How a crackhead-turned-shaman got the rich and famous hooked on smoking the psychedelic venom of a Mexican desert toad

Some druggies trip on acid.Others soar on magic mushrooms.

Mescaline heads claim using it brings instant enlightenment.And then there’s 5-MeO-DMT, a little-known psychoactive chemical compound idolized among members of a growing international cult, including celebrities.Press on the glands of the obscure Sonoran Desert toad — found in Mexico’s vast and deadly desert — and it will release venom.That discharge hardens into brittle flakes, which are then vaporized in glass pipes and smoked — like crack.The formerly esoteric practice — known among the cognoscenti as “smoking the toad” — is hailed by its growing user base as the “God Molecule.”Under the right guidance, users say, the drug dissolves reality and induces “ego death” as well as an obliterating loss of identity.The toad, which lives among the ancient Mexican Seri tribe, has become a psychedelics Everest, according to Kimon de Greef’s mind-blowing and meticulous “The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence” (Doubleday).As de Greef recounts, the brains and “chief instigator” behind toad smoking was a “charismatic Mexican doctor,” Octavio Rettig Hinojosa, “who styled himself as a 21st-century shaman.”Known to his followers simply as Octavio, the doctor “catalyzed a modern psychedelic movement, propelling the toad, and himself, into popular consciousness.” But as de Greef tells us, “a substance capable of inducing the most profound human experiences also opens the door to exploiting them.”Hunter Biden smoked the toad and claimed in his memoir it kept him clean from cocaine for a year.Former Navy Seal Robert O’Neill — who took credit for firing the shots that took down Osama bin Laden — revealed in an interview with Tucker Carlson he smoked the toad as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.Mike Tyson confessed on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that he had smoked the toad, and, “I’ve never been t...