As a journalist, I get sent a lot of books. Some immediately catch my attention; others join the ever-growing pile threatening to topple over beside my bed. Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip nearly joined the pile. Then I spotted an endorsement from Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain. “Written with humour and flair. A major talent,” it said.
That got my attention. So did the fact that De Greef is a South African journalist. And then there was the line punched out on the back: “A psychedelic guru, a magical toad, and the dark side of the modern quest for transcendence.”
I was in. Hook, line and amphibian.
What a story. At its centre is Octavio Rettig, a charismatic Mexican physician who became a psychedelic guru devoted to the Sonoran Desert toad and a secretion it produces. The stuff contains 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful psychedelic known in some circles as the “God molecule”.
Its effects are intense and short-lived and can include “ego death”: a temporary loss of your usual sense of self that, for some, can feel like being freed from the fears and insecurities that normally define us.
That’s the quick summary, but actually The Ego Trip is about much more than a guru and a toad. It did what the best reads do: left me with more questions than answers. I began broadly open to the potential of psychedelics, particularly for depression, PTSD and addiction. I finished still fascinated by that promise, but thinking much more about the inescapable messiness of human nature.
From poaching to psychedelics
I met De Greef for coffee in Joburg, where he was in the middle of a book tour. His route to psychedelic toads is almost as unlikely as the story itself. He has a master’s in conservation biology from the University of Cape Town, where research into abalone poaching led him into investigative journalism and eventually Poacher: Confessions from the Abalone Underworld, which he co-wrote about South Africa’s illicit abalone trade.
“It is a completely berserk left-field story for me compared to my normal beat,” he says. Except it wasn’t entirely. After moving to New York, while reporting on the supply chain for white sage, he came across psychedelic toad smoking and reports that the toads themselves were being poached.
He followed the frog.
Enter the guru
At first I thought Rettig was going to be the story. And given that I share the same macabre fascination with true crime and criminal psychology as half the podcast-listening world, that seemed cool. Details of followers, feuds, elaborate ceremonies and serious accusations of reckless behaviour and abuse gripped me. More so, how a toad in the Sonoran Desert led to all that is quite something.
But while preparing questions for De Greef, Rettig took a back seat. Far more interesting was why people seek out these escapist experiences in the first place — and what happens when the search for healing or meaning collides with money and ego.
Why do we want this?
It would be easy to laugh at some of the people in The Ego Trip. They travel halfway around the world to smoke toad secretion in search of ego death or spiritual awakening. It sounds farcical and indulgent, no? Then view the tale through the lens of poaching and mistreatment of the animals … as an animal lover I got very worked up.
De Greef is far less judgmental. Not about the harm to the toads, but about the people and what they’re looking for. “As ridiculous as much of the content in the book is and as unhinged and dark as some of the scenes are, it’s ultimately a story about searching for something which I think most humans share,” he says.
That search takes some strange turns. The former archaeology student in me was fascinated by the idea that smoking toad secretion was promoted as an ancestral practice of the Seri, an indigenous people of northern Mexico, despite there being little evidence that such a tradition even existed. De Greef calls what followed not cultural appropriation but “cultural projection”. As if people were saying: “You’re an indigenous community in Mexico. We expect you to have some psychedelic traditions. Please have one for us.”
But The Ego Trip isn’t all gurus and spiritual seeking. There’s plenty of science too. Psychedelic research goes back decades, and today there is serious interest in its therapeutic use. Some of the science is heavy going, but it’s a useful reminder that this is more than a wellness fad.
Team Seri or Team Toad?
And then there are the toads. For all the talk of healing and transcendence, there’s an actual animal at the beginning of the experience. “People are poaching these toads that they’re using for spiritual experiences,” notes De Greef. “That’s a huge irony. That’s a paradox.” Toads are milked for their secretion, leaving them injured, diseased or dead, while collectors face the dangers of working in drug cartel-controlled territory in Mexico.
Here again, there are no simple solutions. The trade provides income for members of the marginalised Seri community. “At a fundamental level,” says De Greef, “are you Team Seri or Team Toad? Because there are these two marginalised groups, one of people, one of animals.”
Show me the money!
Cash inevitably enters the picture too. There are gurus, retreats and psychedelic tourism, but also biotech, investors and Big Pharma. Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT takes the toad and its mistreatment out of the equation, though for some it also removes the spiritual connection. Then there’s what De Greef calls “corporadelia”— the push to turn psychedelics into regulated medicines for conditions including depression and addiction.
The potential is exciting, but so are the profits. De Greef isn’t interested in telling readers what to think. “I don’t have a good answer, and that’s why it’s more fun being a reporter. My job is just to say: ‘This is complicated.’” The rest he leaves up to us.
Ego tripping
Perhaps the greatest irony in The Ego Trip is in the title. 5-MeO-DMT is famous for dissolving the ego, yet the world around it has produced some spectacular ones. “It supposedly destroys the ego but can also launch people on these majorly dangerous ego trips,” says De Greef. Rettig is the obvious example. “There’s no escape from being human.”
As Seri historian and community representative Alberto Mellado, puts it in the book: “Life will make you you again.” Psychedelic trips, gurus and toads aside, ordinary life will always reassert itself. We’re still us. Human and complicated.
The Ego Trip by Kimon de Greef is distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers and is available at major retailers and online
