If you ask Mike Tyson, he’ll tell you that he’s misunderstood.

He’s not referring to his infamous lisp, either.

The former professional boxer has a long and storied history of drug use, and has been deep in the depths of addiction many times before.

Cocaine-filled benders with Steve-O aside, one of the stranger stories from his drug-using days involves smoking 5-MeO-DMT, a potent psychedelic produced from the venom of Bufo alvarius, a rare species of toad commonly known as the Colorado river toad, or the Sonoran desert toad.

In other words, toad venom.

You may recognise the DMT part, which forms part of the ayahuasca ceremonies you’ve heard people talk about. Smoking the toad, reports GQ, is “like riding a rocket to the same place of total ego death that ayahuasca takes you to by riverboat”.

The article focuses on the fact that Mike Tyson is opening a weed resort in the middle of the California desert, but let’s stick to the toad story for now.

Tyson smoked the venom as part of the first episode for his new podcast (everyone has one), where his guest was Dr. Gerardo Sandoval, a big believer in the “spiritually and psychologically transformative properties” of 5-MeO-DMT.

Let’s hop on that rocket:

Dr. Gerry had him at ‘So there’s this weird thing, and you can smoke it’.

“You have to look at it from my perspective,” Mike Tyson says, months later. “I’m going into this situation thinking I’ve seen everything. I had done some heavy drugs. I’d done acid before. So I’m thinking, Give me that stuff. Let me check this out.”

So Mike Tyson heated up the toad venom in a little glass pipe. And what was clear almost instantly was that smoking the toad was not like doing other drugs. It was nothing like that. Tyson found himself in another dimension, moving fast, scared to death.

He thought about his wife and his kids, how they didn’t know where he was or what he’d just done to himself.

“I was just freaking out,” Tyson says. “I don’t wanna do this no more. I want it to stop. Too late. Couldn’t stop. I thought, I fucked up. Oh, shit. I fucked up. What was I trying to prove? I’m dead. I’m dead. It’s over. My whole life. Boom. My life is gone. I took these fucking drugs and it killed me. There’s no way I’m gonna survive this.”

But then the fear began to pass. Mike Tyson began experiencing beautiful things. He stood outside his own life and saw it stretched out in linear time, a continuum of Mikes coming and going. He saw Aztec symbols, bizarre pyramids, people who had died.som

“It’s almost like you die and you’re reborn,” Tyson says.

He’ll fit right in at AfrikaBurn, then.

Dr. Gerry says he watched Mike “experience an outpouring of powerful emotions”, which then helped him release some of the burdens he had been carrying for a while.

Hey, if it works, do it again:

In the wake of the toad experience, though, all that feels like it’s finally behind him in a way it’s never been before. It feels like so many things are finally behind him.

“And I did it three times,” he says, laughing. “I stayed there. I had to do it again. What the hell? I wanted to go back.”

Third time’s the charm.

To read about Tyson Holistic, that weed resort he’s opened in the desert, head over to GQ.

[sources:gq]