Spinster columnist Maureen Dowd flew to Colorado to eat marijuana candy so she could write about it and warn all you kids against doing the same stupid thing. She did her drug of choice alone, in a hotel room in a place far from home, which is kind of sad. But that’s a junkie’s life.
Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.
What could go wrong with a bite or two?
Everything, as it turned out.
Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.
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 turns out that MoDo used some seriously strong stuff, and used it the wrong way, which made her whole trippy experience even worse. But…
Green corduroy jeans?
It’s one thing to admit to drug use, another to admit your noobness in using drugs while trying to seem with-it, but MoDo has to return to New York at some point, where the fashion police are as militarized as the real police.
Marijuana use has been proven to do bad things to the brain. But how does MoDo explain a terrible choice she made before her terrible choice to use drugs?
pjmedia.com
The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.
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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.
[ This is a real ethical industry. Make it look and taste like a candy bars so they'll eat it up fast ... no warnings about use. ]
I reckoned that the fact that I was not a regular marijuana smoker made me more vulnerable, and that I should have known better. But it turns out, five months in, that some kinks need to be ironed out with the intoxicating open bar at the Mile High Club.
Colorado raked in about $12.6 million the first three months after pot was legalized for adults 21 and over. Pot party planners are dreaming up classy events: the Colorado Symphony just had its first “Classically Cannabis” fund-raiser with joints and Debussy. But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.
In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.
As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.
“We realized there was a problem because we’re watching everything with the urgency of the first people to regulate in this area,” said Andrew Freedman, the state’s director of marijuana coordination. “There are way too many stories of people not understanding how much they’re eating. With liquor, people understand what they’re getting themselves into. But that doesn’t exist right now for edibles for new users in the market. It would behoove the industry to create a more pleasant experience for people.
“The whole industry was set up for people who smoked frequently. It needs to learn how to educate new users in the market. We have to create a culture of responsibility around edibles, so people know what to expect to feel.”
[ Yeah, that's gonna happen. ]
Gov. John Hickenlooper and the Legislature recently created a task force to come up with packaging that clearly differentiates pot cookies and candy and gummy bears from normal sweets — with an eye toward protecting children — and directed the Department of Revenue to restrict the amount of edibles that can be sold at one time to one person. The governor also signed legislation mandating that there be a stamp on edibles, possibly a marijuana leaf. (Or maybe a stoned skull and bones?)
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?
nytimes.com
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Jane Alexandria, VA 6 hours ago
Ms. Dowd and other commenters here have shared their extremely unpleasant experiences of eating marijuana. I'd like to add my voice to the chorus. It's a horrible and very scary feeling to have to endure. The worst part may be that it takes so long for the effects to wear off.
But this kind of body-slamming effect that lasts for hours and hours only happens when the stuff is eaten. Smoked, it is much more mellow, probably because the quantity consumed is so much lower. It's also much easier to control how much you consume: like a glass of wine, you feel the effects and can choose to smoke or drink more based on how you feel. The dosage and effect is more closely linked in time (seconds or minutes instead of hours, like it is when you eat it).
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Lara Wheeler
Lafayette, CO 4 hours ago
I think there is no place for marijuana edibles. Cookies, candy, gummy bears, they are inherently things that children want. Putting drugs in them markets them to minors, point blank. A big fuss was made about cigarettes and tobacco products being marketed to minors. Imagine if Nicotine Gummy Bears tried to get approval!
Marijuana edibles should have been regulated before, back when it was "medical marijuana." Has any ever thought to make a Prozac brownie? The absurdity of that question highlights the absurdity that the marijuana movement was ever "medical." I advocate an all-out ban on the commercially produced edibles.
If you really want a pot brownie, bake it yourself.
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Tracy Denver 1 hour ago
I'm not a pot smoker, and neither are my friends (at least now in our 40s)... but as Coloradans we wanted to dip our toe in the water. The store clerk said to slice the average sized tootsie roll up into quarters. He said edibles were for the uninitiated, that it would be similar to a two or three glasses of wine. Like Ms. Dowd, we nibbled, then nothing. I went downstairs to fold laundry. My friends watched the game-- it was Sunday afternoon. Frankly, we felt ripped off by the expensive tootsie roll and said as much to one another. And then it hit. The scary shudder. The rising panic over what was happening to us. We tripped for a good 5 hours and felt the effects for 24. Two of us got close to calling 911. My friend Jana was convinced I was going to kill myself. I paced in my room for hours trying to stave off demons that I felt attacking me from head to toe. It remains one of the most frightening experiences of my life-- and of that of my friends. I voted for this legislation and now I live with the regrets. We have to regulate edibles. This isn't your run of the mill weed!
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Bryan Basamanowicz Vancouver 1 hour ago
It's difficult to calibrate dosage with edibles, especially for infrequent cannabis consumers.
In 2012, I started an outreach called MPMC (Marijuana Paranoia Management Coaching) aimed at providing support for individuals (many of them medicinal use candidates) who experienced difficult reactions to cannabis. After working in a professional capacity with 27 individuals and interviewing thousands more, I can tell you that some of the worst "freak-out" stories were tourism stories. Travelers in Amsterdam, failing to understand the potency of what they were consuming etc.
People seem to think that legal weed is gentle weed. The reality is that we've got a lot of work to do to ensure that canna-tourism isn't canna-torture.
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Mark South Florida 1 hour ago
Edibles are not for newbies--the dosing is just too non-standard, and the delayed effect causes people to overindulge. The same thing happened in Amsterdam with "spacecake". It might be best to limit commercial sale of edibles to medical use, and restrict recreational sales to weed for smoking/vaporizing.
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