In this harrowing, incredibly reported story co-published by Science and Retraction Watch, Brendan Borrell uncovers how “Mei,” a 6-year-old girl in China, died a week after an experimental gene-editing trial went wrong—and how her medical team, led by neuroscientist Zilong Qiu, downplayed the risks to her parents, did not publicly disclose her death, and has faced no real accountability.

On 23 March 2025, the day before the procedure, the family settled into a shared room inside a crowded pediatric ward. When the other girl in the room broke into tears, Mei handed her one of her favorite stuffed animals: a blue bird. “She liked to give things to other kids,” Jason said.

The next day Mei put on a brave face as she was taken to the procedure room. Yu’s handpicked doctor inserted a needle between two vertebrae on her lower back and withdrew just over a teaspoon of spinal fluid to create space for the drug. Then, he swapped syringes and gently pressed down on the plunger, filling her spinal canal with viruses.

The president is selling Wall Street early access to his brain farts, and in return you get diarrhea from a salad.

If Congressional Republicans had any spine at all, they wouldn’t let something like this happen.

This article was originally published by Truthout on Aug. 03, 2026. It is shared here under a  Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has permeated our workplaces, where many employers have sought to boost productivity, cut labor costs, and eliminate jobs via the technology. A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that 1 in 5 workers now use AI in their jobs.

Organized labor’s response to the AI has been fraught. Where some see an inevitable shift that simply needs to be regulated and could potentially even create jobs, others see a dangerous trend that will result in further job losses along with a variety of other problems.

The tension is succinctly summarized by a recent Politico headline: “Voters fear AI. Unions want the jobs.”

The ongoing debate over data centers encapsulates this tension. Across the country, community members have spearheaded efforts to block their construction over concerns about water depletion, higher utility bills, noise, and air pollution.

In March, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) introduced the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Center Moratorium Act, which would institute a pause on data center construction until federal safeguards can be established. “We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue,” said Sanders in a statement on the bill. “The time for action is now.”

The legislative effort is backed by multiple unions including National Nurses United (NNU), the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the Association of Flight Attendants. “The unchecked explosion of AI data centers is a public health crisis, an environmental crisis, and a workers’ rights crisis,” declared NNU co-president Jamie Brown at a press conference announcing the bill.

However, there are also many unions that oppose any moratorium on data centers, particularly building trade unions that believe such construction can stimulate economic growth for struggling communities and provide members with work.

“We need the guardrails on AI, we just don’t think that a moratorium is the way to get there,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler told Punchbowl News in June.

The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) is even calling on members to contact their congressional representatives and make social media posts connected to the issue. “I’m a proud IBEW member and I oppose any bans on data center construction since these bans would eliminate good-paying union jobs,” reads suggested text for a social media post.

In June, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer appeared at the groundbreaking ceremony for Oracle and OpenAI’s planned 1.4-gigawatt data center in the state’s Saline Township. Alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Whitmer told the assembled crowd that the state was setting an example for “the rest of the world” by ensuring the “responsible adoption” of AI.

The project was opposed by many residents and local lawmakers. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) called it “disgusting” and said she was “disappointed” with Whitmer, while Democratic State Rep. Dylan Wegela of Garden City said it was a “complete betrayal of the working class” and that the governor had sold out “Michigan to big tech billionaires.”

However, the data center was backed by North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU), and its president, Sean McGarvey, was present at the groundbreaking. “America’s ability to lead in the next era of innovation depends, in part, on America’s ability to build, and our members are proud to be helping make that future possible,” he told the crowd.

Speaking to Politico in June, Senator Sanders’s chief political adviser, Faiz Shakir, said that the data center jobs heralded by certain unions won’t necessarily establish lasting occupations.

“It’s fine to say that [data centers will] be built with good-paying union jobs now — and I hope that that’s the case — but what we’re also looking for on behalf of the working class of America is long-term sustainability of jobs,” he said. “It doesn’t help a lot in our view if you have a short-term infusion of good, union paying jobs at the cost of the decimation of many, many long-term jobs.”

Support for AI within organized labor is receiving a boost from AI companies themselves. Last year, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced that it would create an AI training hub in New York City via $23 million from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

“The industry funding is part of a drive by U.S. tech companies to reshape education with generative A.I. chatbots,” noted The New York Times. “These tools, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot, can produce humanlike essays, research summaries and class quizzes.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the academy was inspired by the work of other unions, like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, and that the idea for the National Academy for AI Instruction sprang from a partnership established between Microsoft and the AFL-CIO in 2023.

“AI holds tremendous promise but huge challenges — and it’s our job as educators to make sure AI serves our students and society, not the other way around,” declared Weingarten. “The direct connection between a teacher and their kids can never be replaced by new technologies, but if we learn how to harness it, set commonsense guardrails and put teachers in the driver’s seat, teaching and learning can be enhanced.”

The way Weingarten is selling the hub is seemingly at odds with that of Roy Bahat, who first proposed the idea. In a LinkedIn post made shortly after the announcement, Bahat, who heads the venture capital firm Bloomberg Beta, essentially admits that the center can serve as a test case for applying AI more broadly — or, as Nolan Higdon put it in Truthdig: “Teachers are guinea pigs in Big Tech’s broader project to reengineer labor, one profession at a time.”

“If we can figure out how teachers should teach with and about AI, we can affect the lives of millions of educators, and millions and millions of young people,” explains Bahat in the post. “And if we can figure out how to train teachers on using AI, maybe we can figure it out for other occupations.”

The training hub, and union leadership’s wider connections to AI, have sparked criticism from labor activists and rank-and-file members.

“Using AI compliments, intensifies, and accelerates privatization of the public sector, and that’s in addition to any harm that it’s doing to work,” author and teacher union activist Lois Weiner told Truthout. “The labor movement should be contesting the idea that the imposition of AI is inevitable. That’s the labor movement’s responsibility.”

“What makes this so disturbing is that it raises fully the problem of union democracy,” she added. “These decisions were made without informed debate with union members. They have a moral responsibility to community and the kids we serve to have a voice.”

Trevor Griffey, a labor historian, lecturer at UCLA and UC Irvine, and vice president of legislation for AFT Local 1474, told Truthout that, since the collaboration was established, the AFT national has focused too much on trying to help teachers adapt to AI, and too little on organizing worker power in school districts. He believes unions should go on the offensive and push for deeper reforms, as AI is already having a dramatic impact. He points out that groups like the California Federation of Labor Unions are trying to bring together statewide unions in California to lobby on a range of bills targeting the dangers of Big Tech.

“The question is less where unions stand on AI or other forms of technology, and more how they organize to resist the unsafe and unethical use of automation at work,” he told Truthout. “Unions need to invest in strategic research and organizing to support workers most likely to be negatively impacted by employers’ adoption of AI-powered technology — both at work, and in building political power sufficient to prevent the unethical and unsafe use of new technology. Beyond just regulating AI, unions should push for full employment and/or universal income policies to mitigate the disruptions to people’s lives that AI-related layoffs are already having.”

These sentiments were echoed by Vishal Reddy, a union negotiator for nursing home workers and the executive director of WorkFour.

“Unions at the local, international, and federation levels need to put real money and organizing capacity into figuring out which affirmative AI-related demands — four-day workweek, UBI [universal basic income], AI dividends, and so on — actually resonate with a wide swath of workers,” he told Truthout. “Just like in bargaining, we want to know which affirmative policy would be most deeply and widely felt, so we can prioritize it in the fights ahead, including May Day 2028.”

“That means cross-union convenings, issue campaigns, commissioned polling and research, and real resourcing behind the bargaining fights where these policies are already surfacing,” Reddy added. “For example, if a fight over a 32-hour workweek is on the table somewhere, that’s exactly where the labor movement should be throwing its weight.”

At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, on ground the Army’s own contracting documents describe as previously used for grazing, a company owned by two of the largest investment firms in the world is preparing to build a data center.

That site sits about an hour’s drive from the nearest community, on the installation where the U.S. military conducts its primary chemical and biological weapons testing. Three parcels there total roughly 3,466 acres. One of them, about 1,201 acres, is already spoken for.

It is one of at least a dozen military installations the Army and the Department of the Air Force have opened to commercial data center developers over the past year and a half. Two of those deals are real; the rest are still proposals.

Land-for-Computing

In late March, the Army conditionally selected two companies to enter exclusive negotiations to build and operate commercial hyperscale data centers on Army land.

Carlyle, the global investment firm, was picked for roughly 1,384 acres at Fort Bliss, Texas. CyrusOne, a data center operator jointly held by funds managed by KKR and BlackRock, was picked for the parcel at Dugway. Each project is estimated to cost about $2 billion, according to the Financial Times.

The companies will be responsible for financing, building, operating, maintaining and eventually decommissioning the facilities, the Army said, on what it called “underutilized but non-excess Army land at no upfront cost to taxpayers.” In exchange for the land, the service gets access to computing power.

It all runs through the Army’s Enhanced Use Lease program, driven by a Trump executive order directing agencies to open non-excess federal land to data center development. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is handling lease negotiations and environmental review.

“AI is a strategic asset for the Army,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said in the March announcement. “It is a force multiplier, supports future transformation and requirements, keeps the Army ahead of our adversaries, and generates resiliency across the force.” Driscoll told the Wall Street Journal that the Fort Bliss facility would be “the first hyper-scale data center that the Pentagon has ever done.”

Which Bases and How Close to Housing?

Only Fort Bliss and Dugway have been awarded so far, and even those remain conditional, pending negotiation. Beyond them, federal contracting documents show the Army considering data centers at Fort Hood, Texas, and Fort Bragg, N.C.

The Department of the Air Force put out its own call in 2025 for private AI data center projects on unused land at Arnold Air Force Base, Tenn., Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Ariz., and Robins Air Force Base, Ga.

More recently, it sought bidders for facilities at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Eielson Air Force Base and Clear Space Force Station in Alaska. Acreage varies enormously; for example, Fort Hood has 207 acres on offer. Fort Bliss has nearly seven times that.

Dugway is remote by design, although not every site is. Contracting documents show the Army weighing a parcel at Fort Hood within a half-mile of residential and commercial property, and several potential locations at Fort Bragg within one mile of civilian areas and a half-mile of civilian housing.

Proximity to the population is what has made data centers a heated topic in the civilian world. Nearly $156 billion in projects nationwide have been delayed or canceled after local opposition, according to Data Center Watch.

In Virginia, which holds the world’s highest concentration of the facilities, a state-funded study found residents’ monthly energy bills could rise by $14 to $37 by 2040.

Army Officials Say They’re Ready

“So I think the difference between us, the Army, doing a data center, and say Meta or Google, is we’re part of the communities that are there, and we are going to engage with them on a routine and regular basis to look for solutions that work for everyone, right?” Col. John Oliver, executive officer for Deputy Army Under Secretary Dave Fitzgerald, told Defense One. “Because, yes, we understand that there’s been consternation with data centers.”

Two requirements attached to these projects do not apply to commercial builds off base. Proposals must include net-zero water usage and a power plan that does not draw on the local electrical grid. Bidders were also required to describe plans for “local outreach and engagement” and to assess “any risks or opposition” to the project.

The Defense Department’s own procurement documents, obtained by the trade publication Data Center Dynamics, rate the water risk for the El Paso area as “Extremely High.” Data centers consume water to cool their servers. Fort Bliss is where the Army wants its flagship.

Army officials want the project to be a net contributor rather than a net drain. In the spring, Fitzgerald traveled to Fort Bliss for a listening session with the commander of the 1st Armored Division, community members, El Paso Water, El Paso Electric and Carlyle. One idea on the table is having the developer drill a new well to feed the city’s desalination plant, offsetting what the data center uses.

“We are encouraging Carlyle to do that, so actually make it net-positive,” Oliver told Defense One. “We don’t know if that’s an engineering solution that we can actually get to yet, but we’re actively working toward that as a part of the process.”

Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies data center development, said the approach is sound, and that communities which have accepted the facilities tend to be the ones told the full details in advance.

“People want to know up-front, you know, where the energy is coming from, how much water is being used, how much the overall cost is going to be, and what the noise levels are,” West said.

Congress Not Settled

Rep. Cory Mills, a Florida Republican, secured a provision in the House version of the fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill. This bill bars the Defense Department from leasing land for data centers unless developers agree not to install equipment containing components made in China, Russia, Iran or North Korea. The restriction covers certain printed circuit boards, advanced semiconductors and chipsets the department considers a security risk.

“Honored to pass this amendment to protect our military installations from Chinese components being used in data centers on our installations,” Mills wrote on X.

The Army objected. The measure would create a “federal land penalty,” a service official told Federal News Network, imposing rules on companies building on installations that would not apply to identical projects built anywhere else. “We want Congress to incentivize companies to build on secure federal land, rather than creating barriers that drive them away,” the official said.

Rep. John Garamendi, a California Democrat, proposed requiring the Pentagon to evaluate a data center’s energy and water consumption, noise and light pollution, and effects on security and supply chains before finalizing any deal. House Armed Services Republicans rejected it.

“We’re not opposed to data centers,” Garamendi said. “We just want to make sure that if we’re going to put a data center on a federal facility, that federal facility is not going to be degraded by the data center.”

His questions were installation questions. “Is there encroachment on training and operations and the physical and supply chain of security?” he asked.

Senate Armed Services Republicans defeated a separate Democratic amendment that would have blocked leasing until the Pentagon finalizes a data center strategy. House appropriators, meanwhile, adopted language acknowledging that data centers “place significant strain on energy and water resources and communities have resisted such projects.”

Available Information

For anyone stationed at or living near one of these installations, several things are known for sure. Only two projects have been awarded, and both remain conditional. Fort Hood, Fort Bragg and the Air Force sites are solicitations, not commitments.

Read full story here…

Forced disappearances have plagued Mexico for decades. In 2019, something remarkable happened: Twenty-one disappeared people were found, alive. They had been toiling in narco-slavery camps, an under-covered aspect of Mexico’s illicit drug trade. But there wasn’t a happy ending. (This story was originally published in Spanish by Quinto Elemento Lab):

Freedom had not been kind to the captives. Few had been able to regain even the wretched standard of living that had pushed them into the arms of the cartels in the first place. Many were scarred by paranoia, trapped in addiction or suffering mental illnesses. Some had been abandoned by their partners or families. More than one, we learned, died after being rescued, some by their own hand. We came to feel that these men had been triply betrayed: first by the narcos who had lured them into the mountains, then by the government that failed to look for them, and finally by a society that refused to welcome them back into its fold.

We are telling their stories not because we hope to secure justice, but simply to establish the truth. This was a modest ambition shared by one of our interlocutors, Andrés. He told us that many of the survivors’ accounts had been doubted. He’d even read criticisms on social media: That’s what they deserve for being shiftless and lazy. “Those people should try thinking before they speak, because they don’t know when they might suddenly find themselves in a similar situation,” Andrés said. “They might be lucky enough to be rescued, or unlucky enough to die out there. I decided to give this interview because this situation’s not going to change. In Mexico, there’s sexual slavery, human trafficking, forced labour. This didn’t start yesterday; it’s been going on for many years.” 

Today, Republicans on the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary voted to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination to be U.S. Attorney General to the full Senate.

Stand Up America’s Managing Director of Policy & Political Affairs, Brett Edkins, issued the following statement on Blanche’s confirmation:

“Every Senate Judiciary Republican just endorsed Todd Blanche’s extreme agenda for the Department of Justice: politically motivated prosecutions of the president’s perceived enemies, defending and giving taxpayer-funded settlements to January 6th insurrectionists, burying the Epstein files, and shielding Trump and his family from the IRS.

“Now it’s up to the full Senate. Are there still Republicans willing to stand up to the president—willing to say they’re against weaponizing the Justice Department, against shielding Trump and his family from accountability, and against protecting predators in the Epstein files? The Senate doesn’t need unanimous courage to block Blanche—it needs a few Republicans willing to put country over party.”

If we can get through the RFK Jr. era of public health without an outbreak more serious than Covid-19, it will be a miracle of biology.

For a so-called short session, a lot happened at the NC General Assembly in 2026, but a few issues also remain unresolved.

Five takeaways from the 2026 legislative session is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s more than 11 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Kimon de Greef | Longreads | August 4, 2026 | 4,741 words (17 minutes) 

In 1935, two chemists at Tokyo’s Imperial University synthesized a new molecule and unwittingly launched one of the strangest narratives of the psychedelic age. Toshio Hoshino and Kenya Shimodaira were working on a family of compounds known as the tryptamines, which occur widely in nature and have a range of intriguing biological properties. The neurotransmitter serotonin, which among other things regulates mood, cognition, and social behavior, is a tryptamine. So are many psychoactive drugs, although this would only be discovered later on. The Japanese scientists had recently completed the world’s first laboratory synthesis of a molecule called bufotenine, which is produced by toads and certain species of mushrooms. Now, via a sequence of reactions, they engineered a close chemical relative. Diagrams of the two tryptamines looked nearly identical, each represented by two angular rings and a tail, resembling microscopic organisms; the only difference lay in the shape of the head. Such tiny changes in chemical structure “can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad’s switch points,” as the writer and organic chemist Primo Levi once wrote. The new molecule’s name, following scientific convention, would be 5-MeO-DMT.

Hoshino and Shimodaira published their findings in the Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan, leaving no explanation as to why they had conducted these experiments. The early 20th century was a time of wide-ranging exploration in organic chemistry, with researchers synthesizing new compounds to assess their pharmacological potential or better understand the reactions by which one substance could be transformed into another. Many of these compounds had no evident utility, such as 5-MeO-DMT, which for decades was thought only to be a product of the laboratory.

This changed in 1959, when the molecule was isolated from a shrub native to Brazil. Not long afterward, 5-MeO-DMT was detected in Anadenanthera peregrina, a leguminous tree from the Caribbean and South America. For thousands of years, Indigenous communities had been harvesting its slender bean pods to prepare snuffs called cohoba or yopo, which were typically inhaled using hollow bones or bamboo shoots—the earliest known use of psychedelics in the New World. “With this powder they lose consciousness and become like drunken men,” Christopher Columbus observed in the 15th century. The Spaniards regarded such practices as demonic and sought to eradicate them as they colonized the region. After witnessing a yopo ceremony in the Andes, where the snuff was dispensed from a snail shell with a spoon carved from the bone of a puma, one missionary reported, “They summoned the devil.”

The rich biodiversity of the Amazon also yielded other hallucinogenic snuffs containing 5-MeO-DMT. These were prepared from trees in the nutmeg family and were known, in some local communities, as “semen of the sun.” In the early 1950s, a distinguished Harvard scholar named Richard Evans Schultes had documented the snuffs being used for “witchcraft, divination and the diagnosis of illness” by the medicine men of more than half a dozen tribes, describing the effects as “virulently potent.” Schultes expressed incredulity that such a widely used substance had gone unstudied for so long. “It makes one wonder how many more narcotic plants, up to now obscured by better-known ones, still wait to be discovered,” he wrote. These snuffs were only later found to contain 5-MeO-DMT.

A tall, bespectacled man who wore a pith helmet in the jungle, Schultes was considered the father of modern ethnobotany, a field that studies the traditional uses of plants. He was also one of the world’s foremost experts on psychedelic rituals in an era before they had captured mainstream attention. In the 1930s, he had uncovered the ceremonial use of psilocybin mushrooms in southern Mexico and identified the source of an ancient Aztec sacrament as the seeds of a native morning glory vine, which contained a chemical cousin of LSD. He went on to live in the Amazon for a decade, documenting thousands of medicinal plant traditions while researching alternative rubber sources for the US military. The only provisions he carried were instant coffee and tins of Boston baked beans.

Even then, Schultes recognized that incursions from the wider world threatened the survival of Indigenous knowledge. “Time is running out,” he once warned. “The Indians’ botanical knowledge is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves.” Yet capturing this knowledge, as an outsider, was a formidable endeavor. In addition to navigating remote and inhospitable regions, ethnobotanists had to draw on scattered records from disparate disciplines—botany, anthropology, archaeology, plant chemistry, pharmacology, history, geography and sundry other tangential fields of the sciences and arts,” as Schultes put it. There was always the risk that in selecting and piecing together this information one might draw false conclusions.

In the 1960s, while Schultes was continuing his ethnobotanical research, 5-MeO-DMT was detected in numerous other plants around the world, including a type of grass that could cause grazing sheep to convulse uncontrollably, a phenomenon known as “staggers.” Then, in 1964, the molecule showed up in an animal for the first time, detected in the skins of Sonoran Desert toads, a species that had formerly been of interest only to the occasional herpetologist. This breakthrough was thanks to an Italian chemist named Vittorio Erspamer. Earlier in his career, Erspamer had discovered the neurotransmitter serotonin—a pivotal moment in the field of neuroscience, laying the groundwork for understanding chemical signaling in the brain. His lifelong interest was pharmacognosy, or the study of drugs from natural sources; by the end of his career, he would identify and name more than 60 new compounds, including from octopuses, shellfish, and sea anemones, and twice be nominated for the Nobel Prize. “Land and sea are populated by a miraculous variety of creatures, representing the outcome of the tremendous biosynthetic work carried out by Nature over hundreds of millions of years,” he once wrote.

No animals captured his attention like amphibians, which he described as “an inexhaustible mine of active compounds.” In his laboratory, which was decorated with pictures of frogs and toads, Erspamer and his assistants minced the skins of different species with scissors and exposed them to a variety of tests: gas and paper chromatography, X-ray fluorescence analysis. Colleagues from around the world sent him samples by airmail, and in the early 1960s he received 21 Sonoran Desert toad specimens that had been skinned and dried in Arizona. (At the time, the species was classified as Bufa alvarius, a name that remains in widespread use despite being formally changed in 2006.) The findings were striking. All toads produce bufotenine, but this was the only species among some of the most chemically diverse animals in the world that contained 5-MeO-DMT.

Erspamer’s study was published in a technical journal in 1965, just as the psychedelic revolution was getting started. At around this time, a small cohort of psychonauts began using synthetic 5-MeO-DMT, alerted by its discovery in South American snuffs, but it would be decades before anyone in this milieu realized that the same molecule could be obtained from a North American toad. Knowledge of psychedelic toads was fractured across niche academic disciplines, and even Erspamer appears not to have been aware that 5-MeO-DMT had hallucinogenic properties. But over the next two decades, something remarkable happened: A misleading narrative about psychedelic toads took hold, involving not only the wrong molecule but the wrong species entirely. Although 5-MeO-DMT can produce experiences of overwhelming intensity, often interpreted as encounters with ultimate truth, the history of toad smoking is riddled with false leads and misinformation.

In 1956, a psychiatrist named Howard Fabing co-authored a study in Science, the prestigious academic journal, about the effects of a purported hallucinogen. Like many others in his field, he had become fascinated by drugs that appeared to evoke states of psychosis, inspired by the discovery, the previous decade, of LSD. People had reported overpowering hallucinations after consuming tiny doses of acid, as the substance would become known in psychedelic culture. “My field of vision fluctuated and swam like an image in a distorted mirror,” its creator, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann, recalled of his first trip (during which he somehow wobbled home from work on his bicycle). Accounts like these, Fabing wrote, had “precipitated the whole field of biochemistry into a new look at the brain.” Psychoanalysis had long been the dominant paradigm for treating mental illness, but now another possibility was arising. If certain compounds could seemingly induce the symptoms of insanity, then perhaps insanity was a result of faulty brain chemistry—and could thus be treated with psychiatric drugs.

Fabing’s interest lay in using psychedelics not as therapeutic agents but as tools for understanding how a healthy mind could malfunction. This was seen as especially urgent in the 1950s, when around half the hospital beds in the developed world were occupied by patients with schizophrenia and other mental disorders. “The stakes are high,” Fabing wrote. Scientists had begun revisiting anthropological accounts of hallucinogenic rituals—iboga ceremonies in Central Africa, peyote cults in the American Southwest. The term “psychedelics” was not yet in use; instead, such substances were known as psychotomimetics, reflecting an underlying belief that they induced not illumination but madness. Intriguingly, many of them shared a chemical structure with serotonin.

This line of inquiry had led Fabing to bufotenine, the tryptamine relative of 5-MeO-DMT that Hoshino and Shimodaira had originally synthesized. Besides occurring in most toad species, bufotenine was known to occur in fly agaric mushrooms, the iconic red toadstools of fairy tales, and thought to be the origin of the Norse berserker legend, involving warriors who reputedly consumed the mushrooms and entered such frenzied states that they were invincible in battle—the root of the phrase “going berserk.” Separate accounts from Siberia described nomadic herders using fly agaric in shamanic ceremonies, taking pains to prolong its psychoactive effects. “The urine of persons intoxicated with fly agaric is not wasted,” an anthropologist noted in 1901. “The drunkard himself drinks it to prolong his hallucinations, or he offers it to others as a treat.”

Fabing hypothesized that schizophrenia might arise from the abnormal production of bufotenine in the brain, possibly instead of serotonin. To explore the compound’s effects in more controlled settings, he and a colleague injected subjects with escalating doses and monitored their reactions. One man experienced a bodily numbness that he described as “a pleasant Martini feeling.” Another became light-headed and reported visual hallucinations. “I see white straight lines with a black background. I can’t trace a pattern,” he exclaimed. “Now there are red, green, and yellow dots, very bright, like they were made out of fluorescent cloth, moving like blood cells through capillaries, weaving in and out of the white lines.” Based on the results of this experiment, the scientists concluded that bufotenine had hallucinogenic properties similar to LSD.

This finding, published in a reputed journal, would later cross disciplinary lines and be picked up in the rush to solve a major anthropological mystery. Across Mesoamerica, archaeologists had unearthed a preponderance of toad artifacts, including detailed depictions of the parotid glands (located at the top of the neck) in which toads produce their defense toxins. Each of the great civilizations—the Olmecs, the Mayans, the Aztecs—had left behind extensive toad artworks: sculptures, altars, friezes, ceramics. There were middens of toad bones in what appeared to be ritual contexts, sometimes comprising thousands of skeletons. What significance had these ancient societies ascribed to toads?

In the 1970s, amid surging popular interest in psychedelics, a compelling academic theory arose: that toads had been used as ritual intoxicants, much like psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca. It was well established that Indigenous cultures across the region had performed healing or shamanic rituals with psychedelics. Of the psychoactive plants identified worldwide, close to 90 percent were native to the Americas, with more than a dozen psychedelic traditions documented in Mexico alone. Fabing’s research had suggested that bufotenine, which occurs in many species of toads, was hallucinogenic. The pieces of the puzzle all seemed to connect.

There was also an obvious candidate species: Bufa marinus, more commonly known as the cane toad, a lumbering, fleshy creature that can grow up to ten inches in length and weigh as much as six pounds, a little less than a typical newborn baby. Cane toads were native to Central America, dwelling in marshlands and swamps. They corresponded to many of the archaeological depictions of toads, with bulging parotid glands, and their bones were frequently excavated during archaeological digs. It wasn’t long before researchers were confidently asserting that there had been a psychedelic cane toad tradition in Mesoamerica. “The Olmecs had a predisposition for consuming toads,” one scholar wrote in a book about the region’s archaeology. “Consumption of these toads produces hallucinations.”

Yet the theory had a glaring weakness. In addition to bufotenine, the cane toad produces an array of other chemicals, several of them acutely toxic. Its glands secrete two classes of compounds, bufogenin and bufotoxin, that can be lethal to humans even in tiny doses. Similar molecules are found in the skins of many toad species around the world and have long been used for preparing poisons. Women in ancient Rome used toad secretions to murder their husbands; 16th-century Italian chemists laced salts with toad toxins for poisoning the food of enemies. At English country fairs in the 17th and 18th centuries, charlatan doctors hawked medicines by feeding live toads to hired assistants, who fainted or became delirious in front of onlookers, only to revive upon swallowing whichever concoction was being advertised. The assistants survived by lining their mouths and stomachs with oil or by consuming large meals in advance. They became known as “toadies,” a word that has drifted from being associated with charlatanism to its modern definition: a sycophant or obsequious helper.*

The driving question for proponents of the psychedelic cane toad hypothesis thus became how precolonial Mesoamerican cultures might have isolated bufotenine from these deadlier defense toxins. In the early 1970s, an American graduate student named Timothy Knab went searching the Mexican countryside for a healer, or curandero, who could provide an answer. Knab eventually came across an elderly man in the mountains of Veracruz who claimed to remember a potion that had not been used in decades. The man ground the glands of 10 cane toads into a paste, added lime water and ash, then boiled the mixture overnight. This was stirred into corn beer, filtered, mixed with cornmeal, and left for several days to ferment before being heated to drive off the remaining moisture. The result was a hardened doughlike substance. The curandero refused to consume it and only reluctantly consented to dose Knab, who recorded the experience in dissociative terms. “Profuse sweating is noted along with a sudden increase in heartbeat,” he wrote. “The heartbeat becomes continuously harder and stronger. A pronounced chill sets in with twitching of the facial and eye muscles. A pounding headache and delirium shortly follow the onset of twitching.” For several hours, he lay in front of a fire, sweating and unable to move.

In a seeming blow to the theory, Knab reported no hallucinations from this experiment. But his account, which he presented at an anthropology conference in Mexico City, stirred the imagination of another young scholar. Alison Kennedy was the heiress of a wealthy Palo Alto family who would later adopt the alter ego Queen Mu and launch an influential cyberculture magazine called Mondo 2000, a futuristic mash-up of technology, psychedelics, and arts writing. Before all of this, Kennedy was an anthropology graduate student with an interest in Mesoamerican iconography; this had led her, almost inevitably, to the question of toads. She turned her eye to the artifacts of the Olmecs, who died out around twenty-five hundred years ago and are considered the first major civilization in Mesoamerica. Jaguars featured prominently among their artworks, which many researchers had interpreted as a sign of mythological significance. But Kennedy concluded that this had been a case of mistaken identity. Many of the artworks weren’t jaguars, she argued. They were toads.

In support, she presented dozens of illustrations, focusing on what she described as “the attributes of toadiness”: downturned mouths, inward-facing forelimbs, glandular swellings. She became drawn, like so many others in her field, to the idea that toads had been used in psychedelic ceremonies.

To account for the toxicity of the toads, Kennedy proposed a solution that reads like science fiction from the magazine she later founded. In addition to toads, the Olmecs had left behind depictions of many other animals, including ducks, which have highly efficient livers. Perhaps ducks had been used as bio-processors, feeding on toads and metabolizing their poisonous compounds so that humans could safely consume them. Kennedy drew attention to Olmec figurines of people wearing what appeared to be duck-billed masks. These masks would have provided protection from “venom spatters” as putative toad shamans “stood at their toad altars lancing the parotid glands,” she posited. This relied on the assumption that ducks could eat toads without being poisoned themselves. To investigate further, Kennedy visited a zoo in Texas, where she and the head aviculturist flung some cane toads into a duck pond. The ducks had been reared in captivity and were “toad-naive,” as Kennedy wrote, yet they pursued the toads with avidity, juggling their soft bodies before gulping them down. Kennedy described this behavior as “singular and apparently wholly instinctive.” Duck bills have neither nerve endings for sensing toad toxins nor blood vessels for absorbing them; the juggling movements were conceivably an adaptation for rinsing poisons into the water. Two of the duck species in the pond happened to be native to Mexico, home of both the Olmec culture and Bufa marinus. Here, at least, was proof that ducks had an appetite for the toads.

Now Kennedy took her suppositions even further, reexamining the literature on a famous Olmec site where thousands of toad skeletons had been excavated. The ruins featured an elaborate system of water channels hewn from some three hundred tons of rock, running between a sculpture of a jaguar (or possibly a toad) and an enormous stone receptacle in the shape of a duck. The main channel drained into a series of smaller pools too shallow for human bathing; confounded researchers had guessed that they were for unspecified “ritual use.” With a flourish, Kennedy now presented her final claim: That this complex hydraulic system had been designed as an integrated bufo-culture station, including both spawning grounds for toads and a captive population of bio-processing ducks. These bold ideas won her a prize at an anthropology conference in 1979, but there was one problem: No one had taken the obvious next step and tested whether the duck livers were in fact hallucinogenic. For all the scholarly attention it had garnered, the mystery of the psychedelic toad remained unresolved.

In the early 1980s, after reading about Fabing’s bufotenine study, a British artist named Adrian Morgan began a series of personal experiments with toads. These included “licking poison glands, rubbing animals against my forehead, and in one instance collecting venom with blotting paper . . . and then eating the paper,” he reported. Disappointingly, Morgan experienced no hallucinations from these tests, which seemed only to aggravate his research subjects. “One specimen of green toad showed its disgust by leaping from an open window into the celery patch below me,” he wrote. “It was never seen again.”

One spring, Morgan visited a forest outside London and came upon two dead female toads in a pond. He took them home, where he pounded their skins and poison glands in a mortar. Then he snuffed the residue and took notes in an increasingly jagged hand:

3:41 p.m. First quantity ingested into right nostril. Within one minute, nostril strongly anesthetized.

3:49 Sneezing violently, profuse sweating of forehead.

4:03 Fleeting pain at temples.

4:05 Salivating strongly.

4:15 Thick saliva at back of throat causing tendency to gag.

4:32 Feeling very tired.

Midway through, colors briefly appeared richer and moving objects left trails in his vision, like speed blurs. Morgan described these sensations as “only slightly psychedelic” and concluded, “The experience was not pleasant.”

Yet the notion of hallucinogenic toads persisted, cropping up in stranger contexts still. While Morgan was pursuing his investigations, stories of psychedelic cane toad use began surfacing in Australia, of all places, where the animals had been introduced in the 1930s to control pests on plantations. The toads had gone rogue, consuming native frogs, birds, insects, small marsupials, even Ping-Pong balls and cigarette butts flicked toward them at pubs—almost everything except the swarms of sugarcane beetles they had been imported to feed on. Australia’s plague of beetles had been compounded by a plague of toads. 

This was possible in large part because toads are opportunistic and superbly adaptable creatures. They are residents of the gutter, the verge, the ditch. They can hunker down when times are bad and burst to life when conditions favor them. They are capable of producing millions of eggs. In their present form, toads have existed for at least 30 million years, enduring all kinds of planetary upheaval, from ice ages to the rise of humans. Released onto a new continent, the cane toads marauded unstoppably.

In the 1980s, 50 years into the invasion, an Australian filmmaker named Mark Lewis began working on a satirical documentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, which Werner Herzog later declared to be his favorite film of all time. Hundreds of millions of the animals had taken up residence across Australia’s east coast, expanding their occupied range at a rate of more than 15 miles annually. Researchers dubbed the toads “an amphibian weed.” Streets were slicked with flattened toad carcasses, which emitted a fishy aroma. Bands of vigilantes went after the animals with cricket bats or swerved deliberately to run them over, but the toads continued their relentless spread.

During his research for the film, Lewis picked up on a rumor that people were getting high on the toads. He ended up speaking by phone with a man who claimed to have been in prison, where the inmates “would race to grab a toad if it found its way inside the compound,” Lewis told me. His source was unwilling to appear on camera, so Lewis hired an actor to deliver the lines. “You use a little quantity at first, then larger,” the man mumbles in the film, which identifies him as a “cane toad drug abuser” from the town of Mullumbimby. He makes a reference to Carlos Castaneda’s writings, saying how users of peyote would “see the world through the consciousness of the cactus. “With a weak laugh, the man adds, “The toad’s the same.”

The documentary also features a detective from Queensland who attests that people in “hippie communes” have been tripping on cane toads since at least the 1970s. “When heroin and other drugs weren’t freely available, the next best alternative was to go out and get a cane toad, “the detective explains. These toads would be boiled down in billycans to produce a sludgy brew, which the hippies purportedly drank. “From what I’ve been told, they had fantastic color hallucinations, “the detective says. “It warped their sense of time.”

Australians have a certain reputation for toughness, but even the hardiest among them would likely have been poisoned by the bufotoxins in this recipe. Yet Lewis also heard about a more plausible mode of ingestion. A local narcotics squad was said to possess a jar of confiscated dried cane toad skins that could be “shredded and put into a hookah or a pipe and smoked,” apparently causing intense hallucinatory effects. At one point during his research (“to see what all the fuss was about”) Lewis rolled a small quantity with tobacco into a joint. “I smoked it, and the only result was that I got a bad headache,” he told me. “I would not recommend that kids try this at home.”

But in 1988, the year Lewis’s film came out, a moral panic began that swept the concept of psychedelic toads into popular culture. “I feel partly responsible,” Lewis told me decades later, sounding mystified. This strange sequence began with media reports in the United States of Australian hippies “forsaking traditional drugs for cane toads, which they boil for a slimy, potentially lethal cocktail.” Later that year, a doctor at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, a San Francisco drug treatment facility established during the Summer of Love, jokingly mentioned the “rare 1960s practice of toad licking” during a lecture. Afterward, the clinic was inundated with calls from reporters around the world, wanting to know about “crazed hippies licking toads in the mountains,” as the clinic’s director later recalled. Staff assured the journalists that there was no evidence of toads being licked in the United States, but the idea, like some invasive animal, took on a life of its own. At a conference on crack cocaine the following year, the Berkeley police chief announced that toad licking was a “problem that comes up from time to time.” An official from the Drug Enforcement Administration was quoted saying that cane toad secretions were “in the same (legal) category as heroin or LSD.” Bufotenine had indeed been listed as a Schedule I substance in 1967—even though, at the time, there had been virtually no reports of anybody using it. Citing the DEA, news articles now declared toad licking “the latest way to hallucinate.” (One headline: ”A Desperation High: Crack? Coke? Croak!”) The DEA official later clarified that he had said nothing about toad licking, but the phrase continued spawning fresh rounds of coverage until, as Scientific American later put it, “reality imitated fiction.”

In 1989, two teenagers were hospitalized in New Mexico after licking toads, which they had read about in the papers. The following year, two men were admitted to an emergency ward in Canada, bewildered and vomiting, after reportedly scraping the back of a pet cane toad and eating its secretions on crackers; the tabloids later claimed that one of the men had committed suicide after being discharged. Dubiously sourced accounts followed of Australians who died after drinking toad tea and a man supposedly being imprisoned in South America on toad-licking charges. Hungry for copy, journalists pressed experts for comment. “It gives them a kick like alcohol,” an Australian herpetologist professed, of the toad users. In a foretelling of toad mythmaking to come, it had become difficult to tell fact, conjecture, and fabrication apart. “This is a case of media feeding on media,” a reporter who covered the story would later reflect. Psychedelic toads, as a 1993 journal article titled “Misuse and Legend in the ‘Toad Licking’ Phenomenon” described it, had become an “informational epidemic.”

Meanwhile, the television drama L.A. Law ran an episode involving a retiree accused of toad licking, and Beavis and Butt-Head licked toads on MTV. (“Tastes like chicken,” Beavis remarked.) Psychedelic toads also captured the attention of lawmakers: A state representative in Georgia cautioned his colleagues about “the extreme dangers of toad licking,” while a representative in South Carolina proposed sentencing offenders to community service at zoos. The men appear to have been speaking in jest, but Canadian police were serious when, in 1991, they urged officials to ban imports of cane toads and outlaw them as pets, citing “the deaths of several Australian drug users.” Before long, Australia also passed laws against psychoactive toad use, listing bufotenine as a controlled substance. Toad licking had become so ingrained in popular consciousness that three decades later, while I was working on this book, people continuously brought it up as a point of reference. Yet the hype about cane toads obscured a crucial detail. As the anthropologist Wade Davis, who became drawn into solving the mystery, would later write, “An animal venom that contained no hallucinogenic agent but that did contain lethal poisons was not likely to inspire a new drug craze.” A satirical film had broadcast rumors that snowballed into full-blown hysteria about cane toads, but there was still no evidence that they were psychoactive at all.

Kimon de Greef is a journalist from South Africa and the author of The Ego Trip, an investigative nonfiction book about psychedelic toads. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic, and other publications. He has coauthored a book about abalone poaching and holds a conservation biology master’s from the University of Cape Town.

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A new independent documentary is set to chronicle the remarkable transformation of Australian actor Damien Richardson by tracing his journey from a familiar television face to one of Australia’s most recognisable critics of the government’s draconian COVID-era response.

Titled Becoming Damo, the film follows Richardson across approximately six years as he underwent what filmmaker Nicholas Wightman describes as a period of “profound personal and political change” during one of the darkest chapters in Victoria’s recent history.

As the city of Melbourne endured some of the world’s longest and harshest COVID restrictions, Richardson—best known for his roles in Australian film and television, including Neighbours and Jack Irish—emerged as a prominent figure in demonstrations opposing lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and government-imposed restrictions.

According to the documentary’s synopsis, Becoming Damo follows Richardson’s evolution “from actor to protester,” documenting his progression from speaking at rallies to becoming increasingly vocal in his criticism of governments, courts, and the political trajectory of Australia.

The documentary unfolds against the backdrop of Melbourne’s heavy-handed approach to COVID, where the state had enforced some of the toughest restrictions in the world. This inevitably gave rise to a growing resistance among the public, and as freedom protests intensified with mass demonstrations drawing tens of thousands into the city’s CBD, so too did Richardson’s public profile.

But rather than presenting a partisan and biased account, the filmmakers say Becoming Damo seeks to document events without directing audiences towards a predetermined conclusion. Instead, viewers are invited to “reach their own conclusions.”

“Neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of its subject,” the synopsis explains, “Becoming Damo observes a complicated character moving through an equally complicated moment in Australian history.”

Speaking with Caldron Pool, Richardson said the documentary represents far more than his personal story.

“As far as I am concerned this documentary is testament to the spirit of resistance ignited in so many Australians because of the hypocrisy of the COVID lockdowns,” Richardson said.

“Unfortunately, this period has become indicative of a wider corruption that besets our nation.”

For supporters, Richardson came to embody a growing movement of Australians who believed governments had exceeded their authority in the name of public health.

The film, which is dedicated to the people of Melbourne, has no release date yet but is expected to drop later this year or early next.

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