What trippy worm ooze can teach us about saving nature
When Frank Herbert penned the sprawling space opera Dune, he was thinking a lot about ecology. He was also experimenting with psilocybin, the natural psychedelic found in "magic mushrooms." It's no wonder, then, that Herbert dreamt up a galactic Imperium that depends on the trip-inducing ooze of a fearsome predator—the giant sandworms of Arrakis—for interstellar travel.
Hallucinogenic worm slime, better known as "the spice," is often compared to oil. It's easy to see why: It literally fuels the economy of the Imperium, in addition to having countless ancillary uses, from fiber-making to sacred rituals. Like oil, the spice is mined industrially by a vast colonial empire more concerned with power than planetary protection or human rights. Dune's understanding of the politics surrounding natural resource exploitation—and the existential risks that come with it—make the 1965 novel-turned-hit film series feel like an incisive commentary on the present.
Tuscon-based herpetologist Robert Villa agrees. Villa is an expert on the Sonoran desert toad (Bufo alvarius), an animal that, like Dune's supersized sandworms, secretes a substance people prize for its mind-altering abilities. Inside the toad's venom is 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful hallucinogen also known as the "God molecule." Since experimental psychedelic users first freebased the stuff in the 1980s, the mystique around the toad has grown tremendously. Today, toad tripping is championed by celebrities and wellness influences who've rebranded it 'Bufo therapy' and given it an apocryphal origin story.
In a recent conversation for a National Geographic article on the science of spice, Villa and I discussed what rising popularity of the toad's venom means for the animal's future (probably nothing good), parallels between the Sonoran desert toad and Arrakis' sandworms, and why Dune is a timely tale for today.
Villa graciously agreed to allow The Science of Fiction to run the full interview. You can read it below, condensed and lightly edited for clarity:
Maddie Stone: Tell me about the Sonoran desert toad—its natural history, some of its interesting adaptations, and what we know about why it produces 5 -MeO-DMT.
Robert Villa: The Sonoran Desert toad is a species which is emblematic of the Sonoran Desert. It evolved with it, it adapted to the arid conditions of the Sonoran Desert. And its distribution coincides roughly with the Sonoran Desert itself. It's as Sonoran as a Saguaro or a Gila monster.
And like many desert amphibians, they are in a state of estivation, or dormancy, that waits out the dry season. And so when the monsoon season arrives, they emerge and they reproduce very quickly so that the eggs and the tadpoles can transform into adults as soon as possible. They are very characteristic of a desert species.
Maddie: We don't know of any other vertebrates that produce 5-MeO-DMT. What do we know about why this particular toad produces it? Is it believed to have some sort of adaptive function?
Robert: I think it's a very human-centric question to ask.
As far as I can tell, this is a genomic variation that characterizes the species. It's a phenotype. It's a characteristic like the coloration of the toad, the size. It's just one of the features that's unique toad. And I suspect it's a genomic variation in the genes because the molecule 5-MeO-DMT is very closely related to other tryptamines across toad species called Bufo. So I just think that it's a variation from the other toads that happens to be significant to humans.
Maddie: So it could be the result of genetic drift, basically.
Robert: Yeah. And we know that, at least in humans, it's not orally active in the quantities that it produces. Nobody's studied whether it's orally active in other animals, like a skunk or a raccoon that might want to eat the animal.
Maddie: Not orally active means you can't ingest it and feel these psychotropic effects?
Robert: That's correct.
Maddie: So when people are using it to induce trips, it’s inhaled?
Robert: Yeah. It's freebased. So they take the dried secretion and they inhale the smoke from it.
Maddie: How is the toad typically used by people today?
Robert: Its original use as a psychedelic was exploratory, by a guy named Ken Nelson. Ken read a small piece in Omni magazine in the '80s. And the article, unfortunately, was not entirely accurate in its characterization of toad remains at a Cherokee archaeological site. The archeologist suggested that these remains were evidence of psychedelic use.
Those weren't Sonoran desert toads. But Ken read this and got interested in the psychedelic properties of toads. And so he came across a book which explained that the Sonoran Desert toad produces 5-MeO-DMT.
And so he went from his home in Denton, Texas. He drove to Arizona and found these Sonoran Desert toads, and seemingly, was the first person to smoke its secretions. And when he did this, he had such a transcendental experience that he wrote a pamphlet under the pseudonym Albert Most. And he self-published it as part of a college writing course. And this was distributed all over the Southwest. And there was a small following of people who did that.
By the early 2000s, the concept arrived in Mexico and there was a vanguard of physicians and nurses that realized smoking the substance could alleviate things like addiction to hard substances. And they gave this to people in an uncontrolled setting. Many of those people were indigenous people, and at some point, the idea was fabricated and disseminated that this was ancient indigenous medicine.
When there's no one looking at the common species and something starts to happen to them, by the time people recognize there's an issue, it's often chronic or advanced.
And it's easy to do because there's lots of archaeological evidence that points to toads as sacred beings. They're depicted in different ways, including smoking pipes and incense burners. But the [evidence] just doesn't show that Sonoran Desert toads were traded into southern Mexico or anywhere in the Americas. They may have had some spiritual importance, but there's just no oral tradition or archaeological evidence to prove that Sonoran Desert toads were used [as a psychedelic]. Or any toad was used in a psychedelic manner.
So there's a recreational element, there's a therapeutic element, and it's all swirling around the psychedelic craze.
Maddie: Is there scientific research backing up therapeutic uses like addiction treatment?
Robert: Many of the studies are observational studies. They're qualitative studies that seek to qualify the personal experiences of people under controlled settings. In terms of neurological or biochemical [research] there’s very little of that.
You know, after the release of the documentary [editor's note: a 2017 episode of the Vice docuseries Hamilton's Pharmacopeia focused on the Sonoran Desert toad], there was an article like I just described, characterizing people's accounts after smoking 5-MeO-DMT, specifically from Sonoran Desert toads, as being beneficial to them. And that's great. I'm all for the therapeutic value of psychedelics. But there was no disclaimer about the ethics of doing this. And it's becoming more and more exploitive of the species of Sonora.
Maddie: How has all of this interest impacted the toad?
Robert: We have a trickle of [population] data that is almost ready to be characterized after going on 4 years. Scientists kind of overlooked the toad because they saw it as common and abundant. And they were focusing on things that are probably more urgent. But the issue with that is that when there's no one looking at the common species and something starts to happen to them, by the time people recognize there's an issue, it's often chronic or advanced.
So we're working against time because we don't have a baseline of normal toad data to compare with what's happening at the moment. So we're funding a project which has been monitoring toad populations across the state of Sonora and trying to make sense of their numbers and how they how they're faring.
It’s really difficult to monitor an illegal trade. It's dangerous for the researchers. A lot of it's anecdotal. In Sonora, it is becoming seen as a source of psychedelic tourism. Indigenous people have been wrapped up in a narrative which has been projected on them. And they have to make decisions, in the face of being invaded by illicit activities, cartels, and trying to survive, [about] the narratives that they choose to perpetuate around the toad and their culture.
Maddie: What can be done, in your view, to protect the toad?
Robert: We are born into a society which is programmed to extract and commodify natural resources. There's no getting around that. And there's the saying that there's no ethical consumption in capitalism. And I tend to believe that.
I don't know exactly what will help the toad in our current situation, within our current society. You have a lot of a lot of elements of this spiritual and cultural dispossession. And I think we're all searching for spirituality, a sense of community, of ritual, and healing from serious problems. And when a wildlife product, when a natural resource provides you with something that is significantly useful and helpful, it's very hard to relieve the demand for that.
Maddie: Let's switch gears to Dune. What are some parallels between spice, the sandworm that produces it, and the Sonoran Desert toad or other [real] psychedelic organisms?
Robert: The Dune series was kind of visionary. Herbert did a lot of research into desert ecology and the ethnobiology of deserts. And what I call this transcendent relationship between humans and the environment. There are elements of religion, culture, and language around significant natural resources.
Dune is a great metaphor for what we're experiencing.
To be honest, my first thought was how directly [Dune] pertains to water, as a limited resource in not just deserts, but around the world. But you can apply this to so many things. There are so many resources like water, psychedelics, food resources that have multiple cultural narratives that collide around them. And as these things are exploited and they dwindle, the stakes get higher and people come up with more radical justifications for claiming those things. And I think Dune is a great metaphor for what we're experiencing.
Maddie: The spice is extremely valuable in Dune. There are industrial spice mining operations, and it's also used by the local indigenous population, the Fremen. How could all this [resource extraction] impact Arrakis and the sandworms themselves?
Robert: One of the major things that I see is carrying capacity, the ability for an ecosystem to provide resources to its constituents. Humans are very good at manipulating their environments and extracting from their environments. And whenever we decide to extract something industrially, you have to automatically assume we'll go over the carrying capacity. That resource is going to be hyper- extended.
Maddie: If you were in a position to advise the people of Arrakis on how to sustainably manage the spice, what sorts of measures might you suggest?
Robert: I would start with cultural remediation and cultural reconciliation between the cultures that utilize the substance. Ask hard questions about what those constituents and stakeholders, what importance they have put on the substance.
I think it boils down to peace talks. In a sense, it would be diplomatic. Especially with something that holds such cultural significance to one group. And maybe more of an economic or industrial value to the other groups. And so, maybe bond around the resource and come up with a new narrative moving forward. One that is cooperative. If possible.