Bad Trips

~ Laura

Maureen Dowd recounts a bad experience with a pot candy bar in Denver. She thinks that there should have been a warning label on the pot.

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. 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.

Not sure what I find more alarming. Dowd’s bad trip or the fact that she owns a green corduroy jacket.

UPDATE: More reactions from Twitter.

UPDATE2:

Published by Laura

37 thoughts on “Bad Trips”

  1. I sometimes think that nothing could improve the New York Times more than getting rid of Maureen Dowd. What do her writings add? At least the vapid writings of Douthat provide a window into the world-view of a certain sort of conservative, but as far as I can tell, w/ Dowd, all you get is a window into her huge and completely untethered ego. It doesn’t even seem worth ridiculing to me. There is nothing right to do w/ the “thoughts” of Dowd but ignore them.

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    1. You take an overly utilitarian view of “news.” This is the most fun I’ve had reading an editorial in ages. I think Dowd should keep getting stoned and writing columns about it. Maybe she’ll eventually develop enough of a tolerance to write the column while high and then the real fun will start.

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      1. I’m afraid I’d need a lot more of what Dowd was having than I’d want to take before her writing could become even vaguely amusing, as opposed to trite and revolting.

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    2. Actually, this is probably the most useful thing she’s written in years. Up until I read this extract, I would have had no idea that you need to cut a pot candy bar up into 16 pieces as a newbie.

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  2. What’s the issue with the column? That she points out that new users of psychotropic drugs, in a cultural context in which the use is not the norm, and thus does not have guides and rules (like, don’t drink before five, or whatever that rule is for drinkers) can create public health issues? That she described her own personal unpleasant experience?

    Washington state is having a slower roll out, but I’ve now heard of two incidents of marijuana sales in two different middle schools and another in our local high school. And, no, we didn’t hear of these in any of the previous 10 years (not denying that they happened, but that I do believe that frequency will increase). Edibles (with their small size and ability to use the drug in a non-public way, and their appeal to sugar lovers) as well as the potency of different forms of marijuana (for alcohol, we publish the drug content of drinks on the labels) are going to have to be discussed as marijuana use expands with legalization.

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    1. They do need to work about a clear labeling rule, but her description of her own personal experience is pretty hilarious. It’s like David Attenborough describing a rare species or something.

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      1. Why? Seriously, I don’t get it. Is it naive? or pretentious? or false? or just bad writing (I’ve seen better descriptions of hallucinatory experiences)?

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      2. The thought of her frozen with fear and hallucinations because she ate a candy bar is just inherently hilarious.

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    2. My issue was, it’s completely unclear why anyone should care what Dowd thinks about this, or what her experience was. It’s just completely irrelevant. There may well be real issues here, but we’ll never know from this sort of nonsense. Dowd’s experience is not evidence of anything that we should care about at all. It’s only evidence of her vanity (and perhaps those of NY Times readers, or their voyeurism.)

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      1. I disagree that her experience is irrelevant, except, that I do think a grown up should consider dosage when consuming drugs. But, I guess that’s part of the issue, that we don’t think of candy bars as drugs.

        Her columns starts with her experience but there’s plenty of follow-up talking to people directly involved in the Colorado marijuana industry. Particularly notable to me was the standard corporate/business response to labeling/marketing regulation (a response we see from everyone from Monsanto to Johnson & Johnson to Coca Cola to Marlboro).

        Opinion columns, by definition, write on a large variety of subjects, so I don’t see Dowd is any less qualified to write on this new trend in the US than anything else she writes about.

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    3. so I don’t see Dowd is any less qualified to write on this new trend in the US than anything else she writes about.

      That’s setting the bar pretty low, as I don’t, in fact, think she’s qualified to write on anything. She has no knowledge base or skills or relevant experience. Asking a random guy off the street what he thought would be just as useful.

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      1. David Brooks is going to write a column about him using Purple Dank now. He has to stay on top.

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      2. Generally true about most journalists. They’re supposed to talk to other people and communicate their experience. Personal experience journalism falls in there somewhere, too, like when Nellie Bly committed herself to an asylum in 1987, with the view of “writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management”

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  3. PS: My prediction of expanded marijuana use with legalization (including among children) is just a hypothesis, but I look forward to seeing the results of the experiment (as well as the potential for drug substitution effects).

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    1. I just can’t imagine how you get to be her age without knowing you don’t eat the whole brownie/candy bar in one go.

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      1. What, you can’t eat a whole brownie or candy bar in one go? Or, do you mean you can’t eat a whole marijuana infused candy bar or brownie?

        I think some people think that more people have experience with marijuana than people do, as an average population. I, for example, am a total novice, and know nothing at all about consuming marijuana. Alcohol I know a bit more about. I’m also unsure about the time course of the psychoactive effects of marijuana dosage. Alcohol enters the blood quickly when drunk, and has a quick effect on subjective judgments of intoxication, behavior, and in brain related measures. I’ve heard that smoked marijuana also enters the blood stream quickly, though the subjective measures are less well known. But, how quickly does marijuana enter the bloodstream when consumed in food? And, how is this affected by occasional usage. People do build tolerance to alcohol, but alcohol is not stored in the body — is rapidly eliminated. THC is stored in fat (and can remain in the body for long periods of time). All of these factors affect how THC should be consumed and, I think it’s unrealistic to assume that most people know the guidelines, know them the way many of us do about alcohol, even non-drinkers like me.

        Dowd appears to know a lot about alcohol, but might be quite naive about marijuana (sometimes this is just a matter of a drug of choice, but the social differences between illegal marijuana use during most of her life and the legal use of alcohol might also have an effect).

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      2. I agree with bj – I’d have no idea how to assess how much of a marijuana-infused candy bar to eat. Those of us who have stuck to legal intoxicants may know the difference between a watered-down wine spritzer and an alcohol-packed Long Island iced tea, but it was something we had to learn. If you leave college never having used pot, there are plenty of circles you can travel in where no one uses it, or at least no one talks about using it.

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  4. Interesting to note that alcohol use (ever used it on at least one day) among teens (9-12th grade) is down since the 1991 (peaking at 81.6%, down to 70.8%); marijuana use (at least once) is up (31.3%/39.9%, but down from it’s peak, of 47% in 1999).

    Used within the last 30 days is (50.8/38.7 for alcohol and 14.3/23.1 for marijuana).

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  5. paranoia, hallucinations, fear and loathing are not unusual side effects of MJ overdose..

    Edibles are a huge problem: they started out completely unregulated; and commercial vendors of edibles have perverse incentives to overload their comestibles with extracted and concentrated THC. The other problem is that inhaled MJ will take effect quickly, but eating it takes much longer, so often people will eat more thinking they didn’t get a large enough dose to get the buzz. As bj notes alcohol as a liquid is absorbed quickly, but solids take longer. You can get MJ sodas known as Keef Cola here in CO now, ain’t it glorious ?

    Colorado has just started regulation,
    http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25680313/colorado-begins-mandatory-testing-edible-marijuana-potency

    Marianne, I’m older than Maureen and I don’t know how much of a pot brownie to eat.. so I don’t eat anything at all.
    So far there have been at least two deaths from edibles, including a particularly horrible one where an apparently ordinary decent family man shot his wife while hallucinating,
    http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_25593871/observatory-park-man-charged-wifes-murder-pot-shop
    Numbers of sick kids too. This isn’t what I though I was voting for..

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    1. “The other problem is that inhaled MJ will take effect quickly, but eating it takes much longer, so often people will eat more thinking they didn’t get a large enough dose to get the buzz.”

      Oh dear.

      Banning commercially prepared edible/drinkable pot sounds like a great idea.

      Well, I’m glad the good people of CO have agreed to being the guinea pigs for this particular experiment, so we don’t have to go through all of this sad, stupid stuff nationally before hitting the brakes.

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    2. I read the shooting story–it sounds like the guy was also on pain killers.

      Drug interactions are going to be an important issue with pot legalization. I don’t know that there’s even much data available at this point for doctors and pharmacists with regard to how marijuana interacts with other common pharmaceuticals.

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    3. I understand there were some tragedies, but nothing is completely safe. That’s probably only a little bit more dangerous than peanut butter and safer than some over the counter medications. For example, in all of the U.S., there are 458 deaths from acetaminophen each year. While that’s a public health issue that has deservedly attracted attention, nobody is regretting legal Tylenol.

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      1. “…nobody is regretting legal Tylenol.”

        I actually wonder whether, if aspirin and Tylenol were newly discovered drugs, whether we wouldn’t be having a huge public debate over whether they were safe enough to be over-the-counter.

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      2. And the alternative is to continue to the violent drug war in which many people are dying, mostly minorities, and including children. I think legalization will reduce the death toll and the overall harm from drugs. Furthermore, I am sure that children were getting sick from edibles before legalization, and that men killed their wives before legalization as well. None of this convinces me we should regret legalizing drugs or support banning edibles.

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      3. Aspirin, probably wouldn’t get approved today, at least not as a pain medication. The low dose stuff for heart disease might.

        While you really do want to pay attention to the dosage information on the Tylenol, I can’t see it not making OTC status. There isn’t a safer pain reliever and I don’t think anybody would be willing to either do without it or pay the costs required to have a doctor visit for everybody who needed some.

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    4. Today in responsible gun ownership:

      “…apparently ordinary decent family man shot his wife while hallucinating…”

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  6. My concern is particularly the edible forms. There’s a special worry about the psychotropic effects and the potential for paranoia and hallucination with marijuana, but in other ways the issues of labeling and regulation are similar to energy drinks with high doses of caffeine.

    My other worry about legalization was the role,that marketing would play in making the drug attractive, and those worries are playing out.

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    1. It would be so great if they ran ads bragging about being strong enough to knock out a journalist for eight hours. Probably a little tasteless, but great.

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    2. “My other worry about legalization was the role,that marketing would play in making the drug attractive, and those worries are playing out.”

      Got a link?

      I always wondered what Big Pot would look like once there was legalization. What would the “Joe Camel” of pot look like?

      It’s kind of a weird issue, because if pot is a pharmaceutical (and they say it is), then it’s on FDA turf, and it would have to be tested and regulated as legal drugs are.

      I can kind of imagine a special carve out just for legal marijuana, but total across-the-board drug legalization would essentially dissolve our current system of prescriptions. I suppose that insurance reimbursements would tend to encourage people to stay in the system.

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