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People in Kansas City, MO are smoking toads. This, apparently, is better than licking toads. Either way, you apparently get high.
Look out toads.
"Toad smoking," which is a substitute for "toad licking," is done by extracting venom from the Sonoran Desert toad of the Colorado River. The toad's venom -- which is secreted when the toad gets angry or scared -- contains a hallucinogen called bufotenine that can be dried and smoked to produce a buzz.
Hopefully, they kill the toads before they transport them, or this is going to be a big problem when we start getting Toad Funguses and stuff all over the country...
Clay County Prosecutor Daniel White said possessing the toad is not illegal, but using it to get high off its venom is."It is easier to get it, and law enforcement might not immediately know you use it to get high," White said. "It's sort of a New Age way to get high. You convince yourself it is OK because it is something you get naturally from our environment.
"There are a lot of things that are created naturally but they are still not legal," he said.
[source]
[hat tip: TRCMF]
Medicine & Health
Comments
But what about the people in Kansas City, Kansas?
Long time ago, when I was interested in these things, I recall that the received wisdom among those slightly-more-in-the-know than the average newspaper story (but not necessarily a lot more in the know) was that the active hallucinogen in toads was most likely not bufotenine (5-OH-DMT) but something else. I forget what "something else" was, but I think it was most likely 5-MeO-DMT, the methylated analogue.
FWIW, Wikipedia kind of seems to back up the 5-MeO-DMT-not-5-OH-DMT story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-MeO-DMT
From Chocolate to Morphine by Andrew Weil and Winifred (sp?) Rosen contains a lot of interesting first-person accounts of psychoactive drug use. The toad-venom-smoking account is pretty interesting. It seems to have been a good experience for the user, though; the really interesting ones are the ones where the users have horrible experiences.
Posted by: El Christador | December 4, 2007 5:18 PM
The problem with toads is that they are so hard to get lit.
Posted by: Greg Laden | December 4, 2007 5:30 PM
Harder than getting them lit, is to get them to leave your apartment the morning after--harder still is reckoning exactly how they got there the night before....
Posted by: the real Toadstool(s) | December 4, 2007 10:18 PM