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Kambo, the Frog Venom Making Suburbanites Puke Their Guts Out

In her first VICE documentary, Amber Rawlings travels the UK, meeting unhappy people searching for answers in Amazonian frog secretions.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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Careful: After watching our latest documentary about the Amazonian drug, kambo, you might start seeing frogs wherever you go.

Thinking about the poison, which is derived from giant monkey frogs, and then seeing the creatures dotted hither and thither as you go about your daily life would be taken by most people as a funny coincidence.

However, there are those to whom this is a clear sign that they need to dab their flesh with the venom and then vomit their guts into a bucket, in the name of a ceremonial ritual that supposedly cures almost any ailment (naturally, there’s no clinical evidence for these claims).

VICE’s Amber Rawlings has been meeting British kambo enthusiasts, who have been gathering in apartments, parks, nature reserves, and lay-bys across the suburbs to be “healed” by part-time shamans armed with venom sourced from Indigenous rainforest tribes.

Though this is not illegal in the UK, the stuff isn’t a licensed medicine. Earlier this year, a 40-year-old man died after reportedly taking part in a ceremony—one of a number of suspected fatalities around the world.

Amber first got interested in kambo while interviewing tripsitters, and although this isn’t a psychedelic,........

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