The DMT Frog

The DMT frog, in one paragraph

There is no frog that produces DMT. The animal behind the name is Incilius alvarius (Girard, 1859), long known as Bufo alvarius and commonly called the Colorado River toad or Sonoran Desert toad. It is a true toad in the family Bufonidae, the largest in the United States apart from the introduced cane toad, and it lives in the desert drainages of southern Arizona, the far southwest of New Mexico, and Sonora, Sinaloa and Chihuahua in Mexico. The bulging parotoid glands behind its eyes secrete a defensive fluid that contains 5-MeO-DMT and bufotenine, two tryptamines that are not N,N-DMT, alongside bufadienolides, cardioactive steroids that behave like digoxin. The name is wrong on both counts: wrong animal, wrong molecule.

• Scientific name: Incilius alvarius (Girard, 1859), formerly Bufo alvarius
• Family: Bufonidae, the true toads, a family within the frogs
• Range: southern Arizona, extreme southwest New Mexico, Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua
• Secretion contains: 5-MeO-DMT, bufotenine, and cardioactive bufadienolides
• Secretion does not contain: N,N-DMT, the compound normally called DMT

It is a toad, and it has been renamed three times

Toads are not a separate thing from frogs. The true toads make up the family Bufonidae, which sits inside the frogs, so every toad is a frog in the way every terrier is a dog. What separates a toad in practice is the build: dry warty skin rather than smooth wet skin, short legs made for walking rather than long jumps, and a pair of bulging parotoid glands behind the eyes. Those glands are the whole reason anyone is searching for this animal, and a true frog does not have them.

The species was described by Charles Frederic Girard in 1859 as Bufo alvarius. Molecular work in the 2000s broke up the enormous genus Bufo into a number of distinct genera, and this animal travelled through Cranopsis and Ollotis before settling as Incilius alvarius. The older name has not gone away. Most of what is written about the toad online, and almost everything sold under its name, still says Bufo alvarius. Bufo alvarius, Incilius alvarius, Colorado River toad and Sonoran Desert toad are four labels for one species.

It is a large animal, reaching about 190 millimetres, roughly seven and a half inches, which makes it the biggest toad in the United States apart from the introduced cane toad. Olive green to mottled brown, gold eyes with a horizontal pupil, and the kidney-shaped parotoid gland sitting just behind each eye. It is worth noting that this particular toad is unusually smooth for one, with leathery rather than heavily warted skin, which is part of why people reach for the word frog when they see it. There are further glands on the legs, and all of them produce toxic secretions.

Its range in the United States follows water through desert: the lower Colorado River and the Gila River catchments, which covers much of southern Arizona and the extreme southwest corner of New Mexico. It is presumed extirpated from California. In Mexico it occupies Sonora and Sinaloa. It is nocturnal, shelters in rodent burrows, and is most active from May to September when the rains arrive. Females can lay up to 8,000 eggs, and individuals sampled at one Arizona population ranged from two to four years old. New Mexico's own regulation, incidentally, still lists the animal under yet another name, Ollotis alvaria, which tells you how unsettled the naming remains.

Three molecules, three drug codes, one confused nickname

The parotoid secretion contains 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, which everyone shortens to 5-MeO-DMT, and bufotenine, which is 5-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine and is named after the genus Bufo itself. What it does not contain is N,N-DMT, the compound people mean when they say DMT, the one in ayahuasca. All three are tryptamines and all three are related, in the way that three siblings are related. They are not the same compound, they do not have the same duration, and they do not have the same effects.

US drug law makes the distinction for you. Schedule I of 21 CFR 1308.11 lists them as three separate entries with three separate DEA drug codes: dimethyltryptamine is 7435, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine is 7431, and bufotenine is 7433. If they were interchangeable there would be one listing. The nickname DMT frog gets the animal wrong and then gets the molecule wrong, which is a reasonable thing to be confused about and an unreasonable thing to stay confused about if you are considering putting any of it in your body.

There is a reason this one species is singled out. Its skin carries the enzyme 5-hydroxyindole-O-methyltransferase, which methylates bufotenine into 5-MeO-DMT, and as far as the published literature goes it is the only toad known to put 5-methoxyindolealkylamines in its skin at all. The first chemical characterisation was by Erspamer and colleagues in Experientia in 1965. So the animal is genuinely unusual. It is just not unusual in the way the nickname suggests.

How much is in there is a fair question with an unsatisfying answer, and we would rather give you the unsatisfying one than a clean number that is not real. Weil and Davis reported in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology in 1994 that one toad yields roughly 0.25 to 0.5 grams of dried secretion at up to 15 percent 5-MeO-DMT, so perhaps 75 milligrams from one animal. ICEERS puts the range at 5 to 15 percent of dry weight. A 2022 review in the Journal of Neurochemistry cites 20 to 30 percent. Those figures differ by a factor of six, which is the honest state of the literature, and it is also the practical point: secretion scraped off a wild animal is not a standardised product. Nobody collecting in the field knows the concentration of what they collected, so nobody smoking it knows the dose.

The part left out of most descriptions is everything else in the fluid. Alongside the tryptamines it carries bufadienolides, cardioactive steroids that act on the heart much as digitalis does, plus catecholamines including epinephrine and norepinephrine, serotonin, and a range of other indolealkylamines and sterols. It is worth being precise about one word too: this is a poison rather than a venom. A venom is injected. This is a defensive secretion the animal exudes, and it only reaches you if you put it in your mouth or dry it and inhale it.

Licking it is the myth, and it is also the dangerous version

Toad licking is a phrase that has followed this animal around since the 1980s, and it describes something that does not work and can hurt you. The tryptamines are not orally active in any useful way, while the bufadienolides very much are. Swallowing toad toxin has produced documented human poisonings and deaths, including fatalities linked to chan su, a toad-derived preparation used in traditional medicine and sold as a remedy and an aphrodisiac. In one reported case a woman died roughly two and a half hours after drinking it as a tea.

The National Park Service put out a public advisory in late October 2022 asking visitors to refrain from licking the Sonoran Desert toad, and it travelled around the world. It is worth being straight about that post: it was written humorously, and the Park Service has said it holds no records of visitors actually licking or harassing toads in its parks. The advice is sound. The implied epidemic was a joke that got reported as news.

The best documented harm is to dogs, and here the detail matters. The Merck Veterinary Manual names Incilius alvarius and the cane toad as the two species behind most serious toad poisoning in dogs, with hypersalivation, vomiting, cardiac arrhythmias, laboured breathing, cyanosis and seizures. It also draws a distinction people often flatten: poisoning by this species usually responds to treatment within about thirty minutes and death is uncommon, whereas the cane toad kills far more often. That is not a reason to relax. It is still an emergency, it still needs a vet, and raccoons have worked out what your dog has not, flipping a toad onto its back to feed on the belly while staying clear of the glands.

The route people actually use is different again: the secretion is dried and vaporised, at which point 5-MeO-DMT is absorbed through the lungs and effects arrive within seconds and are largely over inside twenty minutes or so. That route avoids the digestive tract but it does not make the material standardised and it does not tell you what else came along with it. The one field study of this practice, by Uthaug and colleagues in Psychopharmacology in 2019, followed people inhaling dried toad secretion in naturalistic settings with no control group, and participants reported acute difficulties including grief, anxiety, panic and paranoia, some of which persisted for weeks. An uncontrolled observational study cannot establish benefit or risk rates, and we are not going to present it as though it does. What it does show is that hard experiences are part of the picture.

One combination is worth naming on its own. Taking 5-MeO-DMT with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which includes the harmala alkaloids in ayahuasca preparations, has been associated with fatal outcomes. If anyone offers you the two together, that is the point to leave.

Where to go from here, depending on what you were actually asking

How a desert toad became a global commodity

Least Concern on a 2004 assessment, threatened under state law

The two answers people quote about this toad's status are both true and they point in opposite directions. The IUCN Red List records Incilius alvarius as Least Concern. That assessment was made by Hammerson and Santos-Barrera and it is dated 2004, which is before the retreat economy that now drives demand for the secretion existed in anything like its present form. NatureServe similarly ranks it G5, globally secure. Neither has been revisited against what has happened since.

State law tells a different story. New Mexico lists the species as threatened under 19.33.6 NMAC, where it appears as Ollotis alvaria, and collecting it there is unlawful. In California it is presumed extirpated and protected. Arizona designates it a Species of Greatest Conservation Need, Tier 2, in the state Wildlife Conservation Strategy, requires a licence to collect amphibians at all, and prohibits exporting live wildlife from the state, and possession with the intent to smoke the secretion can itself be a violation there. None of the three US states in the animal's range lets you carry it across a state line.

The pressure people describe is real but it has not been quantified, and we would rather say that plainly than put a number on it. Collectors take toads and milk them, rubbing under the chin to make the glands express, and the animals are also killed on roads and eaten by predators. The biology makes recovery slow: this is a species that takes years to reach sexual maturity and breeds only in the monsoon window, so removing adults is not a loss the population absorbs quickly. Robert Villa, president of the Tucson Herpetological Society, put the problem well in 2022: there is a perception of abundance, but that perception does not survive people beginning to remove large numbers. What does not exist is a range-wide population survey. There is no published study measuring the harvest or attributing a decline to it, so if someone quotes you a percentage collapse, ask them for the paper. We looked, and there is not one.

There is a straightforward way to take the animal out of the equation, which is to use the synthetic compound instead. That is what registered research uses, and it is what we use.

The ancient tradition is not in the historical record

A lot of the material sold around this toad is framed as the recovery of an ancient indigenous practice. The evidence does not support that framing, and it is worth separating two things that often get merged.

Plant-based snuffs containing 5-MeO-DMT do have genuine, documented Indigenous use in South America and the Caribbean. That is a real lineage and it belongs to real communities. Toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT is a different lineage, and the documented one begins in 1983 with a self-published pamphlet. The toad does appear in Mesoamerican art, which some authors have read as evidence that the effects of Bufo secretions were known long ago, but other scholars doubt the art carries that weight, and depiction is not the same as ingestion.

A 2026 paper in the journal Psychedelics puts the case directly, arguing that claims tying toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT to Comcaac ancestral tradition lack historical and ethnographic support, and that the ancient-tradition narrative was constructed to lend cultural legitimacy to a commercial practice. The authors trace how that story moved through retreat economies and, in doing so, raised demand and ecological pressure on the species.

We say this because it changes what a reader should trust. If a provider is telling you the toad is safe because people have used it for millennia, they are resting a safety claim on a history that does not exist.

Every registered trial uses the synthetic compound

It is fair to ask what science is actually being done here, and the registry answers it cleanly. As of 26 August 2026 a ClinicalTrials.gov search for 5-MeO-DMT returns 19 registered studies. Fifteen are interventional and four are observational, which is a distinction worth holding onto: an observational study does not administer anything. Sponsors include GH Research, Beckley Psytech, Usona Institute, Biomind Labs and University Hospital Basel.

Every interventional study on that list is Phase 1 or Phase 2. The largest enrolled 81 participants. There is no Phase 3 trial, there is no approved product, and 5-MeO-DMT is not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for any indication. We are not going to summarise Phase 1 and Phase 2 findings here as though they settled anything, because they do not.

The point that matters for this page is simpler and is not in dispute: not one of those registered studies administers toad secretion. They use synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, because a trial needs a known compound at a known purity and a known dose, and a wild animal's defensive secretion is none of those things.

5-MeO-DMT is a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States under 21 CFR 1308.11, DEA drug code 7431, placed there effective 19 January 2011, and bufotenine is separately Schedule I under code 7433. The live animal is regulated by state wildlife law rather than federal drug law, and it carries no federal Endangered Species Act listing, but collecting its secretion means possessing a Schedule I substance. Our own sessions use the synthetic compound at a known purity, for the reasons set out in our comparison of toad secretion and synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, and every participant clears cardiac and psychiatric screening first.

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