For Mike Tyson to resume his boxing career, he got some assistance from a psychedelic toxin and a shaman that oversaw the process.
Ahead of his November 15 fight against Jake Paul, Tyson spoke to Rosie Perez for Interview Magazine, where the native New Yorkers discussed Tyson’s return to the boxing ring (he retired in 2005), which came after he tried toad venom, a potent psychedelic substance that contains 5-MeO-DMT. While it is a controlled substance, the 5-MeO-DMT compound treats anxiety and depression, and, according to Tyson, using it allowed him to “meet God.”
“You see a toad, you bust its puss, you put it on like a mirror, and it gets hard. You rub it down until it become fine sand, and then you smoke it. Then you meet god. And this is what god told me to do,” Tyson told Perez.
Tyson confirmed that he’s had a shaman and tried toad venom80 to 90 times. When asked by Perez if he saw God, Tyson replied, “No, you don’t see him. You feel him.”
Tyson said that he felt “That I’m nothing, but I’m everything.”
“Well, listen. I was scared to death. Because I had a spiritual death; I died,” the 58-year-old added. “I’ve dealt with death to the closest magnitude I ever could. But once you go through that process, you realize dying is beautiful. How could death be bad and life be beautiful? It’s a total contradiction.”
When Perez expressed that she’d be “terrified” to have that experience, Tyson said, “It’s good to be afraid because you realize there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“That’s what the toad is all about: dying with dignity, and not being afraid of dying,” he added.
Tyson said that he was “very conscious” throughout the journey and “overwhelmed” during his first time doing toad venom, where his wife, Lakiha “Kiki” Spicer, was also with him.
“It’s better to do it when someone you love is with you as well as the shaman,” Tyson said, adding that his wife of 15 years “cried a little bit.”
“But she tried it as well. Anything that helps me, I give it to my wife, my kids. I gave it to everybody that I love. I gave them the toad,” he said.
When asked if toad venom should become legal, Tyson believes that it’s a bad idea. “Well, they don’t want it to be legal because we would have a whole different perspective of life. Everybody might start loving each other. And we don’t want that, do we?” Tyson asked.
Tyson has spoken about doing toad venom multiple times before, like during an ESPN segment just months after his first time trying the medicine.
“It lasts forever, but it was only 15 minutes, but it felt like hours,” he said around the 1:30-minute mark of the video below. “It was frightening.”
