Octavio Rettig — Bufo alvarius (5-MeO-DMT) facilitator network

Octavio Rettig is a Mexican former physician (University of Guadalajara) who says he was introduced to smoking the vaporized secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad (Incilius alvarius), which contain 5-MeO-DMT, in the summer of 2006, and was free of a crack-cocaine addiction roughly eighteen months later. He began serving the substance to others, and from 2011 built a narrative around a Seri Indigenous community in Sonora, obtaining documents from a tribal elder that he uses to present himself as reviving an "ancestral" Mesoamerican toad-smoking tradition; researchers on Seri ethnobotany have found no clear historical evidence that toad use held this significance for the tribe. A 2013 TEDx talk and a laudatory 2015 VICE documentary made Rettig internationally prominent; by his own account he has since introduced toad-smoking to more than 10,000 people, often serving as many as twenty participants per session at roughly $250 each, while smoking cannabis himself during sessions and leaving assistants to supervise attendees.

On October 5, 2018, Araceli Ramirez Hidalgo, a housewife from Leon, Guanajuato, died after inhaling toad vapor at a session Rettig led; witnesses said she began convulsing and stopped breathing, and that Rettig performed CPR before she was taken to hospital, where she died. Her official cause of death was recorded as an anaphylactic reaction to an unknown substance. Her husband, lawyer Jorge Villalpando Medel, spent nearly two years gathering evidence, and in September 2020 Rettig was arrested and charged with manslaughter; a judge declined to elevate the charge to murder. Rettig avoided trial by reaching a settlement with Villalpando, reported at 600,000 pesos. The New Yorker's 2022 investigation additionally documented at least two earlier deaths associated with Rettig's ceremonies -- an elderly patient some years before, and a man in his forties who suffered a fatal pulmonary embolism during a session, which Rettig attributed to the man's health rather than the toad -- and reported that a member of the Seri community whose existing methamphetamine addiction worsened after Rettig allegedly gave him toad without explanation or consent later died, in 2019.

In early 2019 a group of anonymous toad practitioners and users published a letter accusing Rettig of "reckless, unethical, and potentially criminal behavior," describing his approach as "high-volume, high-dose, haphazard, dose-them-and-then-leave" and alleging he physically manhandled participants while they were incapacitated. The same letter accused Rettig's early collaborator, Gerardo Sandoval, of fraud and sexual assault; those specific allegations were directed at Sandoval rather than at Rettig, and Sandoval denied them. Rettig has continued holding sessions in Mexico, telling The New Yorker in 2022 that the deaths in his care "made me a better human being." No criminal conviction has resulted from any death associated with his practice to date; the one homicide-related case that reached formal charges, Ramirez's, was resolved through a private settlement rather than a trial verdict.