Which, in your opinion, is the worst current cultural trend: social media influencers; unregulated wellness practitioners; macho manosphere posturers; psychedelic bores; cultural appropriators? The good news is that, with Octavio Rettig, the central character in Kimon de Greef’s The Ego Trip, you don’t have to choose between them. He’s all five wrapped into one objectionable package, and so much more besides.

The tale begins with the Sonoran desert toad, an improbable amphibian that spends most of its life hiding underground in the baking badlands along the Mexico-Arizona border, and has done so blamelessly for millions of years. Whenever it rains, the toads emerge from their hiding places to mate, laying strings of eggs wherever water has pooled.

There have long been fanciful tales of hippies getting high by licking toads, but these ones are the real deal: the world’s only known psychoactive animal. In the early 1980s, humans discovered that the toad’s poison glands secrete a venom that contains, among other chemicals, 5-MeO-DMT, a potent hallucinogen also known as the “God molecule”. The first known user squirted the glands of a toad that his dog caught on to the windscreen of his Chevy Sport, where the substance dried and he smoked it.

He wrote a manual describing “an overload of thoughts and perception, brief collapse of the ego, and loss of the space-time continuum”. It was, in short, a lot. The prospect enticed other users, and those included, two decades later, Rettig.

A troubled young man from Mexico, Rettig started smoking dried toad venom in the first decade of this century, and claims it helped him kick his crack cocaine habit. That was a time when popular interest in psychedelics was re-emerging after the long post-1960s winter, and many medical practitioners were wondering if these mind-altering chemicals couldn’t help patients who weren’t responding to their traditional treatments. Much of the focus had been on LSD, psilocybin and ketamine, but 5-MeO-DMT provided a whole new level of experience. The shatteringly powerful effect of the chemical was said to replicate the effect of years of therapy in just half an hour, which is clearly an attractive prospect for a psychedelic entrepreneur keen to maximise patient throughput.

Rettig was no pioneer in his enthusiasm for smoking toad. Instead, his contribution was to create a tradition for this new hallucinogen, thus giving it the kind of mystical authenticity that peyote, morning glory and ayahuasca gain among devotees thanks to their association with ancient Native American rituals.

The Seri people, who live between the Sonoran Desert and the Gulf of California, have suffered terribly both under the Spanish colony of Mexico, and the independent republic. By the time Rettig visited in 2011, there were just a few hundred of them left, living in squalid and trash-strewn villages, predated upon by drug cartels and plagued by addiction. Rettig adopted their chants, claimed their ancient toad-based tradition had been suppressed and was only now being rediscovered, and started presenting himself globally as a practitioner of indigenous medicine.

There may well be a medical case for treatment with 5-MeO-DMT, but it’s hard to see any argument for treating people with it the way that Rettig did. He offered huge doses with minimal screening, sometimes inflicting treatment forcibly. (In response to footage of him being aggressive to clients, he told De Greef: “I am open to acknowledge that some of my actions might be disturbing for most audiences, but this is a very deep therapeutic work.”) He engaged in sexual relationships with women after serving them toad, denied responsibility when patients died, and never seemed to learn from his mistakes. Rettig claims: “My work has been misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused.” But it is an incredibly dark tale.

A different writer might have been tempted to go gonzo, to smoke toad himself, and to come back with stories of ego death, the space-time continuum and the rest of it, but Kimon de Greef mercifully avoids that temptation. A South African, he came to the story of Rettig not from the world of psychedelics but from researching wildlife smuggling, which gives him an unusually clear-eyed view of how grim these kinds of practices are.

A lot of the reporting for this book began life in the New Yorker, and it is as methodical, exacting, well-written and exceptionally reported as you’d expect. Fortunately, De Greef avoids the fate that can befall books based on American magazine articles that fail to break free of them, and really enjoys the extra space. He launches into entertaining digressions into how exactly the toads’ psychedelic powers were first discovered, into how pharmaceutical companies are harnessing 5-MeO-DMT for their own ends, introducing fascinating cameos, before he returns to the main story.

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He is not a man for grand conclusions, but I challenge any reader not to see this highly enjoyable book as a parable for so much that’s wrong with the current economy. Everything from the undeserved authority of charlatans, to the rampant exploitation of the natural world, to the hiding of hyper-capitalism behind a shield of cod-mystical woo-woo: it’s all in there.

Rettig’s ultimate fate has been to be largely forgotten by the movement he helped to popularise, which has mutated and expanded at the speed of social media, with new influencers appearing and new markets opening. The toads, meanwhile, have become just another commodity to be exploited.