Pubdate: Sun, 08 Jun 2014
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2014 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Maureen Dowd

A version of this op-ed appears in print on June 8, 2014, on page SR11
of the New York edition with the headline: Pot Rules

POT RULES

WASHINGTON - IN the last chapter, I covered how not to get high. In
this one, I will cover how to get high.

After my admission that I did a foolish thing in Denver - failing to
realize that consuming a single square, about a quarter, of a pot
candy bar was dicey for an edibles virgin - many in the pot industry
upbraided me for doing a foolish thing.

But some in Mary Jane world have contacted me to say that my dysphoria
(i.e., bummer) is happening more and more in Colorado.

Justin Hartfield is the California founder of Marijuana.com and
Weedmaps.com (a sort of Yelp for pot), and an entrepreneur involved in
some of the nation's top marijuana-technology companies. As The Wall
Street Journal noted in a profile last March, the 30-year-old former
high school pot dealer wants to be "the Philip Morris of pot."

"Your experience points out a significant need for standardized
dosing, testing and labeling," he told me, recalling a similar
vertiginous paranoia spiral when he and his wife split a pot brownie
in Amsterdam in 2008.

On Friday, Marijuana.com launched an ongoing guide to "the best
practices towards both consumption and sale of edibles." It urged
every dispensary in Colorado and throughout America to follow
Amsterdam's lead and put up signs warning about the dangers of
oversampling psychotropic treats. (Other websites, from Vice to Vox,
also weighed in with helpful safety tips on edibles.)

Hartfield said Weedmaps is providing pamphlets, posters and video to
dispensaries and users, including an "Edibles Education" pamphlet with
headings like "Start Small," "Wait" because edibles take two hours or
longer to take effect, "Don't Mix" with alcohol or other substances,
and keep "Out of Reach" of children.

"Edibles are not the best delivery device in general for marijuana
because it's notoriously hard to control the titration in your
stomach," Hartfield said. "When you smoke it's so easy. You have a
hit, it affects you immediately. Then you can decide to take another
if you want to get higher. With edibles, it hits your stomach all at
once, and holy Nelly!"

Some Colorado pols are nervous about stories like that of the Longmont
mother who found her 2-year-old daughter eating a pot cookie in front
of their apartment building and the two 10-year-olds in Greeley who
were caught selling and swapping pot purloined from relatives. (Not to
mention the new British study suggesting there may be a correlation
between smoking cannabis and a temporary change in the size and shape
of sperm.)

"It's kind of shocking in a way that the states that approved it have
not had more oversight and consumer information," said Dr. Jerome
Groopman of Harvard Medical School, who favors legalization. "The
horse is out of the barn, so to speak, and there's a responsibility to
consumers and particularly young people. THC is a serious substance.
It has increased by 5 to 15 times in today's plants compared to the
1960s. It's a long time since Upton Sinclair. Now consumers have to
know: Is it pure? What is the concentration? What are the hazards?"

On Wednesday, the state task force met to forge a rule denoting 10
milligrams as a serving, so that the dosage is clearly demarcated. And
on Friday, Gov. John Hickenlooper signed legislation proposing a
banking solution for the mainly cash pot business, but the Federal
Reserve will need to sign off on it.

Because the Colorado law was approved by referendum, it's like a Wild
West statute, where things are getting filled in underneath, with a
haphazard application of the regulatory process.

"One major reason I got involved in the movement was so that consumers
could have basic access to information about the products they're
consuming, which was totally impossible under the prohibition that
created the black market," said Tom Angell, the founder and chairman
of Marijuana Majority. "So it's particularly disappointing to see that
some companies in the legal marijuana industry - which our years of
advocacy allowed to exist - are falling short of those principles. It
seems basic labeling and consumer information hasn't been a chief
priority, but hopefully now it's starting to change."

He wants budtenders behind the counter to be trained so they can give
customized guidance to customers of varying tolerance levels.

As the black market comes into the light, the hang-loose community can
be uptight about any moves to regulate or put contours around the sale
of pot to better protect neophytes, teenagers and children. Perhaps
because they have spent so much time fighting to move past the old
"Reefer Madness" caricature, the reefer crowd gets mad at the
suggestion of any regulation, no matter how small or helpful. The
clubby community that long existed in the shadows can have a
countercultural reaction to rules.

Also, as one Colorado political aide pointed out: "There's so much
money involved. This is a group of people who probably never thought
about money, and now a lot of people just have dollar signs in their
eyes."

Laughing, he noted, "The weirdest thing in the world is to hear from
an angry pothead who finishes a tirade about rules with 'dude.' "
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MAP posted-by: Matt