A Bad Trip with the Toad Shaman

The Observer's longform is informative, sad, scary, and hilarious in the sense to the the 2021 state constitutional amendment sent to the public by the Lege, over public health measures restricting COVID church services, now being used by New Age wingnuts to start "churches" devoted to smoking toad venom:

Entheogenic churches seem to be spreading rapidly in Texas. Ian Benouis, an Austin-based attorney, says he has helped organize dozens such “medicine churches,” which use bufo or other psychedelic substances such as ayahuasca or kambo. He explained that the state provides the best legal protection in the country for these types of churches because a 2021 amendment to the Texas Constitution prohibits the state or local government from limiting the services of religious organizations. An entheogen is a psychoactive substance, usually derived from a plant, that induces altered states of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes. Many researchers prefer that term to psychedelic when referring to substances like bufo.

Beyond that hilarious petard hoisting, the scary part is that this is toad venom, is poisonous, and unlike LSD, psilocybin or ayahuasca, has rarely been studied. And, per the piece, it is NOT "ancient medicine" of Sonoran Indians, which makes the provenance of what fake churches are peddling an additional issue.

And, per the piece, the Comcaac Indians, the self-name for what outsiders call Seri, themselves seem a mix of New Agey projectionism and self-marketing over that:

Rodrigo Rentería-Valencia, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Central Washington University, said he thinks bufo is essentially a marketing tool for some Comcaac people. 

“The use of bufo, in my opinion, became a platform for certain Comcaac individuals to be able to offer a market to non-Indigenous people that are in this New Age thing to explore a ‘spiritual dimension’ in a ‘real indigenous context,’” Rentería-Valencia said. He specializes in indigenous societies in the Sonoran Desert. “Right now, the Comcaac people are an extremely hot commodity in Mexico,” he said.

They've got the right to make money off dumb, Westernized but would-be escaping Whites (or Blacks, Hispanics, etc.) but caveat emptor!

And, they may have need for that. Long resistant of Spanish/Mexican incursion, their isolation, and their traditional-world social integrity, seem to be crumbling.