Maureen Dowd’s Marijuana Edibles Problem—and Mine

It has
been six months since Colorado’s state-licensed pot shops started
opening, and in the absence of any noticeable catastrophe critics
recently have been highlighting the special hazards posed by
marijuana edibles. In my latest Forbes column, I
argue that the solution to the risk of accidental overindulgence
lies in variety and information, rather than arbitrary limits. Here
is how it starts:

During a recent trip to Colorado, I sat on the cold hard floor
of my hotel bathroom in the middle of the night, thinking about
Maureen Dowd. The New York Times columnist had
been widely mocked for eating too much marijuana-infused chocolate,
which left her “curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next
eight hours.” And not in a good way. “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,” Dowd wrote last month. “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.”

My own marijuana overdose was not nearly so dramatic. But I
clearly had eaten one sour gummy candy too many. When I got up from
bed to use the bathroom shortly after midnight, I was so dizzy that
I had to sit down. I sat/fell hard enough to leave an
impressive-looking bruise on my lower back. I know because during
my massage with cannabis-infused lotion a few days later
the masseuse remarked on it, which prompted me to tell her the
whole embarrassing story, the moral of which is that edibles are
indeed tricky, but consumers are not quite as helpless as Dowd
portrays them.

Read the whole thing.