The first of what appears will be an annual event of the World Bufo Alvarius Congress was held this summer on July 27-29th, 2018 in Mexico City in the historic district downtown.
The 300 person capacity event sold out during the event and was attended by residents of Mexico including indigenous tribes of the Sonoran desert home to the bufo alvarius or incilius alvarius commonly called the Colorado River Toad or Sonoran Desert Toad. There were attendees from the US, Canada, Australia, South America and Europe.
There was a mixture of practitioners, enthusiasts, academics, researchers, scientists, psychonauts in attendance. At one point during a talk it appeared the by a show of hands that Octavio Rettig had shared the medicine with at least 25% of the people in the room. After serving it to over 6,000 people in the past few years that didn’t seem like a stretch.
In ironic alignment with the medicine, pretty much everyone succumbed to information overload at some point during the first day. Whiteout. Then recovery. Good thing that the entire event was supported by a second track that was all integration tools and support that started on Saturday and ran through Sunday. Tools like Qigong, Hakomi, breathing exercises, sharing circles, yoga, sound healing, along with various integration practices, therapies and philosophies.
The science around the medicine was amazing and serious. We learned about EEG studies of the acute effects of 5-MeO-DMT by Juan Acosta-Urquidi, PhD. You can read more information on his website neuroshamanism. We learned about 5-meo-dmt induced hypercoherence where different parts of the brain normally quiet while the default mode network (aka. the “ego”) is operational light up and talk to all of each other while under the medicine. It increased gamma brain waves over 100% during the entire effect.
I learned from Dr. Jack Allocca that too much 5-meo-dmt normalizes to bufotenine poisoning. Now after doing more personal research it appears that in his referenced study the animals they tested were getting amounts between 48-278 mg/kg!! No human could ever get anywhere near that amount in their body through any route except intravenously. The bigger issue is concomitant use of MAOI’s (monoamine oxidase inhibitors) or SSRI’s where the normal MAO-A pathway is backed up, the extra 5-meo-dmt in the body gets metabolized in other pathways that convert it to bufotenine, thereby poisoning the subject.
It wasn’t all science though as there was lots of personal testimony as to the power of the medicine and the benefits people were experiencing with it on their healing paths. Of course reintegration was the most talked about subject and well explored. We met a man who was a toad practitioner from Mexico who claimed that after growing up with the current President of Mexico that at least 25% of the current administration has some experience with entheogenic medicines.
A crew of us came down from Austin along with an entheogenic jedi veteran from Colorado already well-versed in toad. We all fell in love with Mexico City, the largest city in the world. The highs were 78 degrees, in the mid-50’s at night. The people were amazing. The food was incredible. The currency exchange made everything at least 50% or less of what it cost in the US. We visited the pyramids of the Moon and the Sun at Teotihuacan and united the divine feminine and masculine under the tepezcohuite tree in a cosmic washing machine of love.
Here are some pictures created and also treated to capture the experience. If you like this artwork please visit Psychonaut Division at his website and Instagram.
Ian Benouis 