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