Hunter Biden Credits Large, Lickable Toad for Brief Moments of Sobriety

The National Park Service’s Halloween-night message started with a couple of  “toad-ally terrifying” bad puns, then it got serious. 

“As we say with most things you come across in a national park, whether it be a banana slug, unfamiliar mushroom, or a large toad with glowing eyes in the dead of night, please refrain from licking,” the agency posted on Facebook.

The rangers were referring to the Sonoran desert toad (Bufo alvarius), also known as the Colorado river toad, the largest toad native to North America, growing to around seven inches long. It’s fat, olive green to dark brown, and has smooth, shiny skin covered in warts. But what makes it lickable are the prominent parotoid glands on its back that secrete a milky-white hallucinogenic toxin, known chemically as 5-MeO-DMT.

Toad-licking has become popular in recent years, but 5-MeO-DMT is illegal and designated as a Schedule I drug, meaning it has no medical application but with a high potential for abuse. Still, some researchers are looking into it for its potential beneficial applications. Even troubled POTUS offspring Hunter Biden has partaken of the toad, claiming in his memoir that it helped him stay sober for a year. (Sober-ish, would be more accurate.)

The popular toad is not an endangered species, yet, but it is listed as “threatened” in New Mexico. Besides the threat of strange tongues giving it a lick, the toad is beset by habitat loss and something the state’s Department of Game & Fish calls “roadway mortality as a result of increased borderland security traffic.”

The Park Service’s Facebook post was accompanied by the attached black-and-white image of a “Sonoran Desert Toad staring into your soul,” as the NPS put it, taken by motion-sensor trail cam at Organ Pipe National Monument, Arizona.

Photo credit: National Park Service