Toad and Me, or: Smoking Amphibian Venom for Psycho-Spiritual Health

Seth Lorinczi
12 min readMar 12, 2019
Yes, this is a generic and stereotypical “My brain on drugs” image.

Moving with unhurried precision, the woman handed me a small wooden pipe and a lighter. Pressing myself more upright on the couch, I spared a nervous glance into the bowl, where a pinch of glassy crystals rested on a bed of dried herbs. I took a breath, slowly exhaled, and raised the pipe to my lips.

As the flame licked down into the bowl, the crystals flared for a moment, then emitted a slight crackle as they released a thick and slightly ominous smoke into the throat of the pipe. The whoosh of sensation into my eardrums was frighteningly swift, the first indication that I was heading someplace very, very far away. I was falling — fast — into a blackness shocking in its totality. In my last moment of hereness I set down the pipe with as much care as I could muster and leaned back into the couch’s embrace.

I wasn’t in a tapestry-lined dorm room or a dealer’s shabby apartment. Where I was was in the clean, functional and intentionally bland confines of a Central Eastside therapist’s office. The woman was an experienced and highly skilled therapist, and the crystals I’d just inhaled were 5-MeO-DMT, better known as “toad” for their source, the venom glands of the Sonora Desert toad. (It’s my understanding that harvesting the toxin doesn’t hurt the toad, but as with many of their ilk, worldwide populations are in serious decline.) On its face it was a patently ridiculous notion, the idea that I could find salvation by exposing myself to amphibian poison. And yet here I was.

This psychedelic journey began — or rather, resumed — a couple of years ago, when I was in my mid-40s. Forever unable to yank myself into the present, I had spent much of my life in painful alienation. Psychedelics, I hoped, would help me find a way into life, an ironic quest given the received wisdom that they were a way out of reality, not in.

I’m not sure if I’m “cured” or not, but these experiences have had lasting and profound effects. I would eventually write about Portland’s psychedelic practitioners — or as they inevitably prefer…

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