I am enrolled in a printmaking class this semester, and this week we are learning how to print on copper plates. Part of the process includes an “acid bath,” where the copper plate is dipped into a tank full of quite literally, acid. This allows the lines to be chemically etched into the plate, creating a more detailed and fine line in the final prints. Unsurprisingly, in a class full of 18 to 20-year-olds, when “acid” is mentioned, the immediate joke is “lol we’re learning to do acid.”
In Kimon De Greef’s article for the New Yorker magazine’s Department of psychopharmacology Toad Smoke – The Pied Piper of a hallucinogenic movement, De Greef introduces the charismatic doctor of psychedelics Octavio Rettig. Octavio specializes in powerful poison from the glands of the toad’s necks. The scientific name for this hallucinogenic is five-MethOxy-N, N-Dimethyltryptamine, or 5-MeO-DMT which has become commonly known as the “God Molecule.” Octavio has popularized this drug, so much so that when one of my classmates made a crack about “doing acid,” it inspired another to make a print of a toad, a direct reference from the acid of printmaking to the psychedelic properties of toad’s poison.
Octavio’s creative product was his very popularization of smoking the toad, his creative method the genealogy of the drug’s supposed roots in ancient tribal practices of Aztecs and Mayans. Octavio charmed his way through a few of the remaining tribes of the ancient world of Mesopotamia, bringing them to accept his medical practices. Octavio works towards spreading toad smoking as an alternative to other drugs, as a less addictive, healthy, way to end addiction. Over the past few years Octavio has gained both a negative and positive reputation. His practices are controversial, some of the patients he has treated being miraculously cured while others getting more addicted, more affected by PTSD, and even a few dying.
Octavio’s own history of mental illness of addiction throughout his childhood and into adulthood has altered his line of work and passion for popularizing smoking the toad. Without his roots in struggling with the disease himself, Octavia would have never been first interested in finding alternative cures to addiction, nor spreading his highly contagious methods of smoking to cure smoking.
This is Octavio’s Ted talk from 2013, his introduction into the public sphere and the start of his journey of popularizing toad smoking. Here is A sound cloud recording of Octavio explaining his practice, and a link to his Facebook page. This is the New Yorker article I reference as my source. All the images of Octavio come from his Facebook feed, the graphic from The New Yorker article, and the print is an original piece of art from a peer of mine.
I'm really intruiged by the different medical applications of previously banned substances. While the applications of opiods has long been understood, the effects of medical marijuana, and now toad-based psychedelics, are only recently being explored. I'm very curious to see where this research leads, and I suspect it will be onducted by people like Octavio!
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting how controversial Octavio's methods are. I wonder why some people were cured by "toad smoke" and others were lead deeper into addiction. Scientific creativity can have much more serious impacts than what we might think of as "classic" artistic creativity.
ReplyDeleteThis is so interesting! Like Mereya, I wonder about what happens when we are prompted with creativity that can be both beneficial and harmful, and how we determine whether the possible benefit is worth the risk. In Octavio's case, for example, I wonder how (or even if) he considered the autonomy of the people to which he introduced these methods.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that I've always heard about psychedelics is that they have really different effects on different people. I listened to a podcast recently with Stevie Nicks and Matty Healy where they discussed drug use. One of the things that they both noted was that drugs can have a "positive" effect on people's creative processes sometimes, probably because they can help people look at the world in a way that they usually wouldn't. However, sometimes drugs have an overwhelmingly negative effect on people's creativity (for a variety of reasons). I'm wondering if that's why Octavio's method had really varying effects.
ReplyDeleteI always love to see the crossover between creativity and the science/medical community. But it's also interesting to think about how he must have been tremendously creative in his presentation of the drug, since I can't imagine it being something anyone would be jumping up and down wanting to try. In addition to being creative in the use, he is also entrepreneurially creative and I think that's really neat.
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