Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip tracks a psychedelic hustler and the toad that launched a movement

A charismatic figure and a toxic method

Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip takes as its starting point an unlikely animal: the Sonoran desert toad, a species that spends most of its life hidden beneath the ground along the Mexico-Arizona border and only emerges when rain arrives. In de Greef’s telling, this ordinary amphibian becomes the centre of a far stranger human story, one involving psychedelic experimentation, pseudo-spiritual authority and a man who embodied several of the most troubling habits of contemporary culture at once.

That man is Octavio Rettig, the book’s central figure and, as the reviewer puts it, an awkward fusion of social-media self-promotion, unregulated wellness practice, macho posturing, psychedelic evangelism and cultural appropriation. Rettig built his reputation around the use of Sonoran desert toad venom, a substance that contains 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful hallucinogen sometimes called the “God molecule”. De Greef traces the route by which this once-obscure chemical moved from weird anecdote to coveted experience, and then into a larger marketplace for spiritual and therapeutic transformation.

From obscure venom to modern psychedelic trend

The book begins with the toad itself, which has long been subject to exaggerated stories about people licking amphibians for a high. The real discovery, de Greef shows, was more specific: in the early 1980s, humans learned that the toad’s poison glands secrete a venom containing 5-MeO-DMT. The first known user reportedly encountered the substance after a dog caught a toad on a car windscreen, and the resulting dried venom was smoked. The account that followed described an overwhelming experience of thought, perception and ego loss.

What made 5-MeO-DMT especially appealing to later users was the speed and intensity of its effects. By the first decade of this century, Rettig, then a troubled young man from Mexico, had begun smoking dried toad venom and claimed it helped him stop using crack cocaine. That personal narrative arrived just as interest in psychedelics was reviving after decades of relative neglect. While LSD, psilocybin and ketamine were drawing most attention, 5-MeO-DMT seemed to offer a different kind of promise: a vast psychological journey compressed into a very short period.

For de Greef, this is where the story stops being merely curious and becomes culturally revealing. Rettig did not simply use the substance; he helped construct a tradition around it. By presenting the practice as ancient and spiritually inherited, he gave it the kind of mystical legitimacy often attached to peyote, morning glory or ayahuasca. In the process, he created a marketable form of authenticity out of something that was, at least in his hands, deeply unstable and ethically dubious.

Indigenous claims and exploitation

A significant part of de Greef’s reporting concerns the Seri people, who live between the Sonoran Desert and the Gulf of California. The source material describes a community battered first by Spanish colonial rule and later by the Mexican republic, and by the time Rettig visited in 2011, it was living with poverty, addiction, cartel predation and severe social damage. Rettig adopted their chants and claimed that an ancient toad-based tradition had been suppressed and was now being revived, using that story to market himself internationally as a practitioner of indigenous medicine.

The ethical problems do not end there. According to the material supplied for reporting, Rettig administered huge doses with little screening and at times used force. De Greef also records allegations that he engaged in sexual relationships with women after administering toad venom, and that he denied responsibility when patients died. Rettig’s own defence — that some of his actions might be disturbing to outside observers but were part of “very deep therapeutic work” — only sharpens the sense that the book is about the abuse of language as much as the abuse of people.

Reporting that resists the haze

De Greef’s approach matters because he does not lean into the psychedelic self-mythology that can easily dominate this kind of subject. The material available indicates that he came to the story not from within the psychedelic scene but through earlier work on wildlife smuggling, and that outsider perspective gives the book a cooler, more distrustful edge. Rather than treating altered consciousness as a shortcut to insight, he examines the structures around it: the charisma, the mystique, the claims of healing and the commodification of nature.

The book’s reporting first appeared in part in The New Yorker, and the published version is described as methodical, exacting and well reported. It also apparently uses the book form to expand beyond the original magazine material, with digressions into how the toad’s psychedelic reputation was discovered and how pharmaceutical companies are now seeking to harness 5-MeO-DMT for their own purposes. Those detours help place Rettig’s story in a wider, fast-moving ecosystem where spiritual language, medicine and commerce increasingly overlap.

Why the story resonates now

The reviewer’s larger point is that The Ego Trip works as more than a profile of one man. It reads as a bleak parable about authority without accountability, the exploitation of living creatures, and the way high-minded talk can hide crude extraction. That gives the book relevance beyond the specific subculture it describes. It touches readers interested in the psychedelic revival, but also anyone watching the growth of wellness branding, influencer culture and the monetisation of authenticity.

Rettig, the source material notes, has largely been forgotten by the movement he helped popularise, which has since spread and mutated through social media and new markets. The toads, meanwhile, have become another commodity. That ending leaves de Greef’s book with a grimly contemporary shape: not a tale of enlightenment, but a record of how easily wonder can be turned into product, and how quickly a supposed remedy can become part of the very machinery it claims to transcend.