The office of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd reached out to TPM on Thursday to make clear just how much of a cannabis-infused chocolate bar she consumed in her experiment with edible marijuana earlier this year.
On Wednesday, a pro-pot ad campaign adopted Dowd’s likeness for a billboard advertising responsible consumption of edibles, referencing a “bad trip” the columnist wrote about back in June. The experience was so bad, she wrote, that “I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.”
In an email on Thursday, a representative of Dowd’s office clarified how much pot Dowd consumed at that time:
Great story today on the marijuana ads but I just wanted to push back on a small thing in your article. Although it has become accepted wisdom that Maureen ate most of a candy bar (or “about half” as you put it), her columns and comments at the time explicitly said she only about 1/4. I’d appreciate if you could change the story online to reflect that.
In the original column, Dowd did not specify how much of the candy bar she ate, writing that she had “a bite or two,” and that she “nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more.”
But in a subsequent piece reflecting on the bad snack, Dowd indeed specified that she consumed “about a quarter” of the candy bar. In an interview with Business Insider, Dowd also said she ate “approximately a quarter of the candy bar, which was too much for someone like me.”
