In Defense of Maureen Dowd’s Risible Col About Her Bad Trip on a Pot-Laced Candy Bar

Last night, a good chunk of Twitter was abuzz
with the release of
a new New York Times column from Maureen Dowd. The
Pulitzer Prize-winner had traveled to Colorado, chowed down on a
chocolate bar packed with legal pot and…had a real bummer of a
trip:

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.

Other than sharing, it’s not exactly clear what the point of
Dowd’s column was. There was the snide headline which she probably
didn’t write (“Don’t harsh our mellow, dude”) and a lot of lines
about the rise in emergency-room visits from new-to-edibles
customers such as Dowd. And then this:

The state plans to start testing to make sure the weed is spread
evenly throughout the product. The task force is discussing having
budtenders give better warnings to customers and moving toward
demarcating a single-serving size of 10 milligrams. (Industry
representatives objected to the expense of wrapping bites of candy
individually.)

“My
kids put rocks and batteries in their mouths,” said Bob Eschino,
the owner of Incredibles, which makes candy and serves up chocolate
and strawberry fountains. “If I put a marijuana leaf on a piece of
chocolate, they’ll still put it in their mouths.”

He argues that, since pot goodies leave the dispensary in
childproof packages, it is the parents’ responsibility to make sure
their kids don’t get hold of it.

“Somebody suggested we just make everything look like a gray
square so it doesn’t look appealing. Why should the whole industry
suffer just because less than 5 percent of people are having
problems with the correct dosing?”

Does he sound a little paranoid?

Whole piece here.

It’s easy to make fun of Dowd as an aging baby boomer hipster
who doesn’t know how to handle her own dosing. For instance, former
Times man Nate Silver dug up a 1921 Times story
headlined:

New York Times headline: “MEXICAN FAMILY GO INSANE.; Five Said
to Have Been Stricken by Eating Marihuana” http://t.co/Hp5Ukroflh

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June
4, 2014

He followed that up with this one:

I hope she expensed it. http://t.co/DhrGtYO6zH

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June
4, 2014

I myself was more than happy to
sling some snark at
Dowd and her Times colleagues, who often come across so
square they’re more like hexagons.

But
Dowd’s column—and her admirable willingness to talk frankly
about her experience in all its inglory—raises real issues about
the process by which pot legalization will be vetted. The fact is,
there’s a societal learning curve that’s every bit as real as
individual learning curves. It takes a while, and oftentimes a lot
of trials and errors, for a society to figure out how to deal with
major changes (divorce, gender and racial equality,
etc.). 

The sooner we acknowledge that the end of pot prohibition will
require a lot of conversation about what works well and what
doesn’t, the faster than the new normal of “marijuana on Main
Street” will be accepted for the huge leap forward in freedom and
peace that it really represents.

Related: Reason’s brand-spanking-new special landing
page of original articles, videos, and resources about every
aspect of pot legalization.