Few things say, “Oh, God, I love staring at my naval,” as does writing a column about somebody else’s column about getting high.
But I can’t let New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s public drug-overdose confession smolder any longer. Dowd came to Denver a few weeks ago to get a firsthand feel for the hedonist life we’ve permitted ourselves starting in January when it became legal to buy dope.
Dowd hooked up with folks from one of the state’s ganja-tourism services, My 420 Tours, who told her what’s what and took her around to some pot shops, according to Dowd and the Denver Post’s Cannabist website. She bought a juiced-up candy bar, didn’t follow the directions, ate too much, saw Jesus or something during an uncomfortable eight-hour trip and ended up riding Mary Jane around her hotel room while never leaving her bed.
I know a lot of us have been there, but we were just starting college in the ‘70s.
Some days later, she penned an amusing column, essentially admonishing folks here for not taking our rocky mountain high life seriously. She more than implied that she waltzed in and out of a pot shop and was left to her own devices on how to dose herself to a higher plain. Since then, the people she actually spent time with have made it clear they told Dowd, repeatedly, about the dangers of eating too much dope. And despite what she wrote, there really are instructions and warnings on all edible pot products in Colorado. Whether through naivete or forgetfulness, this child of the ‘60s forgot Rule No. 1 when it comes to inserting mind-altering substances in the ol’ pie hole: wait.
If you’ve forgotten, too, eating the right amount of hash in your browns, orange in your sunshine, mush in your rooms or mescaleez in your quick is tricky business. The temptation is always to eat a little more because, “I don’t feel anything yet.” This of course leads to the sensation of a sudden and violent increase in Earth’s gravity, obscenely self-conscious mouth breathing and a lot of “oh-my-god’s.”
In one memorable moment of my youth, I didn’t wait for Pot Brownie No. 2 and about two hours on the floor of the Ogden Theater, laughing uncontrollably, watching my equally stupid pal instead of the weekly midnight antics of the “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and then wandering around Colfax for what must have been weeks. In Dowd’s case, she got clobbered by the kush fairy after not waiting for Dose No. 1 to kick in before eating way too much dope.
“… 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.”
Immediately, a country full of people who have no idea how much they’d hate her if they knew she was Public Liberal Media Hack Enemy No. 1, and all the people who do hate her because she’s Public Liberal Media Hack Enemy No. 1, were siding with her and quoting her and clucking their tongues about “See? See how real reefer madness really is? See?”
I have to admit, while reading Dowd’s column I raced toward the end to see at what point she joined an orgy in the hotel elevator or found herself handcuffed in the back of a cattle car on the way to eastern Europe to be a sex slave. As it turns out, she spent the night trying to wish herself out of her high.
The parallels to reality Dowd and others overlook are painful: booze. The back of my favorite beer bottles admonish me to “drink responsibly” and not at all if I’m pregnant. I painfully remember my first encounter with Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill and thinking, “Wow. This shit tastes great.”
What harm could come from another little glass? Or four? I didn’t see Jesus that night, but, man, did I see stars when me and my date fell in an old mining hole on the Rooney Ridge as we were “flying” across the hill in the dark. I had dry heaves for three days. To this day, I won’t even make eye contact with anyone named Boone. Shudder.
Guess what I learned at age 17? Soda-pop wine packs a wallop. Southern Comfort really smells awful when your expelling it through your nose. Wait before you have a little more, and just don’t have a lot. Just don’t.
Now I’m in my fifties. Guess what? I so vividly remember the nausea from too much booze and the “oh-my-god’s” from too much dope, that I make a concerted effort to never, ever, go there again.
Now don’t mistake me here. I’m by no means telling out-of-towners that they’re just fun crushers by not endorsing our newfound high-life here in Colorado, or that the edible pot industry doesn’t need to make a host of changes to ensure we’re all going to be OK with this newfound fun-distry. I’ve considered that Dowd comes from a part of the world where the city tells people when to stop drinking soda pop and everyone works hard to not know or see each other in public. So maybe we should have different rules for people who even in their sixties might be at risk of waking up on the bathroom floor, snuggled up to an empty Annie Green Springs pillow, or eating the entire jar of salted peanuts at one sitting, or getting stuck on the top of a totem pole after sampling a few too many shrooms on a gorgeous summer night. Clearly, I would advise Dowd and her sympathizers to avoid many other Colorado offerings, such as skiing, rafting, ice-climbing, fourteening, mountain biking, backpacking and the like. You get pretty high, but if you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing, the consequences can be much more tragic.
Enough already. I’m a lifelong fan of Dowd, and I sympathetically suggest she and others follow my lead in just licking the kushy candy bars instead of actually eating them and finding endless wonders in where their umbilical cords used to be.
— Editor Dave Perry
Bravo.