Frog poison. Toad venom. Zero FDA oversight, a nearly extinct toad, a death toll that keeps climbing, and a $6.8 trillion industry with no accountability. How amphibian-based wellness became the trend nobody can regulate — or stop.
Mike Tyson has smoked bufo, Sonoran Desert toad venom, approximately 80 times. He has said, across several interviews, that it was like dying and being reborn, that it helped bring him out of retirement, that God told him to fight Jake Paul. Kristian Trend, a 40-year-old wellness coach from Leicester, England, tried the other thing — kambo, frog poison rather than toad — once. He went to a ceremony on April 11, 2026. He died at the hospital later that day. One man did it 80 times and told Joe Rogan it changed everything. One man did it once and didn’t come home. This is, approximately, the current state of amphibian wellness.
The easiest way to sell someone poison is to call it a cleanse. Tell them the discomfort is the point, that the body knows what it’s doing, that the vomiting is proof that something is leaving. Give it an Indigenous name and a Silicon Valley endorsement, and you have, more or less, the full cultural biography of kambo and bufo. The former is a toxic secretion harvested from the skin of an Amazonian tree frog, applied to open burns on the participant’s body, and sold to wellness seekers as a detox ritual. The burning is considered a feature. The face-swelling and uncontrollable vomiting are the advertised outcome. The dying is, apparently, a side effect no one in the industry is prepared to address. The latter contains the most powerful psychedelic on earth, delivering experiences consistent with Tyson’s: ego death and rebirth, conversations with the divine.
Kambo and bufo are distinct substances, distinct amphibians, and distinct experiences, though the wellness industry has done its best to position them as adjacent chapters in the same spiritual awakening story. Kambo is a secretion scraped from the skin of the Phyllomedusa bicolor, a giant tree frog native to the Amazon rainforest. It contains no psychedelic compounds whatsoever. Its bioactive peptides trigger a violent physiological response — tachycardia, blood pressure instability, severe vomiting — that practitioners frame as a “purge” and market as detox. It is administered by burning small holes in the participant’s skin and pressing the dried secretion directly into the wounds. Sessions run $150 to $500. The purported benefit is that the body will expel something it needed to expel. The medical evidence for this is, per Bryan Kuhn, a toxicology management specialist who told Banner Health, there’s “no evidence to support any therapeutic benefits for any medical condition. Period. End of story.” Not insufficient evidence. None.
Bufo is a different category of experience entirely. The Sonoran Desert Toad (Incilius alvarius) — not a frog but a toad, and not a trivial distinction, taxonomically or legally — produces a secretion from its parotoid glands containing 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenin, both powerful psychedelics. The dried secretion is smoked. The experience lasts 15 to 20 minutes and is, by most accounts, among the most overwhelming things a person can voluntarily do to their own consciousness: an ego death, a dissolution of self, what Tyson has described as a literal conversation with God. Unlike kambo, there is genuine scientific interest in 5-MeO-DMT as a potential treatment for depression and PTSD, with early research results that are, in certain contexts, promising. Also, unlike kambo, collecting Sonoran Desert Toad secretion for psychedelic use is a federal crime in the United States — 5-MeO-DMT has been a Schedule 1 substance since 2011. This has not meaningfully slowed the ceremonies.
The celebrity pipeline
The wellness industry runs on credibility transfer — someone with an audience says “I did this and it transformed me,” and the credibility flows downstream. For bufo, the pipeline has been unusually high-profile. Tyson has credited toad venom with his psychological transformation across multiple major platforms. Hunter Biden wrote in his memoir that a 5-MeO-DMT session in Mexico in 2014 — toad secretion administered at a beach house following an ibogaine treatment in Tijuana — helped keep him sober for a year; his disclosure was, per Lucid News, widely credited with pushing toad venom toward mainstream awareness. Christina Haack, the HGTV renovation host, announced on Instagram in 2021 that she had smoked toad venom and it had “reset my brain and kicked out years of anxiety in 15 mins,” which generated tabloid coverage, significant public attention, and, for many readers, their first encounter with the term. Tony Robbins has discussed bufo publicly as well.
For kambo, the celebrity footprint is less tabloid and more wellness-media-industrial-complex. Lauren Berlingeri, co-founder of HigherDose — the brand whose infrared sauna blankets became a fixture for a certain kind of aspirational wellness consumer — documented her kambo session on HigherDose’s blog, describing it as making “your face swell up like a frog and then you throw up,” and filed this under biohacking. Katie Wells, founder of the widely followed Wellness Mama platform and podcast, devoted an episode to her own experiences with kambo and reported noticing “physical, emotional, and mental benefits” across multiple sessions. Neither of them is a doctor. Neither of them was required to be. This is how a $400 frog-burn ceremony becomes a cultural trend: not through peer-reviewed validation but through the authority of someone with a following saying it worked for them, and the scale of the industry absorbing that signal and amplifying it.
That industry scale is worth holding in view. The global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is projected to hit $9.8 trillion by 2029, according to the Global Wellness Institute — larger than global tourism, sports, and IT industries combined. The detox products market, specifically built on the cleanse-and-purge premise that sells kambo, was valued at nearly $59 billion in 2024 and is forecast to reach $82 billion by 2030. Social media drives 72 percent of consumer awareness for new detox products. The person running an unregulated $400 kambo session in Leicester is operating at the very bottom of an economy generating trillions. They answer to none of it.
What happens to the animals?
The frogs and toads involved have no seat at the table, which is one of the most clarifying details in a story that revolves around “consciousness.”
Kambo begins with capture. According to ICEERS, the Phyllomedusa bicolor is caught and tied spread-eagled in an X shape. The secretion it produces is a defense mechanism — a fear response triggered by the stress of being handled and restrained. The frog is not a participant; it is producing what amounts to a last resort against a perceived predator. Practitioners describe this as humane and note that the frog is released afterward. As Western commercial demand has grown, researchers have raised concerns about overharvesting pressure and increased wildlife trafficking. It remains unknown how the repeated capture and manipulation of adult P. bicolor frogs affects individual behavior, parental care, and offspring survival. No standards currently exist for commercial kambo harvesting. The industry’s answer has been to brand the extraction as “ethical harvesting” — a term with no regulatory definition and no enforcement mechanism.
The Sonoran Desert Toad is in a far worse position. Wildlife conservationists issued public warnings in 2022 to stop milking the toads — not a phrase one expects to read in a conservation report, yet there it is. The species is believed extinct in California and is listed as threatened in New Mexico, with overcollection among the cited causes. Climate change and habitat loss compound the pressure. A 2023 study in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies found that the “ancestral indigenous use” narrative attached to bufo ceremonies is largely fabricated — the 5-MeO-DMT content of the species was identified and publicized in a 1984 pamphlet, and the spiritual cosmology surrounding its ceremonial use was constructed in retreat centers in Mexico and California, not over centuries of Sonoran Desert indigenous life. The toad’s cultural origin story was invented by the wellness industry that exploits it.
The tradition question
Kambo does have genuine roots in Amazonian practice. At least 15 indigenous groups across the Amazon basin have used P. bicolor secretion in ceremonial contexts for generations. The traditional knowledge those communities developed has been converted, through the international patent system, into 11 separate patents held by companies in the United States, Canada, Japan, France, and Russia (notably none of them held by anyone in the Amazon).
Marcos Vinício Chein Feres, a law professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Brazil who reviewed the patent records, told Mongabay that this type of appropriation “strengthens the inequality between developing countries, which are rich in biodiversity, and developed countries, which are rich in technology.” Stella Pieve of the Escolhas Institute was more direct: “The international exploitation and commercialization of biodiversity resources in violation of the rules of a country is called biopiracy,” she said. Brazil established a benefit-sharing regulatory framework in 2021. The Western retreat circuit has not prioritized compliance.
Bufo’s claim to indigenous tradition is shakier still. The “ancient ritual” that practitioners invoke mostly didn’t happen. The spiritual narrative was built after 1984, and the indigenous communities whose cultural authority has been invoked to legitimize toad ceremonies have increasingly objected to that framing. The practice was popularized in the Global North, rebranded as shamanic, and sold back through the retreat economy at premium prices. It has effectively created an indigenous tradition by assertion.
The risk requiring no disclosure
The broader psychedelic therapy landscape does have a real, if still developing, evidence base. The global psychedelic therapeutics market was valued at $2.94 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $11 billion by 2034. Psilocybin and MDMA are in late-stage clinical trials for depression and PTSD. Ketamine already has FDA-approved applications. More than 5,000 specialized psychedelic therapy clinics now operate in North America. The research is rigorous, the oversight is institutional, and the results in treatment-resistant depression and PTSD are, in many cases, genuinely significant. This is the category of work that has moved psychedelics toward mainstream credibility. Neither kambo nor bufo belongs to it.
Kambo’s documented risks include seizures, liver failure, cardiac arrest, and death. A 2025 systematic review published in Cureus links it to sudden cardiac death. A 2025 case report described the first kambo-related brain death in U.S. scientific literature: a 35-year-old woman whose facilitator’s prehydration protocol — large quantities of water, a standard pre-ceremony instruction — combined with kambo’s peptide-induced sodium depletion to produce irreversible cerebral edema within hours. The water her practitioner told her to drink contributed directly to her death. Dr. Lewis Nelson, an emergency physician and toxicologist at Florida Atlantic University, stated the governing problem to Medscape plainly: “The underpinning of all of medical toxicology is that the dose makes the poison.” Kambo practitioners have no validated dose protocol. They have a certificate from a private training organization.
Trend had survived Burkitt lymphoma and wanted to go further in his healing. “He was going to cleanse himself, that’s what he said to me,” his mother, Angie, told The Telegraph. “He was very spiritual. He took a lot of vitamins. But I don’t know what happened.” She also said: “That’s the worst part. He was in the hospital for four months and got through that, and for this to happen is just awful.” A 41-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of administering poison and released. The investigation is ongoing.
What accountability would require in a market this size is genuinely unclear. A ban has limits, and meaningful reform would likely need practitioners with verifiable medical credentials, protocols subject to clinical review, and a liability structure that reaches the people at the top of the content pipeline, not only the facilitator on the ground. None of that exists. What exists is a system in which deaths are processed as individual tragedies while the platforms that amplified the trend keep their following, the certification organizations keep certifying, and the next person who survived something terrible opens a wellness blog and reads that Mike Tyson did this 80 times and it was like talking to God.
“I hope they ban it, but I’m not strong enough to fight for it,” Angie Trend told The Telegraph.
“There’s no reason to think that vomiting itself [is beneficial], despite the fact that they’ll tell you that the bile that you’re vomiting up is cleaning out all the toxins in your body,” Nelson warns. “The closest I get to medical advice is to say I wouldn’t do it.”
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