Willow found a toad this morning. I persuaded her to leave it alone, but it reminded me of the time I flew to Boston to meet with Mark Kleiman, who was then the drug policy expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Mark had said extraordinarily nice things about a guide to eradicating street drug markets I wrote, but we had never met or even spoken.
Time to correct that!
Mark and I got into it pretty quick.
He loved what I’d written about alcohol, but thought I was a bit rough on marijuana. 
I averred that the psychotropic properties of reefer were not too alarming, but smoking the stuff in volume (something I knew a great deal about) was akin to beating your lungs with a stick twice a week.
To be clear, this was in the era before chewables, when Zig Zag and plastic bongs were king. The struggle was real.
I fell back to look for common ground with Mark.
“Let’s think about it on a Platonic scale of 1 to 100,” I suggested. If we agreed that reefer was 4, what would he park at 100?
He paused, thinking about it. “I don’t know… what do you think?”
“Marine toads,” I said.
“Marine toads,” he asked? “What….???”
He looked confused.
I explained.
“You fly to Florida. Go to a golf course parking lot at night. Collect toads under the lights. Shoot them through the head with a pellet gun — I recommend an expanding Crow round. Skin the toads using a hobby craft knife. Hang the skins on Eagle Claw snell fishing hooks affixed to a frame in your empty freezer. Wait 2 weeks so the skins are completely freeze-dried. Take the skins down, grind the skins up so the pieces are the size of red pepper flakes. Load them into a one-shot bowl, and fire them up with a butane lighter.”
He looked at me amazed.
“You’ve done this!”
“Me? “ I asked? “Hell no. Do you think I’m crazy?”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of that story.
Mark Kleiman is gone now, and I alone am left to tell the tale.
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