Good Question
Can I Overdose on Cannabis?
What adverse reactions look like — and how risky they really are
Welcome to my new column for Elemental. Each Tuesday, I’ll attempt to answer a thought-provoking health question with the help of one or two experts. If you’d like to suggest a topic, please email me at goodhealthquestion@gmail.com.
Michigan voted to legalize recreational marijuana late in 2018. Open-to-the-public sales began a year later, but I didn’t partake until the fall of 2020, when the monotony of the pandemic and the prospect of a long, isolated winter made a little psychotropic dabbling seem like a good idea.
In Detroit, where I live, the sale of recreational cannabis is still outlawed. And so on a snowy Wednesday evening I drove to a nearby suburb and waited — first in a long line of cars, and then in a parking lot — for a masked dispensary worker to bring out my packet of indica gummies. I went home, cut each of the gummies into fifths, and ate one of these pieces. I felt what I expected to feel, which was a kind of mild cognitive reshuffling — as if someone had slightly rearranged the furniture in the living room of my mind — and an almost imperceptible body buzz.
Since then I’ve been eating a bit of gummy in the evening a few times a month. The break…
