NEW YORK (PIX11) – While researching Colorado’s booming marijuana trade, New York Times op-ed columnist Maureen Dowd decided to experience what she was reporting on, and things did not go well.

Dowd, who doesn’t use marijuana, visited a local dispensary and picked up a caramel-chocolate flavored candy bar that “looked so innocent, like the Sky Bars I used to love as a child.”

She took the pot candy bar to her hotel room, intent on finding out what the drug — now legal in Colorado for recreational use — felt like.

“What could go wrong with a bite or two,” Dowd wrote. “Everything, as it turned out.”

She nibbled part of the bar, and, when nothing happened, she ate more. After an hour and still nothing, she decided to order room service and “return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.”

That’s when the THC took hold:

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.

When the effects of the marijuana finally wore off the next day, Dowd returned to the pot shop and was told that novices were only supposed to eat 1/16th of the candy bar — even though the instructions were apparently not on the package.

After Colorado legalized marijuana January 1, 2014, the state pulled in roughly $12.6 million during the first three months, according to the paper.

Despite the obvious popularity of the drug, Dowd wrote that “some kinks need to be ironed out” as both novices and chronic users with vastly different tolerances buy from the same high-grade dispensaries.