Hunter Biden, the long-troubled son of President Joe Biden, traded one illegal substance for another during an attempt to quit drugs, according to his new book.
He tried toad venom.
“It was a profound experience,” he wrote in his book, Beautiful Things, according to excerpts posted online. “It connected me in a vividly renewed way to everyone in my life, living or dead.”
Biden has a history of substance abuse, including problems with alcohol and crack cocaine.
“I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles,” he wrote. “I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig.”
But the 51-year-old also writes of a very unusual attempt to break the habit in 2014, claiming the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad helped keep him sober for a year.
The treatment, which he received in Mexico, is called 5-MeO-DMT, and isn’t merely an experimental remedy with accepted use… nor is it something the feds haven’t caught wind of yet.
It’s listed as a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States, which is the strictest category and includes other hard drugs such as heroin, LSD, and ecstasy.
That makes it illegal to buy, sell, possess and use under U.S. federal law (although some specific communities have decriminalized it locally, often as part of a larger drug decriminalization effort).
The designation also means that, at least according to the federal government, substances such as 5-MeO-DMT “have no currently accepted medical use in the United States, a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision, and a high potential for abuse.”
The designation is controversial. Marijuana, for example, is also listed as a Schedule I substance despite growing acceptance… and at least one study out of Europe backs toad venom for mental health issues, saying it increases “satisfaction with life and convergent thinking.”
The drug has made headlines in some unusual and unexpected ways in recent years.
Ex-boxing champ Mike Tyson, who’s had his own well-documented struggles with substance abuse, swears by the toad treatment.
“It takes you to a place that takes you to another dimension,” he said on his podcast in 2019, according to the Townhall website. “Ever since I did it, I’ve had a miraculous change about me.”
On the other hand, a Spanish porn star was arrested in connection with a death from the use of the drug in a sensational and salacious case that briefly stole headlines from the coronavirus pandemic last spring.
Biden wrote that the toad venom helped him with his famously troubled family relationships.
“Any division between me my Dad, my mommy, Caspy, or Beau vanished, or at least became irrelevant,” he wrote.
“I know it sounds loopy,” he added. “Yet whatever else it did or didn’t do, the experience unlocked feelings and hurts I’d buried deep for too long.”
He said he stayed sober for a year after trying it.
But then, it was back to square one as he continued to struggle with drugs and other personal and financial problems.
Some of them, he wrote, took place as his father was forming plans to run for president
“In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself,” he wrote.
Hunter Biden’s book and media tour for it – including national television interviews – less than three months into his father’s presidency.
— Walter W. Murray is a reporter for The Horn News. He is an outspoken conservative and a survival expert.