Octavio and Sandoval travelled to Sonora, where they gathered up hundreds of toads and emptied their glands onto glass plates. Octavio began smoking toad multiple times a day. Within eighteen months, he says, he was off crack, although he continued to smoke toad and cannabis. He began serving toad at outdoor raves, among addicts, and to his friends, often free of charge. He moved to Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, where he got a job as a general practitioner at a chain pharmacy, giving him access to a stream of potential toad clients. He told his brother that he was “doing research” with the toads. David recalled visiting Octavio’s apartment: “You would sit on a couch and a toad would jump out.” His family sensed a change in him. “When Octavio met sapito,” Bertha said, using the diminutive Spanish term for toad, “that’s when he found his mission.”
At around this time, Octavio began to wonder if Native communities in Sonora had ever used toad medicine. Mexico is home to numerous shamanic rituals involving psychoactive substances, such as psilocybin and peyote; farther south, communities in the Amazon have been brewing ayahuasca for centuries. Although the most concentrated source of 5-MeO-DMT is the Sonoran Desert toad, the compound is also produced by some plant species in Latin America, where it was traditionally used in snuffs. One of Octavio’s uncles was an archeologist who had excavated Aztec artifacts, and David was studying archeology, too. They told Octavio about a rich archive of iconography in Mesoamerica—pottery, paintings, pipes ornamented with toads. He became convinced that at least one of the tribes of Sonora had, at some point, performed rituals with toad.
His hunch was seemingly confirmed in 2011, when he was introduced to the Seri, a remote tribe on the eastern shore of the Gulf of California. The tribe’s territory falls within a drug corridor to the U.S., and there had been an increase in addiction among its members. Octavio claimed that he served them toad, and that several tribal elders then began speaking of a lost tradition. “None of these tribes remembered that this toad contains this medicine,” Octavio said, at a psychology conference in 2017. The Seri authorized him as a practitioner of their traditional rituals, and they began calling him el doctor sapo, or “the toad doctor.”
The Seri hold their New Year celebrations at the end of June, marking the onset of the summer monsoons. On the first day, I accompanied Octavio to a gathering at a house in Bahía Kino, a coastal town south of Seri territory. Down-tempo electronic music played from a speaker, and two dozen people milled around. I spoke to a young couple with a toddler and another baby on the way; when I asked where they were spending the night, they said, “We don’t know, we’re just following Octavio.” One of Octavio’s patients, a man who asked to be called J.R., sat on the outskirts of the group. He had come from Houston, where he had become hooked on meth and Xanax, after years of being a dealer. He’d been in rehab nearly a dozen times; his addiction had become so bad that he no longer cared if he survived. The night before leaving for Sonora, he told me, he woke up to rivals shooting at him. His usual response would have been to “kick down the front door and shoot everybody,” he said, but instead he rolled over and fell back asleep. Since arriving in Sonora, he had smoked toad with Octavio twice. “I know what it is to have a heart now,” he said.
Later that day, Octavio and his entourage drove fifteen miles to the Seri village of Punta Chueca. For thousands of years, the Seri were nomadic, roaming in small groups along the coast. From the sixteenth century onward, they came into conflict with settlers. In 1850, the Sonoran government began paying bounties for murdered Seri people, and within a few decades the tribe had been reduced to around two hundred members. In the twentieth century, the Seri slowly rebounded, but they struggled to find a foothold in the modern economy. Fishermen supplied the commercial market with sharks and turtles, and artisans sold curios to tourists in Bahía Kino. But, until recently, few outsiders visited Seri lands. “I opened the door,” Octavio told me.
At the entrance to Punta Chueca, a sign advertised ancestral toad medicine. We arrived at a gathering of several hundred people. There were stands selling handcrafts, and women who, for a fee, would paint your face with Seri markings. On a wall was an unfinished mural of psychedelic toads, one of several in the village. A tour guide told me that five buses, each carrying around fifty visitors, had arrived for the celebrations. “Tourism to Punta Chueca has really taken off,” he said. “It has a lot to do with the toad.”
That evening, as the setting sun turned the clouds orange, I saw three boys approach Octavio. He used a pipe to blow rapé, a tobacco snuff from the Amazon, up their noses. The youngest boy, who was fourteen, immediately began throwing up. Before long, his companions were emptying their stomachs, too, and a pack of emaciated dogs gathered to lap up the vomit. A middle-aged woman arrived with rolls of toilet paper; two of the boys were her sons, she told me, wiping their mouths. The youngest was addicted to meth. She said that the family had travelled nearly a thousand miles, from Léon, in central Mexico, to smoke toad with Octavio, and that the rapé was necessary for purging toxins. Her husband, a lawyer with Seri face paint, stood nearby. Octavio came over and flung an arm around his shoulder. “Man, I love this guy,” Octavio said, his eyes streaming from a hit of rapé. “He just got me free on a manslaughter charge.”
Araceli Ramírez Hidalgo, a housewife from Léon, was susceptible to losing money in pyramid schemes. That was the view of her husband, Jorge Villalpando Medel, who saw it as his duty to protect her. One time, he said, his wife got caught up selling dietary supplements; on another occasion, it was skin-care products. “They abuse people,” he said, of the companies. “But they also offer a sense of purpose and relief.”
The couple had been married for two decades when, in 2015, Ramírez’s mother died, and Ramírez fell into a prolonged depression. She turned to alternative healing, signing up for an ayahuasca ceremony. Villalpando was skeptical, but afterward Ramírez told him that she’d had visions of her mother at the event. An ayahuasca practitioner later told the couple about toad medicine. “You just have one puff, you’re going to experience ten years of therapy,” Villalpando recalled him saying. When Ramírez heard that Octavio would be in town, she was eager to attend a session. She reserved a spot, promising Villalpando that this would be her last experiment with psychedelics.
On October 5, 2018, Ramírez went early to the venue, a remote property on the outskirts of the city. She was friends with some of the organizers and planned to spend the day there; Villalpando would join them after work, and Octavio would serve toad in the evening. But at around noon Villalpando got a call. Ramírez had stopped breathing. Eyewitness accounts, gathered by justice officials, describe how the session unfolded: Ramírez inhaled toad from a pipe, and Octavio splashed water in her face and dosed her with rapé. Soon, she started convulsing. When she stopped breathing, Octavio began CPR. As Ramírez turned purple, Octavio grew frantic. Two participants heard him yell, “She died!” (Octavio denies this.) According to a deposition from Ramírez’s eldest son, she was still alive when she reached the hospital, but she died soon afterward. The official cause of death was an anaphylactic reaction to an unknown substance.
There have been only a few public reports of deaths associated with 5-MeO-DMT. In the early two-thousands, a twenty-five-year-old man was found dead on a camping trip, with elevated levels of the substance in his body. Last year, Nacho Vidal, a porn star from Spain best known for selling candles made from a mold of his penis, was charged with reckless homicide after allegedly presiding over a toad-medicine ceremony in Valencia, at which there was a fatality. (Vidal maintains his innocence, and the case has been put on hold.) By the time Ramírez died, in 2018, at least two other people had died shortly after smoking toad with Octavio. During a talk that year, Octavio said that an elderly patient of his had died, a few years earlier, after taking toad. “I think this person had a beautiful opportunity to transcend in love and in light,” Octavio said. He also mentioned the death of another patient—an alcoholic in his forties who had a pulmonary embolism during a toad session. Octavio blamed the man’s unhealthy life style.
In December, 2012, before Octavio rose to fame, a woman in her twenties named Ana Patricia Arredondo, widely thought to be his girlfriend, disappeared after going on a walk with him. Divers later recovered her body from an underground body of water. Odily Fuentes, a friend of Octavio’s at the time, said he told her that he’d smoked toad with Arredondo before she went missing. (Octavio denies this; he also denies that Arredondo was his girlfriend.)
Whispers of reckless facilitation have followed Octavio for years. In 2014, he was endorsed as a “carrier of traditional indigenous medicine” by the United Nations Association Venezuela, which is part of a group of nonprofits loosely affiliated with the U.N. A year later, he toured Australia with an ancient Indigenous medicine group. The promotional materials for his tours have featured a lightly edited version of the U.N. logo, the blue globe adorned with a leaf and a feather, so that it resembled a dream catcher. While Octavio was on tour, some of his clients struggled with reactivations. They tried to reach him, but he had moved on. “He’s too busy serving thousands of patients to take a phone call,” Dean Jefferys, a filmmaker who smoked toad with Octavio in 2015, told me. Jefferys founded an online support group to deal with what he called “the trail of destruction left behind by Octavio.”
“I haven’t slept six nights,” a woman in Dublin posted. “My situation is now serious.” Another woman, from Melbourne, claimed that during a toad session Octavio had left her husband unattended, unable to breathe. She suggested ways to make the sessions safer, such as limiting the number of participants and having a first-aid kit on hand. Octavio replied that “making rules, prototypes, and protocols” for his ceremonies was “judgmental and unfair,” adding that he couldn’t be held responsible for his patients’ reactions to toad.
In 2016, footage began circulating online of Octavio being violent during sessions. In one clip, he kicks and slaps a visibly terrified man on a beach in Venezuela while giving him no fewer than six hits of toad. “Don’t make me beat you up,” Octavio shouts, thrusting a finger in the man’s face. Later, the man tries to run away, sobbing, “Octavio, no!” In another video from Venezuela, posted a year later, Octavio repeatedly pours water down the throat of a man after serving him toad—a technique that he uses to “provoke a breathing response.”
Criticism of Octavio grew more strident, yet he maintained the support of many former patients. Some of his most ardent defenders were people with whom he’d been aggressive, including the man from the Venezuela beach, who appeared in a video denouncing the “blasphemies” of Octavio’s critics. Many previous clients still swore by his methods. One woman, who said she stopped breathing during a toad session with Octavio in 2015, recalled “pain and horror that cannot be described.” She posted on Facebook, “Is there anyone here who feels/felt that they were traumatized by aspects of the experience?” But, a year and a half later, she thanked Octavio for changing her life.
Octavio and his supporters have historically viewed traumatic experiences during toad sessions as a result of fear or resistance. The solution, they’ve often said, is to smoke more toad. “I need to push people until they accomplish the goal that they supposedly set before the session,” Octavio declared at a consciousness symposium in 2018. But other practitioners I spoke with were horrified by Octavio’s approach. He insists on using large, so-called breakthrough doses of toad, though one can’t be sure of precisely how much he serves, as he eyeballs the amounts. He performs minimal screening of patients, who he says range from five-year-olds to octogenarians, merely proffering basic release forms to them. In addition to pouring water on people’s faces, he used to administer small electric shocks; the purpose, he explained at the symposium, was to “really mind-fuck” patients who resisted the effects of toad. Even his old friend from college, Sandoval, who had gone on to become an obstetrician and a rival toad doctor, criticized Octavio’s fast-and-loose approach to me. (Similar criticisms have been directed at Sandoval.)
In 2018, a group of anonymous practitioners, who call themselves the Conclave, released a best-practices guide for serving 5-MeO-DMT, which amounted to an implicit rejection of Octavio’s methods. The guide advised practitioners not to “mechanically bludgeon an ego into submission with large doses of medicine.” It also cautioned, “Pouring water into the mouth, nose or throat to instigate the breathing reflex is an extreme tool that should be avoided.” Soon afterward, a man in central Europe was hospitalized after smoking toad with Octavio and spent several days in a coma. (He recovered.) Octavio’s girlfriend at the time, a psychologist studying psychedelics, recalls warning him that, unless he implemented safety measures, another person would get hurt. A couple of months later, Ramírez was dead.
For nearly two years, Villalpando, who has a law degree, collected evidence against Octavio, contacting eyewitnesses and paying for chemical analyses of toad medicine. Then, in September, 2020, Octavio was arrested and charged with manslaughter for Ramírez’s death. He appeared at a pretrial hearing in Léon, with his lawyer, the man I met at the toad session in Punta Chueca. Villalpando also attended the hearing, asking the judge to elevate the charge from manslaughter to murder, but he was unsuccessful. Octavio was told that he could pay a settlement in order to avoid a trial. Weeks later, he contacted Villalpando to negotiate a deal. The men agreed to meet at a diner in Léon. Villalpando told me that he had become obsessed with “stopping Octavio from hurting more people”; beneath his coat, he carried a gun. But, according to Villalpando, as his finger moved toward the trigger, a small boy, no older than five, came over from another table and tugged at his coat. The boy lifted his arms, as if asking to be held. Recounting this story, Villalpando began weeping and said, “I don’t believe in supernatural things.” He accepted a settlement of six hundred thousand pesos.
A common critique of Octavio is that he has used toad to amass a fortune. Last July, I visited him at his house in Hermosillo, which is about ninety miles east of Punta Chueca; aside from his two cars, one truck, and three high-end mountain bikes, there were few overt signs of wealth. He lives in a poor neighborhood with potholed streets. His house is two stories: upstairs, he sleeps and plays video games, usually first-person shooters; downstairs, he works out. Octavio often posts videos of himself biking and launching off of ramps. He had recently dislocated his shoulder, but he said that he was ready for even bigger jumps. “I can fucking easily break my leg or something if I don’t land properly,” he said. “I am fucking excited about it, because, if I do it, this will only increase my level of confidence.”
Behind the gym was a spartan dormitory with bunk beds and a communal bathroom. Octavio would sometimes take on longer-term patients, often addicts, who paid a four-thousand-dollar fee to stay with him and receive extensive “treatment.” The dormitory walls were covered with photographs of Octavio, framed certificates from university, and toad art. In an unlocked chest on the floor, he had thousands of release forms and testimonials, haphazardly thrown together.
I asked Octavio about the complaints against him. “My work has been misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused,” he said. He conceded that certain videos might look “barbaric or violent,” but he argued that this was sometimes necessary. “I cannot play by the same rules of conventional therapy,” he said. “Most of my patients already went to many rehab centers. They already tried many drugs. I don’t have time to fool around. I just need to be very straight, very direct”—he clapped his hands together—“to stop the bullshit.”
In Bahía Kino, I saw one of his patients, who was left unattended after smoking toad, throw up, choke, and slam his forehead on the floor. In Punta Chueca, when the fourteen-year-old son of his defense lawyer refused more rapé, Octavio had started shouting at him. “Come on! Shut up! I don’t want to hear it, man. Come on,” he’d said, calling the boy cabrón. Another day, a boat took Octavio and a group to an uninhabited island a half hour from Punta Chueca. As the boat headed back to the mainland, Octavio began serving toad. One man lay on his back, thrashing his arms, as seawater splashed in his mouth.
During that session, Octavio launched into a rant. “Where are all these dead people they talk about?” he asked. “I’ve never walked around with a pistol killing people. I’ve never walked around with a toad drowning people.” His acolytes stood by, nodding. One was a man named Brian, from Sri Lanka, who had sold his home to travel with Octavio. (Previously, Brian had been a devotee of Osho, an Indian guru who inspired a cult movement.) Brian had purchased two expensive cameras and was using them to document Octavio’s work. One day in Punta Chueca, Octavio initiated an impromptu photo shoot, putting on a Seri-style jacket and striking various poses. Without warning, he sprinted toward us and leaped at Brian, knocking him off his feet. Everyone laughed uneasily. Octavio strode away for more photographs. Afterward, Brian found me and pulled down his sleeve, revealing a tattoo of Octavio on his shoulder. He whispered, “Whoever gives you the milk, the mother becomes.”
When Octavio first came to Punta Chueca, in 2011, Jesús Ogarrio was conducting an ethnographic study of Seri rituals for his undergraduate thesis. Ogarrio, who is now a professor, remembers Punta Chueca as a ghost town, with government houses on the verge of collapse, and its few public spaces overrun by meth addicts. He estimated that, of the roughly four hundred residents, dozens were addicts. “It was a pandemic of addiction,” Ogarrio said.
The head of the Seri council of elders was a man named Antonio Robles, who spoke little Spanish and had at least two adult children who were addicted to meth. On Octavio’s first visit to the Seri, he served toad to one of Robles’s sons. Several tribal elders also tried the medicine, and some of them experienced penetrating visions. “When I had the toad, I remembered the history,” Pancho Barnett, whose late father was a venerated shaman in the community, told me.
Robles signed formal letters and certificates declaring Octavio a “medicine man” and allowing him to serve toad to the tribe. Octavio moved to Punta Chueca, where he and Ogarrio—the only outsiders in the community—shared a room. Initially, Ogarrio found Octavio “credible and trustworthy,” he said. “He was there to help with a very grave issue.” The village had no basic medical services; here was a doctor, offering treatment. But Octavio smoked toad several times a day and often seemed irritable and anxious—“like an addict,” Ogarrio said. (Octavio denies this.) Ogarrio was also distressed by Octavio’s attitude toward people in the community. Many of them were afraid of toad, and Ogarrio said that on several occasions he watched Octavio serve toad without explaining what it was, or by presenting it as another drug. One day, Octavio slipped a toad pipe to another son of Robles’s, Ogarrio said. The man “started to go crazy,” he recalled, throwing furniture and then running toward the desert. (Octavio denies giving toad to Robles’s son, or to anyone else without the person’s consent.) The man’s meth addiction grew worse, leading to his death, in 2019.
Robles has since died, too, but Octavio has continued to secure documents from the tribe. He has used these to legitimize the harvest and the transport of toad medicine across borders, and to validate his role to external organizations such as Ted and the U.N. Association Venezuela, which have given him a platform to broadcast his claims about toad medicine’s ancestral roots. Yet there are reasons to question this origin story, particularly as it relates to the Seri. Frogs and toads were ascribed a range of symbolic meanings in Mesoamerica, including death, rebirth, and the arrival of seasonal rains, which could explain why the animals were often depicted on pipes and other artifacts. Researchers on the Seri have recorded a rich set of medicinal and cultural traditions, and there is no clear evidence that toads were considered important, let alone sacred. In “People of the Desert and Sea: Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians,” a classic text on Native Mexican ethnobotany, Richard Felger and Mary Moser argue that toads were “inconsequential in Seri culture.” A few Seri people I spoke with said that they’d heard stories of a secret ancient toad-smoking practice. But, as Alberto Mellado Moreno, a historian from the Seri tribe, said, “It’s speculative even for us. Consider a society reconstructed from so few survivors. It’s impossible to know what might have been lost.”