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In 2013, Octavio Rettig, a Mexican doctor, took the stage at Burning Man under a vast geodesic dome in the Nevada desert to talk about what he called, ''the ultimate experience''. According to Octavio, he had overcome addiction to crack cocaine years prior by using a powerful psychedelic substance produced by the Sonoran Desert toad native to the Mexican-American borderlands. Soon after, he shared ''toad medicine'' with a tribal community in northern Mexico that had been seized by a methamphetamine crisis, while claiming to have restored a lost Mesoamerican ritual stamped out by the colonial era. On stage, he allowed himself to prophesize of the drug: ''sooner or later, everyone in the world will have this experience.'' But even as Octavio became a psychedelic superstar, whispers of reckless facilitation grew. Rumours spread surrounding his unapologetically maximalist approach of administering toad medicine-to the mentally unstable, physically infirm, and even to children-as a growing number of patients died in his care. The Ego Trip tells the story of Octavio''s meteoric rise and fall, while interrogating the most important questions facing the resurgent field of psychedelics today. Situating Octavio within the tradition of messianic psychedelic figures like Timothy Leary, The Ego Trip provides a perilous glimpse into how the most powerful mind-altering molecules on the planet are reshaping our world, from the potential and promise of modern psychiatry, to the answer to spiritual desolation proffered by the wellness economy, to the appropriation of Indigenous cultures and ecological collapse, to psychedelics'' shift from underground sub-culture toward a business driven by cartels and venture capital firms. All the while, The Ego Trip asks - who, in our contemporary moment of secular decay and influencer culture, gets to be a guru?
