Demand for This Toad’s Psychedelic Toxin Is Booming. Some Warn That’s Bad for the Toad.

“People hunger for the narrative that the toad was used ancestrally by the Indigenous people of Sonora,” said Ana Maria Ortiz, a doctoral student who is carrying out a population study of the toad at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Human Ecology. “There’s an appeal to that narrative, and even I believed it at the onset.”