You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What you do not picture is a fourth-floor flat on an east London estate, a woman wafting sage around your head and the slow realisation that you have just handed over £150 to be – quite literally – poisoned. This is kambo. And at the lowest ebb of my late thirties, becalmed in a miasma of self-loathing and suffering from PTSD following a moped accident in Thailand, I had decided it was precisely what I needed.
Made from the dried skin secretions of a giant monkey frog, it is also, as of last month, suspected of having killed its first Briton. Kristian Trend, a 40-year-old wellness coach, died after a ceremony in Leicester; a man was arrested on suspicion of administering poison and later bailed. A cross–party chorus – a former health secretary, the chair of the Commons health committee – has since urged Sir Keir Starmer to ban it. The substance is already outlawed in Brazil, Chile and Australia, the last of which files it under the bracingly candid heading ‘Schedule ten poison’. In Britain it remains entirely legal, wholly unregulated and roughly one Instagram search away. All of which I report in the knowledge that, not so long ago, I was lying on a couch in Wapping, awaiting my turn.
