The animal
Incilius alvarius, long known as Bufo alvarius and commonly called the Sonoran Desert toad or Colorado River toad, lives across parts of Arizona, extreme south-western New Mexico, and north-western Mexico. It is a large, nocturnal, burrowing animal that spends most of the year underground and emerges with the summer monsoon. Its active surface season is short, which is exactly why collection pressure concentrates into a narrow window each year.
Its conservation listings tell two different stories at once. Globally the IUCN has assessed it as Least Concern. Within New Mexico it is listed as endangered under state law. Both are true, and quoting only one of them is how this conversation usually goes wrong.
What the secretion actually contains
The parotoid glands produce a defensive secretion. Its major psychoactive constituent is 5-MeO-DMT, but it is not the only one. Bufotenine, which is 5-HO-DMT, is present in meaningful amounts, along with other tryptamines and a range of non-tryptamine compounds including cardioactive bufadienolides in the fresh secretion.
Proportions vary between individual animals, between populations, and across the season. This is the part that is routinely glossed over: a person holding dried secretion has an uncharacterised mixture whose composition they cannot know without a laboratory. Consistency is impossible by definition, and inconsistency is where a lot of harm comes from.
The pressure on the population
Interest in the toad grew very quickly through the 2010s. Collection for secretion, along with habitat loss, road mortality, and the ordinary pressures on desert amphibians, has prompted repeated warnings from herpetologists and from Mexican environmental authorities. Population data for this species is thinner than anyone would like, which cuts both ways: the alarm is not fully quantified, and neither is the reassurance.
What is not in dispute is the direction of travel. Demand has risen faster than any plausible sustainable supply, the animal has a short active season, and the collection is almost entirely unregulated in practice.
The welfare question
Milking a toad is defended on the grounds that the animal is released afterwards. That is usually true and it is not the whole picture. Handling, transport, repeated collection from the same animals, and stress-induced secretion depletion all carry welfare costs that are poorly documented. There is very little published work on what repeated collection does to an individual toad over a season.
The honest position is that we do not know, and that the burden of proof sits with the people doing the collecting.
The case for synthetic
Synthetic 5-MeO-DMT resolves several problems at once. It is a single compound. Its purity can be verified. It contains no bufotenine or bufadienolides unless someone puts them there. It involves no animal. And it is what essentially all serious clinical research uses, which means the growing body of evidence is evidence about synthetic material rather than about toad secretion.
The counter-argument usually appeals to tradition. It is worth noting that the documented tradition of smoking this particular toad's secretion dates to the 1980s in the United States, not to antiquity. The genuinely old lineage in this family of compounds runs through Anadenanthera snuffs in South America, which have nothing to do with the Sonoran Desert. See history and lineage.
What we teach
Three things. First, that anyone speaking publicly about this medicine has an obligation to be accurate about where it comes from. Second, that the ecological argument for synthetic material is strong and the traditional argument for toad material is weaker than it is usually presented to be. Third, that people are entitled to know which one they are being offered, and to be told the truth about it.