Boxing legend Mike Tyson is no stranger to saying or doing something strange—and his latest admission about what exactly helped him come back out of retirement after nearly 20 years is further proof of that.
Speaking to actress Rosie Perez for a new interview for Interview Magazine on Tuesday, the decorated fighter, who is set to fight fellow boxer Jake Paul in a highly-anticipated fight on Netflix soon, revealed that a drug was the driving force behind his decision to make his grand return to the sport. Toad venom specifically, he explained, helped him to “meet God” and “feel God” enough to where he allegedly heard specific instructions to get back to doing what he’d been doing.
According to the official Addiction Center, the venom is known as “5-MeO-DMT: an extremely potent natural psychedelic” and is “four to six times more powerful than its more popular cousin drug DMT (dimethyltryptamine). It’s also been compared to other mind-altering drugs like ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms.
“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 explained.
He went on to say that his wife was with him the first time he tried and has since done it “80-90" times after that experience. He claimed he also gave the toad venom to his adult children.
“I was scared to death. Because I had a spiritual death; I died,” he said. “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.”
While Tyson is an advocate for the drug personally, he also thinks it should be legal—though he’s sure it wouldn’t get cleared by higher ups.
“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?” he said.
To see if the toad venom will help Tyson bring home the win, make sure you tune into Netflix on Nov. 15 to watch him fight Paul.