Mike Tyson smokes toad venom and has even named one of the Tyson 2.0 cannabis strains The Toad. "I’ve done it over 80 times. 90 times, probably," Tyson recently told actress Rosie Perez for Interview magazine prior to his Nov. 15 fight with Jake Paul, which he lost.
"You smoke it. Then you meet God. And this is what God told me to do."
In other words, under the influence of the toad venon, God instucted Tyson to fight Paul, who's 31 years younger than the former heavyweight champ.
A shaman introduced Tyson to the hallucinogen seven years ago. "You see a toad, you bust its puss, you put it on like a mirror, and it gets hard," he notes. "You rub it down until it become fine sand, and then you smoke it."
Tyson on Toad Venom: "I can’t live without it."
Bufotoxins milked from Sonoran desert toads contain bufotenin, or 5-MeO-DMT. That's the source of the high. According to Wiki, "The extract is obtained by squeezing the parotoid glands of caught, washed toads for a white venom and drying; the final dried poison is usually brown, with a chunk or flake form." It's known colloquially as "bufo."
VeryWellMind explains:
While you can ingest the toad's venom by licking its back, it's more common to extract the venom and convert it to a powder form before smoking it. Users report that smoking the venom induces a psychedelic trip within 10-30 seconds that distorts vision and sound and can render the user physically incapacitated for about 30 minutes.
Another technique is to milk toads for "Kambo" or "sapo." which is sweat. The secretions are burned into the skin.
Back the Perez interview:
What was the feeling?
Oh, man. That I’m nothing, but I’m everything.
Did that scare you? Did it motivate you?
Well, listen. I was scared to death. Because I had a spiritual death; I died. I’ve dealt with death to the closest magnitude I ever could. But once you go through that process, you realize dying is beautiful. How could death be bad and life be beautiful? It’s a total contradiction.
Wow, that’s heavy.
Well, I was totally overwhelmed the first time. As soon as I came out, I was screaming, “Where’s my wife? Where’s my family?” But now I’m a professional. I can’t live without it.
Do you think that it should become legal as a form of therapeutic medicine?
Well, they don’t want it to be legal because we would have a whole different perspective of life. Everybody might start loving each other. And we don’t want that, do we?
A derivative of tryptamine, bufotenin is listed as a Schedule I drug.
HInting at his 1982 rape conviction, Perez asks:
Do you think that the public has moved on? Do you think that they see what I see: Mike 2.0?
It’s about things that happened to me and things that I’ve done to people. See, I can’t control what people do to me. But I should have been able to control the things I’ve done to people. I should have known the pain that I felt when people did that to me.
It’s none of my business how people perceive me. It’s how I perceive myself. They can think I’m the psycho guy, the prison guy, the fucking guy that didn’t give a fuck and just said anything without a filter. If they believe I’m the guy that’s trying to get my shit together, that’s cool too. But it doesn’t really matter. It only matters what I feel and what I believe in myself.
I was always in defense of you from day one.
As have many others. The overwhelming majority of 120 million people who watched at Netflix favored Tyson, despite his checkered past.
Tyson's reliance on toad secretion may have impacted his decision to fight at an advanced age, but it did not help him in the ring. He landed just 18 punches, compared to Paul's 78, during the eight-round bout. Paul won unanimously with scores of 80-72 and 79-71 (twice).
Afterwards Tyson commented:
"I knew he was a good fighter and knew he was prepared. I came to fight. I didn't prove nothing to anybody, only to myself. I'm not one of those guys who tries to please other people, I only try to please myself."
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