My Little Friend

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.