A decade ago, I finished my first year of grad school in Los Angeles, and my boyfriend and I went on a short getaway to celebrate. He recommended Ojai, a New Agey town a couple of hours’ north, because some famous person he liked had lived there. After an afternoon of hiking among the orange trees, we returned to our motel room to get ready for our fancy dinner, the kind of white-tablecloth place we could never afford to eat at normally.
I wore my grad-school finest, which is to say I looked like the assistant accounting manager at a medium-size business. My boyfriend brought out something special for the occasion: a cookie infused with marijuana butter. I had smoked joints before, and I wanted to seem game, so I eagerly ate my half. It tasted like your standard Nestlé Toll House, maybe a little grassier, and I swallowed it without asking key questions such as, “Where did you get this?” or “Why are we doing this?”
As soon as we pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant, Earth and its atmosphere began to whisper to me that all was not right. Everything seemed like it had been rotated 45 degrees, but in meaning, rather than appearance. I looked at my boyfriend and realized that I could no longer be sure he was him. What if he was an imposter, and I had come to this strange restaurant in this strange town with a strange man?
Read the rest of this story at https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/07/why-edibles-make-people-paranoid/594649/