The old lineage
There is a long, well-documented history of psychoactive snuffs in South America and the Caribbean prepared from Anadenanthera seeds, known variously as yopo, vilca, cebil, and cohoba. Archaeological snuff trays and tubes from the Andes and surrounding regions push this practice back thousands of years. Spanish accounts from the sixteenth century describe cohoba use among Taino peoples.
Anadenanthera seeds contain bufotenine and, in varying amounts, 5-MeO-DMT. So the compound family does have deep, continuous cultural history. That history belongs to specific peoples in specific places, and it involves plants rather than an animal.
The toad story
The claim that Mesoamerican cultures smoked the secretion of Bufo alvarius in antiquity is repeated constantly and rests on thin ground. Toad imagery does appear in Mesoamerican art and toad remains have been recovered from some sites. That establishes that toads mattered symbolically, which nobody disputes.
It does not establish that anyone dried and vaporised the parotoid secretion of this particular species. The Sonoran Desert toad's range sits well north of the Maya heartland. The species most often discussed in that archaeological literature is Rhinella marina, the cane toad, which does not produce 5-MeO-DMT in the same way. And vaporising a dried secretion is a technique with no clear pre-modern attestation.
Some form of ancient practice may yet be demonstrated. It has not been, and stating it as fact is a marketing habit rather than a historical claim.
What happened in the 1980s
The documented history of smoking Sonoran Desert toad secretion begins in the United States in the early 1980s. A short pamphlet published in 1984 under the name Albert Most, titled Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert, described the practice and circulated within a small community. Ken Nelson has since been identified as the author.
Around the same period, laboratory and self-experimental accounts of synthetic 5-MeO-DMT appeared in the wider psychedelic literature. The compound had been synthesised decades earlier and studied intermittently since the 1930s.
So the toad practice is roughly forty years old, not four thousand. That is still a real history and worth understanding accurately.
The last decade
Growth since the mid-2010s has been extraordinarily fast. Retreat centres, informal networks, and a substantial online culture appeared within a few years, largely without professional standards, shared screening practice, or any mechanism for reporting adverse events.
Clinical research arrived later and is still small. Regulatory interest is recent. The result is a field where the folk knowledge is much larger than the evidence base, and where confident assertions frequently trace back to a single person's experience rather than to anything systematic.
Why the accuracy matters
Two reasons. The first is respect. Attaching an invented antiquity to a practice borrows authority from cultures that did not grant it, while the peoples with a genuine relationship to Anadenanthera go unmentioned.
The second is practical. A person deciding whether to do something deserves accurate information about what they are being offered. If the history is embellished, it is reasonable to ask what else is.