out with the toad story, except far fewer Seri are actually dealing in toad.

Chris Clarke: Right.

Kimon De Greef: Which I think says something. But now the toads are scarce.

[00:27:04] Kimon De Greef: They're way harder to get, whether it's because of the collecting or something happening in concert like climate change or habitat transformation. Toads are scarcer. Tons of outsiders kind of selling the supposed Seri tradition of toad smoking. I just thought the parallels were really fascinating, and again, sort of history repeating itself in many ways.

[00:27:27] Joe Geoffrey: Don't go away. We'll be right back

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Chris Clarke: It has been really hot in the Mojave Desert in the last couple of months. We keep getting extreme weather alerts warning us about heat that keep getting extended by three or four days at a time.

[00:28:19] Chris Clarke: I really needed a break from it, and you might need it as well. So what better week to offer up a recording of winter at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Our nature sounds recordist Fred Bell writes, "The sounds around Peterson Pond are much subdued during the winter months, but significantly different."

[00:28:40] Chris Clarke: Let's listen.

[00:30:02] Joe Geoffrey: You're listening to 90 Miles From Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. Your dog is hotter than you are.

[00:30:10] Chris Clarke: And now let's get back to our conversation with Kimon de Greef. I saw echoes with another topic that you've written on in a different venue. I just kept seeing similarities between the toad industry and the white sage industry, uh, here in Southern California and getting exported all over the country and I guess all over the world.

[00:30:36] Kimon De Greef: Mm

Chris Clarke: You know, in the case of white sage, there was an established native use among the Southern California tribes, and at the same time, it's just exploded far beyond sort of the limits of the Southern California tribes to tribes in other places where white sage did not ever grow. Uh, they may have had- Mm-hmm

[00:30:56] Chris Clarke: a smudging tradition with something local, but white sage is available, and certainly the white hippie contingent is a part of this as well. It just struck me as this is just a trope that we keep living through in our relationships with the people that were on this continent first.

[00:31:16] Kimon De Greef: Yeah, it is striking, and I sort of understand, like the way we live now, the society we live in is so tragically at odds with how we've spent most of our own evolutionary history living.

[00:31:33] Kimon De Greef: We live such atomized, isolated, polarized lives, and I think that there is a deep yearning that many people feel to live fuller, more human lives. And what better kind of screen to project that on than the idea of Indigenous people who lived in much more harmony and in closer kinship with this beautiful natural world that we're sort of demolishing.

[00:32:03] Kimon De Greef: So I kind of understand this desire to find something that's been so tragically lost, but the way that it unfolds is so often commodified, appropriative and harmful. I came into the story of toads through reporting on white sage when I met a fellow who was like a big dealer of sage. Sage was being ripped out of the ground in California reserves.

[00:32:30] Kimon De Greef: Indigenous people who used the sage, like in some real traditional ceremonial context, were struggling to get their hands on the stuff. And I was trying to follow the chain and see who was placing these big orders because you could see sage all over Instagram and in all the kind of boutique shops. You could buy it as-- If you're a hippie in Poland, you could buy it.

[00:32:50] Kimon De Greef: In South Korea, you could buy it, all coming from Southern California. And I met this guy who was a big wholesaler of white sage, and during our interview he's like, "Yeah, no, I kind of invented this market, but you-- I'm surprised you're not talking to me about psychedelic toads because I invented that too." And I was like, "Whoa," like, "Tell me more.

[00:33:08] Kimon De Greef: Of course, I want to know about that." And he told me that he had written the pamphlet that I mentioned earlier, that he was the guy who had worked out that you could have this ego-dissolving, transcendent, incomparable psychedelic experience with toad secretions. And he said, "You can go and see. There's a Vice documentary about me."

[00:33:26] Kimon De Greef: So I went and I watched the Vice documentary, and sure as eggs, there the dude was. The twist in that particular story, so the guy who really set me going, 'cause then I found out that there was toad poaching, I was like, "Oh, this is like the sage. This lines up with my interests and my kind of weird journalistic obsessions."

[00:33:42] Kimon De Greef: But then Vice released a second documentary about the pamphlet, a different guy who'd contacted them after seeing the first one and said, "That's not him. I'm the guy, and I can prove it." So Vice were hoodwinked by this dude, this white sage wholesaler, and so they had to make another whole documentary, and they found the real guy, who was this guy from Texas named Ken Nelson, who has a fascinating story, and they did a really good documentary.

[00:34:07] Kimon De Greef: But my guy who'd set me off, the sage dealer, absolutely didn't. And then I called him, like, while I was doing the book, and I was like, "Just wanted to clear it up with you. Why did you go on that documentary and say that you were the author of the pamphlet, and, like, how does it feel that they put this other one in?"

[00:34:23] Kimon De Greef: He said, "I did it to take the heat off the real guy. Like, I was helping keep him anonymous." And there's something about in this realm of kind of truth-seeking and psychedelic kind of visionaries, where there's just so many grifters and so many bullshit stories, and, like, my way into the story was with a real whopper of one, the guy who got into an international documentary seen by millions of people claiming to have invented something that he didn't.

[00:34:51] Kimon De Greef: And I thought that was kind of hilarious and telling. But yeah, lots of parallels with the poaching for sure.

[00:34:59] Chris Clarke: And one parallel that especially struck me with the white sage and the toad is that there is a very easy environmental guilt-free alternative, which is in white sage, you know, it's pretty easy to grow.

[00:35:17] Chris Clarke: You know, you can put it in a pot on your porch and have your own white sage. And there is a similar alternative with the flavor of DMT that the toads create.

[00:35:29] Kimon De Greef: It, it's fairly easy to synthesize. Not for me, but, you know, people with some chemistry chops. Easier than other psychedelic molecules, I've been told.

[00:35:40] Kimon De Greef: Super inexpensive as well. And as a result, it's fairly straightforward, and I, I can't tell people how and where to buy drugs. That's not my role as a journalist. But people don't struggle to get their hands on synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, which has none of the impacts on the toads, which we can talk more about, that the pursuit of the wild, supposedly indigenous, organic, etc.,

[00:36:07] Kimon De Greef: toad medicine has. There's an interesting wrinkle in that, which is that the psychedelic experience is quite heavily determined by set and setting, by people's expectations of a trip, how they're feeling on the day. And so if you give someone a substance A and tell them, "This is from a magical toad that's a sacrament of this tribal community," and maybe the person receiving it is someone who values the idea of connecting to natural substances.

[00:36:38] Kimon De Greef: They think there's a spirit of the toad in there. And then option B, substance B, is this is the pure molecule from a lab, and it's just, it's just a chemical. Many people will have different experiences in those two unless they're equipped with knowledge and information, and that's part of my job, I think, with this book, is to delve a little bit into what the supply chain for the toads really looks like and what end users are funding and participating in.

[00:37:05] Kimon De Greef: And then having the option as the user to say, "How much does that story matter to me?"

[00:37:13] Chris Clarke: Right.

[00:37:13] Kimon De Greef: Or am I just going to have the exact same molecule hit the same receptor in my brain? And so people who don't really buy into the story are pretty universal in saying that there's no real difference between the two.

[00:37:29] Kimon De Greef: You can have the same high. Actually, many proponents of the synthetic molecule say it's better because you can measure doses more accurately. Mm. You know that it's not contaminated. Individual toads have different quantities of 5-MeO-DMT in their defense secretions, and this molecule is psychoactive by the milligram.

[00:37:50] Kimon De Greef: So a tiny little bit extra can mean the difference between, you know, a dissociative white-out dose or a kind of cosmic bliss high. And so that precision matters. And I'll just talk now about the way that the toad medicine market operates these days- Mm-hmm ... post-Octavio, post the boom in popularity. You know, it's one of these tragedies where it's theoretically possible for this to be a renewable resource.

[00:38:19] Kimon De Greef: You could have a toad in your backyard in Arizona and drop it some insects once in a while, and wash your hands, and pick it up, and squeeze its secretions, and dry them off, and smoke toad, and the toad would live. It doesn't get harmed in the process, obviously, or necessarily harmed. Might not be happy being handled.

[00:38:40] Kimon De Greef: And I even wanna say that that might not be great for the toad, but that's the best case scenario.

[00:38:44] Chris Clarke: Right.

[00:38:44] Kimon De Greef: Um, in reality, what happens is so many people around the world wanna get their hands on this substance now. The toads only live in the Sonoran Desert. Most of them are in the Mexican part of Sonora.

[00:38:59] Kimon De Greef: You know, the American part of Sonora is a lot of private land. There's a bunch of reasons that there's not as much toad collecting happening there. Sonora, there's a lot of poor people who want the opportunity to earn a buck kinda no matter what. And so post-Octavio, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, people started going to Sonora to look for the medicine, but Sonora's also really, really dangerous.

[00:39:21] Kimon De Greef: Mm-hmm. It's cartel land. So you can't just wander in there and pick up a toad, and say your prayers, and squeeze it and leave. And so kind of structurally, the overlay of that toad geography with the social geography with Sonora has meant that these local middlemen, these toad dealers, have kind of risen as this critical node in the medicine supply chain, using the word medicine as many consumers of it would use.

[00:39:47] Kimon De Greef: And their modus operandi is... It's awful. It's grotesque for anyone who cares about the toad, and many of the end users would be shocked. So, but the way that it plays out now is migrant agricultural workers, for the most part, working in, like, avocado orchards or fruit orchards, some of the most impoverished, kind of poorest of the poor in Mexico, during summer now know that if they catch a bag of toads, that someone will come and get the toads, pay them, like, a dollar a bag.

[00:40:17] Kimon De Greef: There's very little quality control. Often toads and frogs of different species are thrown in the same bag. The collectors sometimes take two or three days to make their circuit around these pueblos, ejidos, and these kind of remote places. So the toads are dying in the buckets. They're crawling on each other.

[00:40:36] Kimon De Greef: They're shitting on each other. And then they get taken to some central location, called a kind of toad ranch often.

[00:40:43] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

[00:40:43] Kimon De Greef: Like a sort of farm, where they're dumped in buckets or thrown into a pond and then milked, which means squeezing their glands on their necks and on their limbs. And then there's this kind of fantasy that many of the people who are collecting them have, which is that the toads are then gonna stay there and they'll have a captive population of toads.

[00:41:04] Kimon De Greef: But most of these toads, like evolutionarily, they wanna go back to where they came from. Right. They're sort of like salmon or homing pigeons. I went to the world's biggest toad dealer. I went to his land outside Caborca. It's like derelict, horrible, barren place, and he was just lamenting. He's like, "You know, I can't tell you how many hundreds of thousands of toads I've brought in, but they all leave."

[00:41:25] Kimon De Greef: And I was like, "You know, they, they leave for a reason." This is happening in extremely dangerous territory, so like not only is it bad for the toads, but you've had toad collectors get murdered because the local cartels don't know who they are or they think they're up to no good. They get beaten up, they get shaken down.

[00:41:43] Kimon De Greef: There's protection rackets now, so the cartels shake down the toad ranches where the toads are getting milked. And then some of the toads get recaptured, you know, because, like, everyone's running around. It's two, three months of the year that the toads are out. They're all running around trying to get their hands on this precious medicine that people around the world are gonna use for spiritual, cosmic kind of transcendent experiences.

[00:42:04] Kimon De Greef: And so many of the toads are caught like three nights in a row or whatever, and they get squeezed, and they get squeezed, and they get squeezed, and then their glands start to bleed, and the medicine goes this kind of pink color. Now, I don't think there's anyone in the world who wants to, like, smoke toad blood or be kind of complicit in that.

[00:42:20] Kimon De Greef: And the dissonance is so extreme because so many of the end users revere the toad as a kind of deity. They're like, "This is a spiritual being." There's so much psychedelic art of the toad sitting, meditating, third eye chakra stuff. And it's more like any straightforward poaching story. It's like rhino poaching, except that-

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

[00:42:43] Kimon De Greef: in this case, it's not like some Asian end user using it for the traditional medicine. It's like all the psychedelic seekers of the world, many of them in the United States, having no idea what their pursuit of healing and happiness is intimately bound up with. And so, like, again, I'm not gonna be out there and tell people that if they value the natural substance, they're wrong or that smoking toad is intrinsically evil.

[00:43:11] Kimon De Greef: But I do want people to be aware of the structure of that economy and the difficulty of sourcing toad outside of those channels. And I mean, I've met them even in Cape Town, South Africa, where I live. There's people who are practitioners of toad smoking, and they all say the same line. They say, "I get my stuff from a shaman, an indigenous shaman who collects responsibly."

[00:43:34] Kimon De Greef: That person does not exist. There's people who are, like, doing the shamanic thing in Seri land, some of them more opportunistically than others. There's some really actually fantastic psychedelic practitioners out there, I'm told, who've kind of like made something beautiful out of this tradition that's maybe ancient or maybe something new.

[00:43:52] Kimon De Greef: But they're buying their toad from the meth addicts in the community who are going out and catching them as a side hustle. You know Octavio's story that he healed the tribe. It's not true. There's still a lot of meth addiction there. And now the, like, the toad hustle is just one more sort of way to bring in a bit of cash.

[00:44:09] Kimon De Greef: So the persistence of that kind of fantasy-

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: of where the toads come from, where the toad medicine comes from. Like, if I have one mission with this book, it's at least to give people a better evidentiary base for making their decisions about how and when to have the 5-MeO-DMT experience. And I'm super pro-synthetic myself as a result of what I've seen and who I've spoken to

[00:44:35] Chris Clarke: Yeah, one of the people you spoke to on the conservation aspects was Robert Villa, who is kind of a force of nature in the Tucson conservation world.

[00:44:45] Chris Clarke: I

Kimon De Greef: Sure.

Chris Clarke: had the pleasure of meeting him earlier this year and been meaning to get him on the podcast. But based on conversations you had with him and with other folks working on the conservation end, what does it look like for the species at this point? Is it critically endangered? Is it something that is likely to become threatened in a decade if current trends continue?

[00:45:09] Chris Clarke: Where is the population of the toad?

[00:45:13] Kimon De Greef: So anecdotally, towns and villages in Sonora that would get inundated with plagues of toads, like literally toads in the pools, toads in the gutters, toads coming in through the doors no longer have a fraction as many toads.

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: That's not scientific data, but it's a fairly strong anecdotal pattern across Sonora.

[00:45:37] Kimon De Greef: Similarly, parts of Arizona where people used to see a lot of toads, now the toads are getting run over on the highways, and there's a bunch of threats. So anecdotally, less toads and also people who collect toads. I spent some time with some toad collectors for this book, and they said, "We would have filled a bag like way quicker than we do now."

[00:46:00] Kimon De Greef: So there's definitely a sense of fewer toads being around. Now, is it critically endangered? And I would encourage you to have Robert on your podcast because he's a force of nature and such a kind of old-school natural historian- Mm ... interested in so many different things, not super specialized, a lover of the natural world, and I learned so much from him.

[00:46:22] Kimon De Greef: He's one of the few sympathetic characters in the book, I think. He has been trying to, and managing to raise money to do some kind of toad surveys, because it's kind of the curse of the common animal. Before this was a psychedelic commodity, this was just an abundant toad that no one really did a lot of biology on.

[00:46:43] Kimon De Greef: Like, I spoke to some toad biologists, and there's basic aspects of the Sonoran desert toad's population biology and ecology that are still mysterious and not understood because they were just there and people had other priorities. And determining what the population trends are requires fieldwork in one of the most dangerous territories in the world.

[00:47:06] Kimon De Greef: Like a week before I went back to Sonora, I was there in 2021 and 2023. The week before I went back, Robert Villa himself dropped me at the border in Sasabe, and I walked over. The week before, a Mexican American PhD botany student-

[00:47:20] Chris Clarke: Right ...

[00:47:21] Kimon De Greef: had gone missing while doing surveys, and he was found murdered in his car, probably just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[00:47:28] Kimon De Greef: Robert got some funding and funded some toad surveys, and I went on one of the toad surveys with a woman named Annie Ortiz, who was kind of part of Octavio's clique in the beginning and then saw that he was a psychopath, in her words, not mine, and has kind of spent years trying to make amends for playing a small role in, in popularizing this practice and enabling Octavio, who's got, like, this whole dark trail of, of harm behind him personally.

[00:48:00] Kimon De Greef: And as I went with her, she got some money from Robert. We went to go do these toad surveys, and, um, I just hung out with him for a few days. We found no toads where we were, but we were at the southern edge of their range, so that wasn't too dire. And then they went around the town of Magdalena, where historically there were more toads.

[00:48:19] Kimon De Greef: And then there was a, a huge gang war with mounted assault rifles on the backs of trucks spraying the s- the shop fronts of the, of the high street with bullets and parishioners diving during mass to hit the ground two days before they arrived, so they couldn't do any surveying. Um, so this is all in the book.

[00:48:39] Kimon De Greef: Like it's, it's, it's this kind of domain of conservation. It's like, how do you-- what does the practice of conservation biology look like in hostile environments?

[00:48:47] Chris Clarke: Yeah.

[00:48:47] Kimon De Greef: Like you couldn't go and survey the, the flora of Gaza right now. Like Mexico, northern Mexico is not quite like that, but it's just really difficult to find out And Robert is a scientist, so Robert wants to be clear, to his credit, and not just say the toad smoking is causing the decline of toads.

[00:49:08] Kimon De Greef: It could be something else.

[00:49:09] Chris Clarke: Mm.

[00:49:09] Kimon De Greef: Amphibians are super imperiled. They're super sensitive. They've got porous skin, and they can't handle pollution. Climate change is, is super hardcore for them. They dry out and they desiccate. But by all accounts, there's fewer of them, and I think if current trends persist of the collecting, which is thinning them out, if you're handling thousands of toads as an underpaid kind of toad milker, squeezing their glands, it's like popping a pimple, and you pop, and you pop, and you pop.

[00:49:39] Kimon De Greef: Like, way to spread diseases-

Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

Kimon De Greef: like really, really scary disease vector. It's just absolutely not best practice for, like, Sonoran desert toad conservation. And as I've said, like, conservation aside, for something as sort of transformational in intent as, as the toad smoking experience, the experience of the toads being collected is not a happy experience for the toads.

[00:50:07] Kimon De Greef: Yeah. So, you know, at the, at the animal welfare and the conservation level, it's just, it's just a stupid, sad economy that's, that's so human and so flawed, and you should chat to Robert about it 'cause he's, he's more up on it than I am. I haven't been back to Sonora since 2023. I assume it's even worse.

[00:50:27] Chris Clarke: Yeah. We are getting close to an hour here. You've been very, very generous with your time. I had two more questions, one of which is informed by my own experience in the past with psychedelics and my own reaction to the book, but were you at all tempted?

[00:50:44] Kimon De Greef: Yes, I was tempted, and I made a conscious decision to kind of take that aspect of my own experience out of the frame entirely.

[00:50:54] Kimon De Greef: So books about psychedelics, of which there are many good ones, tend to focus quite inward.

[00:51:00] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:00] Kimon De Greef: Writers will write about their experience. They'll write a lot about other people's experience. I think there's a place for that kind of book, and I really wanted to approach this as a reporter and sort of reverse the lens and say, "What are the real-world forces that intersect with this toad smoking experience?

[00:51:18] Kimon De Greef: How is this kind of potentially transcendent experience tethered to a material reality, whether that's poaching supply chains or complex indigenous politics in Northern Mexico or venture capital funding for developing 5-MeO-DMT into a depression treatment," which is another chapter of the book. So it might sound like I'm evading your question, but I thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to put my own relationship with the question of consuming 5-MeO-DMT into the book, and I decided not to, to kind of make clear that this is not really a work of gonzo first-person reportage.

[00:51:57] Kimon De Greef: I don't think that my thought process or experience would rank in the top 500 interesting things about Sonoran Desert toads and toad smoking and cults and biotechnology grifters and all the fascinating worlds that I encountered in this book And I'm also aware that people would interpret so much of what I'd written through this kind of binary of like he did or he didn't.

[00:52:23] Chris Clarke: Right.

[00:52:23] Kimon De Greef: I've kind of made a decision just not to talk publicly about my psychedelic experiences, with the exception of one inadvertent psychedelic experience that I had near the end of the book at the hands of Octavio, and that's in there because it was just batshit and narratively useful. But all of that aside, I 100% understand the appeal of 5-MeO-DMT.

[00:52:48] Kimon De Greef: It's a remarkable molecule. It radically alters consciousness within seconds. It hits a different receptor to most other psychedelics, and a large number of people have profoundly meaningful experiences and often experience, you know, ego death, a kind of merging with cosmic oneness, like all these kind of woo-woo ineffable terms that people use.

[00:53:12] Kimon De Greef: Even compared to like really extreme advanced meditation, I fully get the temptation. A lot of my reporting for the book also focused on the many ways that it can go wrong. And again, if it's the Mount Everest of psychedelics, I'm sure it's exhilarating to get to the top of Everest, I've no doubt. But I'm sure that's really dangerous and not for everyone, and that's kind of how I think of 5-MeO, like not for everyone, potentially amazing, needs to be approached with reverence and care.

[00:53:43] Kimon De Greef: Tells us really interesting things about how the mind works, that a tiny molecule can kinda zip in there and unlock a completely different conscious experience and then disappear within half an hour.

[00:53:53] Chris Clarke: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:54] Kimon De Greef: Just seems to like, you know, say something about like the neurobiology of spiritual experience that's quite profound and mysterious to me.

[00:54:02] Kimon De Greef: But these things are tools. Psychedelics are tools, and tools can be used to break things. And a lot of breaking happens in this book, not in a good way.

[00:54:13] Chris Clarke: Yeah.

[00:54:14] Kimon De Greef: I don't wanna be accused of becoming a 5-MeO-DMT evangelist myself, but similarly don't wanna say there's nothing here, because there is something.

[00:54:22] Chris Clarke: Right.

[00:54:22] Kimon De Greef: Um, whether or not humans collectively are kind of like wise and responsible enough to use that intelligently and for the greater good without like screwing up the toad population and leaving kind of weird trails of harm in indigenous communities, that's a bigger question, and one that I'm not that optimistic about after six years of looking into this stuff.

[00:54:47] Chris Clarke: Yeah. Where can people find your work?

[00:54:51] Kimon De Greef: The book is in all major bookstores. They can get it through bookshop.org, which supports independent booksellers. They can find me online. I'm on Instagram a bit more these days, and I've got a very rudimentary website. Come say hi!

[00:55:08] Chris Clarke: Excellent. Kimon de Greef, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:55:11] Chris Clarke: This has been a great conversation. Really enjoyed it.

[00:55:13] Kimon De Greef: Thank you so much for your interest, and yeah, it was lovely to connect with you.

[00:55:36] Chris Clarke: Huge thanks again to Kimon de Greef for joining us. It was a fantastic conversation, and I hope you liked it as much as I liked it. If you wanna get a copy of Kimon's book, The Ego Trip, there are a couple options for you. First off, if you're near Tucson on Friday, September 4th, at 7:00 PM, you can go to Millville Studios at 925 East Mill Street and listen as Cimon discusses the book and the Sonoran Desert toads, and probably a few other things with the aforementioned Robert Villa.

[00:56:07] Chris Clarke: Gary Nabhan is gonna be moderating this discussion, and I really wish I could be there. But if you, like me, are too far away from Tucson to easily pop in at Millville Studios, you can go to 90milesfromneedles.com/books. That is gonna take you to our online bookstore where you can buy The Ego Trip or any other books that we've listed from bookshop.org.

[00:56:30] Chris Clarke: I also wanna thank Kevin Garcia, who reached out with a donation and some very kind words in addition to his usual recurring donation. We are so grateful, Kevin. Thank you so much. And Brent Morgan, who has joined us as a new donor. Thank you to both Kevin and Brent. If you wanna sit at the cool kids table with Brent and Kevin, all you need to do is go to 90milesfromneedles.com/donate and pick an amount and frequency of donation that makes sense to you.

[00:56:57] Chris Clarke: And thank you to Copper Mountain College for becoming our first official sponsor We are now taking applications for our fellowship for desert reporting. We have a couple of very promising candidates already, but we're still taking applications until October 15th, and we are going to make our cut by November 15th with work beginning in January.

[00:57:19] Chris Clarke: So if you're a person who may not be an experienced journalist, though if you are, you're certainly welcome to apply. But if you wanna try your hand at some desert environmental reporting and you have a story to tell or a story you'd like to help tell about desert environmental issues, ranging from wilderness to environmental justice, to land back to border issues or whatever you might wanna cover, if it's about desert environment in North America, consider applying at T-H-E-D-A-M-N.org, thedamn.org/fellowship-application.

[00:57:52] Chris Clarke: Jack the giant German Shepherd has been very diligent lately in making sure I have company in the studio. Though with that heat that I mentioned earlier, he has developed a habit of walking over to the little pond here, getting himself thoroughly soaking wet, getting out of the pond, walking into the studio, standing next to my desk and shaking, thus inundating every part of the production cycle of this podcast with pond water.

[00:58:18] Chris Clarke: Honestly, I think it could only help. We are looking forward to bringing you next week's episode. Until then, I will see you at the next Watering Hole.

[00:58:31] Joe Geoffrey: And that brings us to the end of this episode of 90 Miles From Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. You can find show notes for this episode along with links and background at ninetymilesfromneedles.com. We're also on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Threads. Just search for 90 Miles From Needles.

[00:58:57] Joe Geoffrey: And if you'd like a more direct line, you can reach us on Signal at A90MFN.67.

[00:59:06] Joe Geoffrey: If you'd like to support the show, you can make a donation of whatever size and frequency feels right to you at ninetymilesfromneedles.com/donate. Listener support is what makes this podcast possible. Our voiceover is by Joe Geoffrey. Podcast artwork is by Martine Mancha. Nature sounds are recorded by Fred Bell.

[00:59:30] Joe Geoffrey: Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Brightside Studio with additional music licensed from independent artists.

[00:59:40] Chris Clarke: Other music in this episode is by Music Dog

[01:00:38] Joe Geoffrey: 90 Miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network