Mike Tyson says near-fatal overdoses marked his lowest point, and he credits a toad psychedelic with ending his cocaine and alcohol use.
The former heavyweight champion opened up in the Netflix docuseries TYSON about rock-bottom overdoses and a powerful substance drawn from toad toxin that he says changed the course of his addiction.
The Daily Mail reported that Tyson, 60, described bleeding, hysteria, and repeated overdoses before turning to 5-MeO-DMT, also known as “Bufo,” “the God molecule,” or “the toad.” He says he has not used cocaine or alcohol since.
The drug is illegal to use recreationally in the United States. Tyson still filmed himself smoking it at a treatment center for the series and said he has taken it more than 100 times.
Tyson did not soften the picture of how far he had fallen. He tied his lowest moment directly to overdose, not to a lost fight or a public scandal.
He put it in plain terms:
"When I think about a low point, I think about this, OD'ing. I'm bleeding out, my nose is bleeding and I'm hysterical. I'm sweating."
He added that overdoses were not rare in that chapter of his life.
"I OD'd, I've done it plenty of times but this one was a little more extreme than others."
Those are his words, not a biographer’s gloss. A man once feared in the ring described himself as hysterical, bleeding, and out of control.
Tyson’s third wife, Lakiha “Kiki” Spicer, said the path to the drug ran through a friend who knew a shaman. The substance, she said, comes from the Bufo alvarius toad.
"At the time we had this friend, he knew a shaman who does this thing called 5-MeO-DMT, it comes from the Bufo alvarius toad."
Spicer framed its appeal in recovery language:
"Whatever kind of addictions or things that you're going through, it helps level them in your mind."
Tyson went further. He said the experience “blew my mind,” that he has used it over 100 times, and that it is now part of how he makes major choices.
"Any time I have to make a big decision about anything, I take the toad. I haven’t used cocaine and drink since."
That is a sweeping personal claim: a full stop on cocaine and alcohol, pinned to a psychedelic that U.S. law still treats as illegal for recreational use.
Material cited from the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics describes 5-MeO-DMT as usually inhaled by vaporizing or snorting. Effects can start within seconds and last about 20 to 30 minutes, with feelings of awe, hallucinations, and other intense sensations. Early studies have been described as suggesting possible help for anxiety and depression, without named trials or hard outcome numbers attached in the available account.
Tyson’s account fills in what the lab language leaves out: a famous athlete who says ordinary addiction treatment was not the turning point he remembers. He points to a shaman-administered toad secretion, repeated use, and a filmed session at an unnamed treatment center. Dates for the overdoses, the first session, and the filming are not provided. The shaman and the friend are not named.
What is on the record is stark enough. A former champion says he overdosed hard enough to bleed and panic, then rebuilt his sobriety story around a substance Americans cannot legally take for recreation. He presents that as salvation. Viewers are left to weigh a dramatic personal testimony against the legal reality and the absence of a dated medical record in the public telling.
Fame does not repeal biology, and it does not repeal the law. When a household name says he nearly died from excess and now stakes big decisions on an illegal psychedelic, the sober question is whether confession is the same thing as a cure.
