[smc]

This thread seems to have become about food, not drugs.

I have eaten 17-year cicadas. I was at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1987 when the cicada cyle erupted. The cicadas were everywhere. One day, I noticed one of the custodians making his way slowly down one of the walkways. Every once in a while, he would reach up and grab a cicada from a low-hanging tree and pop it in his mouth.

He explained to me that you want to eat some of them alive, just when they're molting. He told me they were like soft-shell crabs (a Baltimore specialty). He had a knack for picking out the right ones from among the (literally) hundreds of thousands, or probably millions, that were lying everywhere. Being a firm believer in trying anything edible at least once, I gave it a go. It was delicious.

The next day, a professor I was working with invited me to a restaurant owned by a friend of his. It was a private dinner of cicadas, served many different ways. I had them served just like soft-shell crabs, rolled in flour and sauteed with butter and shallots and some herbs.

In 2004, a friend of mine in Washington, D.C. (also in the unique U.S. cicada belt) told me that a restaurant in Georgetown served pretty much the same recipe. That would have been 17 years after I tried them -- hence, the 17-year-cicada cycle.