My marijuana overdose: edibles are tricky, but consumers are not as helpless as Maureen Dowd implies.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Column

During a recent trip to Colorado, I sat on the cold hard floor of my hotel bathroom in the middle of the night, thinking about Maureen Dowd. The New York Times columnist ha d been widely mocked for eating too much marijuana-infused chocolate, which left her "curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours." And not in a good way.

"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," Dowd wrote in June. "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."

My own marijuana overdose was not nearly so dramatic. But I clearly had eaten one sour gummy candy too many. When I got up from bed to use the bathroom shortly after midnight, I was so dizzy that I had to sit down. I sat/fell hard enough to leave an impressive-looking bruise on my lower back. I know because during my massage with cannabis-infused lotion a few days later the masseuse remarked on it, which prompted me to tell her the whole embarrassing story, the moral of which is that edibles are indeed tricky, but consumers are not quite as helpless as Dowd portrays them.

'Start Low and Go Slow'

Toni Fox, owner of 3D Cannabis Center in Denver, does not discount the unpleasantness of Dowd's ordeal. Although "you're not going to die from it," she says, "you can feel absolutely horrific if you've never had an experience like that." At the same time, Fox thinks Dowd should have known better. "I believe the dispensary told her what the proper dosage was," she says. "I believe her tour guide told her what a proper dosage is." The guide who showed Dowd around during her visit told The Cannabist he warned her to be careful with edibles. "We all know that the world is watching us," says Fox, whose dispensary was the first recreational pot store to open in January. "Fie knew who she was. He's going to inform her correctly."

Dowd claimed that in response to experiences like hers Colorado regulators are "moving toward demarcating a single-serving size of 10 milligrams." But when she wrote her column, state regulations already required that labels on marijuana-infused foods and beverages indicate the total amount of THC and the number of 10-milligram "standard servings" in a package. "Total THC content is...