And people die.

A number of people in the story died, die, whichever tense we're [laughs] speaking here.

The first death known to have taken place around Octavio and toad was a woman who, uh, was widely understood to be his girlfriend, and he's publicly referred to her as his soulmate.

Although by the time I did fact-checking with h-him for the book, he denied that they'd been romantically involved.

But anyway, they smoked toad together in a kind of underground cave near Tulum, and she went missing and was found drowned.

The sort of implication is less that Octavio like drowned her, but maybe that they were both just completely out of it in a very unsafe environment.

And that was before he started his global kind of travels, and when more people found out about it later, it was kind of interpreted as, and I think fairly so, an indication of his cavalier approach to working with the substance.

Can you speak a little bit about where we are currently in 2026 in the attempt to formally medicinalize 5-MeO-DMT? Do you think this is actually going somewhere?

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.

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.

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.

It's fairly easy to

And as I read that you were going to take this bizarre compound that he was offering you once you'd had a bit of a tete-a-tete about your writing around him, you went ahead and took it, which is kind of weird.

Yes, a very weird decision I made in the field.

I should clarify for listeners that I never smoked toad with Octavio and I never would.

And I actually had no intention of doing any psychedelics with him, but at a particularly caught-up moment of my reporting in 2023, where I bumped into him again in this community where large parts of his story take place, this indigenous community in northern Mexico, and he'd sworn off, he was never going to talk to me again.

So it was quite a dramatic day, and I'd been traveling all day.

These are all my excuses.

He was sitting next to his 17-year-old daughter and took our little kind of essential oil bottle and was kind of playing with it, and I asked him, what's that and he said oh this is some essential oils it's like a natural medicine my daughter it's her birthday soon we can just have some drops and he put some on her tongue and he put some on his tongue and he said would you like some and I said you know you know I don't I don't do this kind of thing when I'm reporting because we'd gone over this multiple times before and he assured me it wasn't psychoactive and to my own astonishment in that moment I just kind of opened my mouth and took a few drops and ended up having a fairly frightening psychedelic experience because I didn't know what I had taken, how large the dose was, or when it would end.

But you don't go quite as far as this journal article as saying the whole connection with the Seri indigenous practice, taking it to the broader world is obviously and deliberately fraudulent.

But let's start with Dr. Octavio Rettig, how you came across him and this new phenomenon of toad.

Sure.

2020, a long time ago now, I was living in the States and looking for stuff to work on, feeling very out of my depth, to be honest, having left South Africa where I had a sense of who to talk to and what was going on.

And so I went back to sort of my old beat of looking for wildlife crime poaching economies and came across a story about psychedelic toad poaching.

which was a string of words I'd never kind of imagined encountering.

And from the beginning, the kind of dissonance like embodied in that was fascinating to me because the end product is this molecule that people have divine transcendent experiences on.

And the idea that that was getting obtained from a harmful exploitative supply chain just seemed interesting.

Can you talk a little bit more about where that seems to be going because of or in spite of Dr. Octavio?