What Was in that Candy Bar?

Today, as I casually browsed Reddit, an article caught my attention. The link was titled something along the lines of "New York Times journalist freaks out on pot candy," and after seeing that, I couldn't help myself. But after reading the full article by Maureen Dowd, and noticing many misleading points, I couldn't help but dissect the article.

The first thing I noticed was that the title of the article was "Don't Harsh Our Mellow, Dude." Really? Do reporters seriously not get tired of using the same old Cheech and Chong puns to title their articles? Not only that, but the title really has nothing to do with the rest of the article, which focuses on the edible aspect of the recreational marijuana industry in Colorado. So really, Dowd is just too lazy to come up with a creative title.

Next, she goes on to describe her experience. Essentially, she's writing articles about legalization in Colorado and she figures, maybe I should give it a try. So she holes herself up in a hotel room with a marijuana infused candy bar and ate... uh.... she didn't know how much. She ate some, then some more, and then some more. And all of a sudden everything was coming on way too fast. She even says she "became convinced [she] had died." All right, so while this is certainly a disturbing story, she seems to have ignored several things that anyone using basic common sense would have realized. First and foremost, she is in a city she doesn't know, in a hotel room she's never been to, trying a drug for the first time. And she's all alone. She takes no precautions and clearly knows very little about pot edibles (or else she would have known they can take up to 2 hours to kick in.) In addition to all of this, she seems to not read the label on the package (where manufacturers are required to list serving size and milligrams of THC.) Often, these products have a serving size of 10mg or so of THC, and there are several servings in one candy. But apparently Dowd chose to ignore that.

My final qualm I have with the article is her very nice little "Edible Horror Stories" section near the end of the article, where she lists people who have committed suicide or murder after eating pot candy. However, she fails to mention that in both the cases she mentioned, there were other drugs found in the system of the person responsible, including PCP in one case.  So that also slipped her mind.

But while this article may be problem-filled and biased, it does raise a good point (though it's the not the point she's trying to make.) There is, quite obviously, a learning curve for using marijuana, and it's quite possible that the current system in Colorado caters to veteran users of the drug. But perhaps the biggest reason for this is that our society just hasn't had the time to adjust to the legalization of this drug. There aren't any videos being shown in health classes about "how much marijuana is a moderate amount" like there is for alcohol. And I think that with time, society will begin to educate people this newly legal substance. Because unfortunately, Maureen Dowd didn't have a friendly neighborhood stoner when she was growing up to explain to her how to use marijuana responsibly.