The New York Times' Maureen Dowd journaled through a THC-infused hallucination this week and published it as a column—and as it turns out, she's a really paranoid stoner.

Not content to sit around smoking lame, old school joints (looking at you, David Brooks), Dowd recently flew down to Colorado and decided to sample the local edibles—in her case, a delicious weed-caramel-chocolate candy bar.

So Dowd, who is hip to marijuana but not a regular user, holed herself up in a hotel room and nibbled "a bite or two."

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.

Surprisingly, it turns out Dowd hadn't died, but the harrowing experience did apparently inspire her to write a piece extolling the "darker side" of marijuana legalization—all based on the fact that the candy bar's label didn't indicate it was supposed to be broken into 16 pieces.

It's not clear how that omission was relevant to Dowd (who specifically notes she ate only "a bite or two") other than to support the 800-word rehash of a well-trod marijuana horror story—and, of course, the column's perfect title: "Don't Harsh Our Mellow, Dude."

[image via AP]