Toad Licking

Turn on, tune in, toad out.

"I'd like to remind all my readers, especially you impressionable young people, that if you must lick a toad, make sure it's wearing a condom. Thank you."

— Dave Barry

Licking the backs of toads to get high.

Based on an Urban Legend dating as far back as The '70s, groups of hippies and teenagers were alleged to have been licking specific species of toads which secrete psychoactive compounds through their skin that can cause hallucinations.

While there are toads that do secrete such chemicals, licking it off a toad itself is very dangerous (they are toxins to deter predators after all, coupled with an easy case of salmonella) and will cause some serious poisoning for anyone considering a pursuit to get high in such a fashion in Real Life (or in layman's terms, Don't Try This at Home).

In fiction, the psychoactive toad is commonly used as a G-Rated Drug.

See Also: Mushroom Samba.

Compare: Alien Catnip, Fantastic Drug, I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!

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Examples:

Advertising

• An educational brochure with information on the dangers of drug abuse that was published by the Canadian organization CATIE features illustrations of a toad licking another toad.

Comic Books

• In one issue of Rat Queens, Betty licks a giant magical frog monster. This leads to a serious Mushroom Samba (even by her standards) and lets her perceive different characters being erased from reality by that arc's Big Bad.
• One X-Men spinoff series featured Toad Boy, a young mutant who secreted a powerful narcotic. His mother accidentally became addicted to him and a crime syndicate found him and used him as a way to get a monopoly on a street drug, before M-Day happened.

Fan Works

• From Things I Am Not Allowed to Do at Hogwarts: "I will not lick Trevor."

Films — Live-Action

• The Bear: The bear cub licks a frog out of curiosity. During the night, he suffers a Mushroom Samba nightmare about frogs mutating and flying everywhere.
• A variant in Big Trouble, the toad actually sprays something in the face of a character, who spends the rest of the movie hallucinating that Martha Stewart (whom he had previously seen in her television show in the background of an earlier scene) is "trying to take my soul!" The police officer reports this to the two FBI guys, one of whom comments "He's not coming back for a while."
• A segment in the documentary Cane Toads An Unnatural History covers using toads as hallucinogens.
  Hippy: Don Juan the Yaqui brujo says that when you take peyote, you become as one with the spirit of the cactus... yer toad's the same.
• In The Mansion, Drazic brought a live "Tibetan toad", whose skin has hallucinogenic properties.
• In the Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny song, "Kickapoo" Jables sings "Gotta lick a toad in the party zone".

Literature

• The Anarchist Cookbook has a recipe to make dried toad skin powder for smoking. It's not good for your toad karma.
• Arthur Herk in Big Trouble has an encounter with a toad of this nature by accident, and spends the rest of the book firmly believing that his dog now has the head of Elizbeth Dole and is trying to eat his soul, amped up by the fact he hears the dog's barking as his own name. ("Herk! Herk!") Later the cop who's handcuffed to an entertainment center with him exasperatedly keeps correcting him right as two people debating whether Miami is worth staying in pass by.
• Seeker Bears has young polar bear Kallik finding a frog and eating it. It makes her feel funny afterward.
• Carl Hiaasen's eccentric governor-turned-hermit Clinton "Skink" Tyree extracts natural hallucinogens from cane toads, which he smokes; he never licks a toad directly.
• In one of the Sword of Truth novels, hallucinogenic toads are used as part of a tribal ritual, but they're not actually licked as the hallucinogens in question are transmitted through skin contact.
• Wings of Fire: Winter Turning has Moonwatcher warning her friends against eating brightly colored frogs. The last time she ate those, she says, she has had strange dreams about anteaters and newts taking over the world.

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of 1000 Ways to Die, two amateur adventurists went on a quest to find the Colorado River Toad to experience the ultimate high. Unfortunately, what they ended up licking was a Poison Arrow Frog.
• Discussed on The Daily Show:
  Jon Stewart: Yeah, isn't that the whole thing — if you lick a frog, you get crazy thoughts?
  Kermit the Frog: ...If you lick a frog, you're crazy before you started.
• The solution to the Eleventh Hour episode "Cardiac" involves kids attempting to get high off frogs.
• A hallucinogenic toad turned out to be a major plot point in an episode of Jonathan Creek. The toad wasn't native to England and had been imported by a local hippie colony for this very purpose. The presence of the toad, allegedly in the prime suspect's house, was what led to Jonathan solving the case he was working on.
• In L.A. Law, the client in one episode was a retired man whose nursing home wouldn't let him have alcohol on the premises, so he acquired a hallucinogenic toad.
• When the gang from Mystery Science Theater 3000 riffed Jack Frost, there was a talking mushroom man; the characters wondered what a talking mushroom would eat to get high, and the only answer anyone can come up with was, "I think they lick toads."
• One the escapees from Hell in Reaper was a stoner whose preferred method of getting high was licking toads. Fittingly, his demonic power was having a prehensile, Overly-Long Tongue.
• The Canadian sketch show The Red Green Show advises against this, as per a song that Red sings:
  Oh, there are certain things you should never do,
  Like donate things you find on your shoe.
  Don't have a nap in the middle of the road,
  And don't ever lick a toad.
  No, don't lick a toad, don't lick it.
  You're better off to just kick it,
  Or better still, just leave it alone, it wasn't bothering you any...
  No, don't lick a toad, don't lick it.
  Just say no to toads.
• An episode of Skins (the American version), features the kids trying to get high from licking a toad.
• The X-Files episode "Quagmire" had a bunch of slackers licking toads to get high.
  Snorkel Guy: Dude, what is wrong with you? You made me drop my toad!
• Young Sheldon: In "An Existential Crisis and a Bear That Makes Bubbles", Dr. Sturgis says that once he was hiking in the Amazon and licked a hallucinogenic frog.

Music

• The M83 track "Raconte-Moi Une Histoire" ("Tell Me a Story") is nothing more than an instrumental with a voice-over of a little girl telling of the wonders of touching a special little frog in the rainforest.
• "Toadlickers" by Thomas Dolby, a country piece about eco-hippies getting high on halucinogenic toads, acquiring an epic case of munchies and raiding the nearby town for food.

Puppet Shows

• An episode of The Muppets (2015) mentions this trope.
  Fozzie: [delirious] Have you ever been shot with a tranquilizer?
  Kermit: No, but I did lick my cousin once and the walls started melting, so I feel you, bro.

Tabletop Games

• In Planescape, there's a bit of flavor text that quotes a Sensate's opinion on licking a Slaadi ^note Beings from Limbo, the plane of pure chaos that look like humanoid toads the size of ogres and have different powers based on their color . He says that it is a horrible mistake... that everyone should make once in his life.

Video Games

• A Running Gag in the PS4 remake of MediEvil is that one should never lick toads; specifically, the Dragon Toads that hang around the Enchanted Earth. Presumably, this is what drove the inmates inside the Asylum insane.

Web Animation

• Sonic for Hire:
  • In Season 2, Luigi licks Frogger and is drugged high enough to admit his love for Mario despite the difference in their fame and subsequently gets run over by a car.
  • In Season 7, when Sonic and the gang gets stumped on how to find The Creator, the BattleToads offer themselves to be licked so they can assert a possible solution. Then the toads somehow end up dead after they decided to lick Eggman.

Web Comics

• In 1977:The Comic, Bud Chambers makes the mistake of licking an exotic amphibian thinking he will get high. The creature is the fabulous Mystic Frog, a sentient, magical and touchy creature. Which curses Bud with an attack of gender-bending confusion.
• In a Biter Comics strip, a princess thinks she has finally found her frog prince, but it turns out to just be a bad trip.
• In Darbi, this is a pastime and business for some dinosaurs.
• One strip from Head Trip claims that James Cameron came up with the inspiration for Avatar after licking a toad.
• Discussed in Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal (2022) with Throg, the Frog of Thunder.
  "Are you like one of those frogs that people lick and get all goofy? Can I lick you? I've had a bit of a day."

Web Original

• Uncyclopedia has an article dedicated to toad licking here.
• Subeta: The Subetapedia page for the Xotl species specifically warns the reader not to lick them.

Web Videos

• Exaggerated in cs188's "Pooping the Charts Vol. 7: Why Can't I Think Of A Title?", which makes fun of Justin Bieber's "Mistletoe" by rearranging the lyrics to proclaim he was "gonna get so high, eating toads."

Western Animation

• In the Amphibia episode "Wax Museum", Frog Soos randomly ponders to the Curator if alternate versions of them exist in parallel universes simultaneously and unknowingly. The Curator asks Frog Soos if he's been licking himself again.
  Frog Soos: Heh, heh. Caught me again, Mr. Ponds.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, toad-licking is used as a fever cure. It works, but only if the toad is frozen.
• One episode of Beavis and Butt-Head had Beavis attempting to lick a frog in order to get high.
• In the first episode of Brickleberry, during a montage of Steve trying to prove himself a better park ranger than Ethel, he inadvertently gets high this way.
• An episode of Drawn Together saw Xander, Toot, and Wooldor discover that Ling Ling excretes a hallucinogen whenever he becomes disappointed. After directly referencing the similarity to toads, they proceed to repeatedly disappoint him so they can lick the life out of him.
• Family Guy:
  • "Toad" becomes such a popular fad at James Woods High School, after a Colombian drug cartel's plane transporting the toads crashes near Quahog in "Let's Go to the Hop", that Peter winds up going undercover at the school as "Lando Griffin" to get the students to stop.
    Tom Tucker: Toad-licking is also known as "lily-padding", "frenching the prince" and "doing Kermit".
  • There's even a hilarious anti-drug PSA directly spoofing the classic Tootsie Pop commercial with Mr. Owl.
    Kid: Mr. Toad, how many licks of you does it take to get to the center of a Rhode Island State Prison?
    [jail door closes]
    Voiceover: Just one.
• In F is for Family, Vic uses every recreational drug imaginable, including hallucinogenic toads.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "Missionary: Impossible", Homer is depicted at one point lying on a hammock and picking up toads at random and licking them to get high while stranded on a South Pacific island.
    Bart: Dad, are you licking toads?
    Homer: I'm not not licking toads!
  • In "How I Spent My Strummer Vacation", Homer resorts to licking the toads in a pet shop in an attempt to intoxicate himself after being kicked out of Moe's Tavern.
  • In "Them Robot", Lenny licks a toad after a drug test held at the plant.

Real Life

• There is a hallucinogenic drug, known by the chemical name 5-MeO-DMT that is secreted by the Colorado River Toad. It is, however, not ingested by licking, but by smoking. Toad venom is illegal in the United States but is in a more legal gray area in many other countries, including Canada and Mexico. Infamously, Spanish porn star Nacho Vidal was charged with reckless homicide after a friend of his died after ingesting toad venom in a shamanistic ritual at Vidal's home in 2020.

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