Dan Rather loves telling people about the time he tried heroin...for journalism. Now liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in a Tuesday column about traveling to Colorado to experience the progressive new world of legalized pot. Suffice it to say, her experience was, well, quite the adventure.
Dowd detailed how she inhaled a pot-filled candy bar, and the resulting psychological effects. Let’s just say her encounter with marijuana was something less than a stoner’s fantasy. She describes, that, after about an hour, she “felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I curled up and lay in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours.”
She continued to discuss the frightening–and somewhat amusing–hallucinations she felt from her apparent pot overdose:
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.
Dowd became aware in an interview the next morning that the candy bar was “supposed to be cut into 16 pieces for novices, but that recommendation hadn’t been on the label.” Who would have thought that a liberal columnist could ever come to realize the dangers of legalized pot?
And as long as the marijuana industry continues to be relatively unregulated–as Dowd notes, there are major issues with uneven dosing in various forms of pot candy–these complications may persist. Of course, even with proper regulation, it is impossible to know the catastrophic psychological effects legalized pot will have on teenagers and young adults.
Dowd certainly chose a bizarre route to highlight the dangers of legal pot in Colorado, but she does have a point: there are serious issues with the product in its current state. And, as Governor Jerry Brown (D-Calif.) eloquently put it, “how many people can get stoned and still have a great state or a great nation?”
