Dowd and Out In Colorado: Maureen’s Bad Dream

Maureen Dowd of the NY Times recently traveled to Colorado on assignment and decided she would try a pot edible to see what all the fuss was about.

She claims she nibbled a little of a pot candy bar and, when she didn’t feel anything, ate some more. She waited about an hour and still nothing was happening, so “[she] figured [she’d] order dinner from room service and return to [her] more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.”

This is Dowd’s description of her experience, when the cannabis finally kicked in:

But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me. It took all night before it began to wear off, distressingly slowly.”

First off, any stoner knows this to be the result of simply taking too much cannabis (in addition to the chardonnay, which certainly didn’t help matters). She mixed pot with wine and I can tell you that of the few “bad” highs I’ve experienced in my life, nearly all of them were the result of also drinking while using cannabis.

The first time you decide to drink alcohol there is a learning curve and a risk of a bad experience (I would argue a far greater risk of a negative experience than with cannabis). Hell, I am what you might call a “professional” pot smoker and there is even a critical mass limit with cannabis that, if I cross it, will lead me to some uncomfortable experiences as well.

I think Maureen should have, perhaps, consulted the clerk who sold her the medible or even hopped online and read any of the thousands of pages (it took Google .39 seconds to find over 5 million pages on the topic) talking about just this circumstance to learn a little about edibles before she just went gung-ho.

I do think that there is some uncharted territory regarding novices and edibles. I personally feel that, unless you’re with an experienced stoner during your first exposure to cannabis, you should stick to smokeables. The very fact that smoked cannabis hits you very fast and that smoking plant matter, in itself, also slows people down, makes it pretty hard to overdo it because when you’re stoned and don’t really want to get “higher”, you’ll likely stop consuming until it wears off.

With edibles, the onset is deceptively slow and the effects are long lasting. I saw this same thing happen to my own mother. I had been trying to get her to try MMJ for years as treatment for her fibromyalgia but she was resistant. Then, one night, my sisters made some weed brownies and tricked my mother into eating them. She had WAY too much for her tolerance level and had a miserable night, similar to what Dowd related. It set back my mother’s willingness to try cannabis by several years. I finally convinced her to try some pot gummi bears and she really likes them because the dosage is appropriate.

The most intelligent thing Dowd put into her article was, “The next day, a medical consultant at an edibles plant where I was conducting an interview mentioned that candy bars like that are supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices; but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label. I reckoned that the fact that I was not a regular marijuana smoker made me more vulnerable, and that I should have known better.”

Pot is not the problem in this scenario. A lack of information and guidance is to blame. While I don’t generally enjoy Dowd’s work, and I don’t think she’s really being very fair in this piece, I do agree with her that there really ought to be better labeling and education for medibles.

I obviously support full legalization, nationwide. But I don’t want people to have bad experiences or get injured. We are at the infancy of marijuana legalization, these are the growing pains that will be resolved in time. Perhaps some educational videos or pamphlets that get handed out if you’re a novice are appropriate.

I do feel, however, that it needs to be pointed out that Dowd and the handful of other people that report scary/dangerous experiences on cannabis are doing so irresponsibly. They like to use these instances as arguments against cannabis legalization or, in the case of Dowd, imply that things are not going as smoothly as the cannabis-media would like you to think. Yet, alcohol is still completely legal and contributes to far, far, far more negative experiences than cannabis (even in the time it took you to read this article it has hurt more souls than cannabis ever has).

Also, it needs to be said that, though Dowd had a bad night, she was never physiologically in danger. That is, the cannabis was never going to cause her heart to stop beating or install a loss of brain function. Tell me one kind of alcohol that you can drink to the point of hallucination and the only consequence is waking up feeling better? It doesn’t exist. Every type of alcohol on earth has killed someone, probably tons over time. So, if you’re anti-weed legalization but aren’t also trying to ban alcohol, I really am tired of listening to your double-speak. At least if the double standard was favoring the non-lethal of the two substances, I could maybe listen. But it’s not.

Dowd finishes out her article by recapping some cherry-picked stories where cannabis use (supposedly) resulted in death/homicide and then vilifies a dispensary owner as paranoid for saying that the whole industry shouldn’t get reprimanded because less than 5% are having problems with dosage.

If I went to Kentucky and just had to try some local-made bourbon that was waaaay stronger than I anticipated, and I got horribly drunk, yelled at my wife, slapped my kids and jumped out of the window, would there then be an article the next day blaming Kentucky bourbon for my actions?

Or, to make it more akin to Dowd’s experience, what if I drank that bourbon and just got shit-plowed drunk in my hotel room and had a terrible time complete with spinning, unquenchable thirst and a feeling of immobility? Is that also the bourbon’s fault? I think not. It’s my fault. Dowd knew 100% that she was eating marijuana edibles, her bad time is her fault, not cannabis’. And, certainly, her solitary negative experience should not reflect upon the cannabis industry as a whole. I get violently, dog-balls sick on roller-coasters. If I choose to ride one, it’s my fault for what happens; Six-Flags shouldn’t have to shutter its doors.

Dowd’s article would have gone down much easier had she been honest and just said, “If you’re going to try cannabis edibles, use caution and ask for advice because I jumped in blindly and had a bad experience. The industry is not yet labeling their edibles effectively.” It bothers me that so many are willing to blame weed for causing problems instead of owning their own dumbass choices.

I also think that part of the issue is that cannabis has, for so long, been counter-culture, existing on the fringes and illegal. Everyone has some knowledge (either personal or through pop-culture) about hangovers and what drinking might entail. But we don’t really have that type of collective wisdom regarding cannabis yet. This will resolve in time as both the culture becomes more aware and the industry goes more mainstream.

What Dowd needed was what so many of us had and took for granted: a cannabis Sherpa. Most of us had that friend or acquaintance that helped us get high that first time. They helped you to know what to expect and how to smoke etc. Dowd basically tried to climb Everest without a Sherpa and now she’s going around telling everyone that Everest is a horrible mountain that will ruin your life.

Stick to the chardonnay, Maureen. I’m pretty sure cannabis might just be too cool for you.