In her most recent New York
Times column,
Maureen Dowd brags about getting high with Willie Nelson, notes
that “I’m the poster girl for bad pot trips” (literally),
and once again misrepresents Colorado’s rules for marijuana
edibles:
Eager not to seem like a complete idiot, I burbled that, despite
the assumption of many that I gobbled the whole candy bar, I had
only taken a small bite off the end, and then when nothing seemed
to be happening, another nibble.Nelson humored me as I also pointed out that the labels last
winter did not feature the information that would have saved me
from my night of dread.Now, however, Colorado and Washington
State have passed emergency rules to get better labeling and
portion control on edibles, whose highs kick in more slowly and can
be more intense than when the drug is smoked.
Dowd visited Denver in January. Under the
regulations in effect at the time, packages of edibles were
limited to 100 milligrams of THC, which makes it unlikely that Dowd
would have experienced the eight-hour hallucinatory hell she
described in a
column last June as a result of “a small bite” and a “nibble.”
Furthermore, every wrapper had to carry a warning that “the
standardized serving size for this product includes no more than
ten milligrams of active THC,” which would be a tenth of a package
containing the maximum allowable amount of THC. At that point
potency testing was optional, but companies that tested their
products were required to include “a potency profile expressed in
milligrams and the number of THC servings within the Container.”
Manufacturers that did not test for potency had to include this
warning: “The marijuana product contained within this package has
not been tested for potency, consume with caution.” Those rules are
hard to reconcile with Dowd’s claim that “the labels last winter
did not feature the information that would have saved me from my
night of dread.”
Since May 1, a month before Dowd wrote the column about her bad
trip, potency testing has been
mandatory in Colorado, meaning that every package has to
carry a label indicating total THC content and the number of
10-milligram servings. Yet Dowd claimed the state was at that point
merely thinking about “moving toward demarcating a single-serving
size of 10 milligrams.” In truth, that has been the standard since
legal recreational sales began on January 1.
Now Dowd says Colorado recently adopted rules “to get better
labeling and portion control” on edibles. But the
rules to which she refers, which were issued at the beginning
of August, do not affect information about THC content or
serving size. Instead they require that foods containing more than
10 milligrams of THC be marked “in a way that enables a reasonable
person to intuitively determine how much of the product constitutes
a single serving of active THC.” The new rules also say that “each
demarked standardized serving of marijuana must be easily
separable.” The upshot is to ban products, such as 100-milligram
truffles, that contain more than 10 milligrams of THC but cannot be
easily divided into standard servings.
There will be one new warning that is
relevant to avoiding experiences like the one described by
Dowd: “The intoxicating effects of this product may be delayed by
two or more hours.” Still, Dowd has consistently understated the
requirements already imposed on the industry and the information
already available to consumers while creating the impression that
Colorado faces a marijuana-edible emergency that demands stricter
regulation. In her June 3 column, she describes two
“marijuana-related deaths” that are
endlessly recycled by pot prohibitionists—one a suicide, the
other a homicide. In her column yesterday, she says public
education is needed to “prevent any more deaths,” as if people are
dropping dead left and right from marijuana overdoses, which is a
biological impossibility in real-world conditions.
Public education should be based on accurate information about
the potential hazards of edibles and the tools consumers can use to
avoid them. Dowd seems intent on misrepresenting both.
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