New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s eight-hour bad trip with weed chocolate — “As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me,” she wrote in yesterday’s paper — was not the result of dealer negligence, according to her guide from Colorado’s My 420 Tours. “She got the warning,” Matt Brown told the Denver Post’s Cannabist blog. “She did what all the reporters did. She listened. She bought some samples — I don’t remember what exactly. Me and the owner of the dispensary we were at and the assistant manager and the budtender talked with her for 45 minutes at the shop.” But back at the hotel, Dowd was all alone with her weed, which she didn’t know how to smoke.
“She got some bud, some edibles and when we got back to the hotel she had to run off to a Mitt Romney documentary screening,” Brown explained. “She asked me, ‘Will you roll a joint for me? I don’t know how to do it.’ But she had to run really quickly to the screening, and I was going to catch a flight the next day, and we were going to connect a few nights later but it never worked out.”
That left the chocolate, which Dowd said did not have serving instructions on the packaging. While she admits that she made a rookie mistake — “I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more” — Dowd used her experience as a jumping-off point to argue a broad point: “that some kinks need to be ironed out with the intoxicating open bar at the Mile High Club.”
Brown agrees that beginners need to be catered to carefully and suggests that marijuana should be socialized like alcohol so norms can be observed and discussed. However, he said, before her experiment, “We talked about edibles and how they affect everyone differently. In the context of covering all the bases with a customer, we really went into depth to tell this reporter, who would then tell the world, about marijuana in Colorado.”
Now that she knows better, maybe a sequel is in order. This time, she can watch the Mitt Romney documentary after getting high, and tell us all about the upsides.
