Maureen Dowd Says Her Marijuana Edibles Experiment Was ‘Ill-Advised’

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Thursday addressed the reactions to her column about a bad marijuana edibles trip she experienced in Colorado, saying she was focused “more on the fun than the risks” and calling her experiment “ill-advised.”

“I wrote in the column that I take responsibility for not knowing enough about what I was doing,” Dowd wrote in a statement obtained by The Cannabist, a marijuana news site operated by the Denver Post. “I was focused more on the fun than the risks. In that sense, I’m probably like many other people descending on Denver.”

But the man who guided Dowd through Colorado’s legal marijuana industry, My 420 Tours co-founder Matt Brown, explained earlier to The Cannabist that he’d warned Dowd about the unpredictable potency of edibles during their hours-long tour back in January. In her statement, Dowd said she didn’t recall such a warning.

“Matt Brown gave me a great tour. There is no mention of edibles in my transcript of our interview, but we were together several hours and no doubt we did chat about it at some point,” she said, as quoted by The Cannabist. “Obviously, however, I didn’t come away with the knowledge I acquired the hard way — that more than a small amount of an edible was ill-advised for someone with a low tolerance level and that edibles are ingested differently and reaction times are quite different. I ate approximately a quarter of the candy bar, which was too much for someone like me.”

Dowd concluded that while she favors marijuana legalization, “given all the tourists streaming into Colorado, it would be better to err on the side of conservative cautions.”