Maureen Dowd’s reefer madness column is getting a lot of run recently. One reason is it flatters the types of people who think Dowd is smart and savvy. The column is heavy on the signalling. Dowd and people like here know nothing about the proletarian word of legalized marijuana. That’s for the dirt people. This section is probably what got the readers most excited.

The caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more. I figured if I was reporting on the social revolution rocking Colorado in January, the giddy culmination of pot Prohibition, I should try a taste of legal, edible pot from a local shop.

What could go wrong with a bite or two?

Everything, as it turned out.

Not at first. For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.

But then 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.

That sounds fictional. But, she is an old woman and potency is higher with food grade weed these days. We’re a long way from mixing in pot with the brownies. Perhaps this is an honest recitation of her experience. In fairness, she does concede that her inexperience may have been the issue. Old age is most likely the bigger issue, but she can be forgiven for not acknowledging it. The reader is supposed to nod along, confirmed in their ignorance about the dirty world of legal weed.

Later in the column she sounds like the her parents circa 1968.

Colorado raked in about $12.6 million the first three months after pot was legalized for adults 21 and over. Pot party planners are dreaming up classy events: the Colorado Symphony just had its first “Classically Cannabis” fund-raiser with joints and Debussy. But the state is also coming to grips with the darker side of unleashing a drug as potent as marijuana on a horde of tourists of all ages and tolerance levels seeking a mellow buzz.

In March, a 19-year-old Wyoming college student jumped off a Denver hotel balcony after eating a pot cookie with 65 milligrams of THC. In April, a Denver man ate pot-infused Karma Kandy and began talking like it was the end of the world, scaring his wife and three kids. Then he retrieved a handgun from a safe and killed his wife while she was on the phone with an emergency dispatcher.

As Jack Healy reported in The Times on Sunday, Colorado hospital officials “are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana” and neighboring states are seeing more stoned drivers.

I fully admit to being torn on the legalization issue. The zeal of libertarians on the issue has always turned me off. At the same time, the scolds on the right with their assertions about gateway drugs and “the children” fall flat with me. When you live in the sort of places I prefer to live, you know better.

Still, I can’t help but note the public reaction. Despite the fact Bill Buckley and National Review have been pro-legalization for fifty years, the Left has always claimed the Right is behind the war on drugs. Now, it is the old warhorses of the Left out wringing their hands over legalization. All those aging Boomers who used to love telling tales of their youthful experimentation are lecturing us about weed. I look forward to her next column on how television rots the brain and rock and roll causes children to misbehave.