What Maureen Dowd Gets Right About Marijuana

By Alyssa Rosenberg

June 4--If there is one thing you can say about New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, it is that she knows her brand.

Even when she has a bad high in Colorado and uses it as the peg for a column on the messy process of marijuana legalization, she does not lose sight of her Dowdisms.

Dowd may have lost her mind via mis-dosage, but in writing about it, she stays on message by describing “my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand,” blaming a girlish affinity for chocolate for her misfortune and confessing her stoned fascination with the green corduroy jeans she was wearing at the time.

As many of you who follow this blog know, I've suffered with multiple sclerosis for the past fifteen years. Since I'm no hero, I find this miserable disease freaken painful. I'm an artist (and a lover), not a phucken martyr! Hey! This shit hurts and I'm not amused, I remind my long-suffering husband! I turn to the usual drugs...each with a long and frightening list of side effects: may cause irritability, sudden drop in blood pressure, rotting teeth before your very eyes, difficulty walking (if this shit hits the lower spine), unbearable headaches (if shit strikes the upper spine). Of course there's more; these are just the big chunks. Recently I've turned to smoking. Like Bill Clinton, I "really" never inhaled, so it was a long lesson I needed to learn and fast! I'm pleased to report the gasping and choking are all but gone and I'm able to control the pain without groveling for pain relief the conventional way.