Working in the California weed world means that I spend my time around farmers, business owners, sales reps, dispensary heads, and marijuana users who will all justify their beloved plant with the same closing argument: “No one ever overdosed and died from cannabis.”

I always took this statement as fact. I never heard of anyone going to some fancy rehab for marijuana abuse. Had anyone on A&E’s Intervention been addicted to weed alone? Nope. It only existed as a cute little sidebar to severe alcohol or crack habits. But we’ve all heard the stories: Some friend of a friend smoked too much weed and tripped so hard he drove his car into the neighbor’s front porch and killed the family dog.

Every drug has a therapeutic index — the ratio between toxic and therapeutic dosing — that determines how safe the substance is. According to a study for the U.S. National Library of Medicine, marijuana has a therapeutic index of 40,000:1; in other words, you’d need to take 40,000 times the “normal” amount of weed in order to die. But that’s a really, really hard thing to do.

People who overdose and die from opioids do so because the drug has caused them to stop breathing. (Morphine’s therapeutic index is 70:1.) That’s because opioid receptors are located in the brain stem, which also controls respiratory function. Marijuana is absorbed into the body through specific cannabinoid receptors that are part of the endocannabinoid system, which controls physiological processes like appetite, pain sensation, mood, and memory. And as most of us know, there’s no way to mitigate the effects of weed; you just have to wait it out, like bad traffic.

My plan for this article was to spend the weekend trying my best to overdose on weed. But, after smoking three bowls of Blue Dream sativa, my memory flashed back to last Christmas.

My husband was away for work, and I’d decided to stay home to write while enjoying my new favorite TreatWell 1:1 Tincture. (The ratio refers to its even amounts of THC and CBD, said to cause “the entourage effect,” a near perfect high.) This was before I had become privy to the golden rule of orally ingesting cannabis concentrates: You must take edibles on a full stomach. Unlike alcohol or pills, cannabis wants to attach to the fatty acids a full stomach creates. Many people will eat a bunch of weed chocolate, feel nothing after 40 minutes, and continue to eat more. Then they go out for a burger and the minute that greasy cow meat hits their gut, they lose it and call 911.

My mistake was twofold: an empty stomach and a lack of patience. Edibles take time to kick in. That’s why every single package warns the user to wait at least an hour before consuming a second helping. I was blind to the recommended dose (I’ve never been one to follow instructions) and dropped five little turkey basters of the tincture under my tongue in the span of ten minutes. Then I waited a few and did six more. I put on my favorite Marlon Brando movie, The Wild One, and sunk into the couch.

It hit when I went outside to smoke a cigarette. My body had been warming slowly, like I was a bathtub being filled with hot water. But something in the back of my head was knocking on my anxiety. In the time it took me to finish my cigarette, I went from calming tub to drowning. Paranoia and anxiety stormed in. You know how you can tell you’re too stoned? When God makes an appearance. He was hanging in the Christmas lights on the balcony, talking about gluttony through the green cords.

Paralysis followed the paranoia. I became too stoned to focus. Cleaning — my go-to — was unthinkable. Watch porn and masturbate? Maybe. No. The guilt! God was still up in those fucking Christmas lights. Walk around the neighborhood? I’ll get killed or run over or eaten by a German shepard. I texted my husband: “You need to call me in a few hours and make sure I’m okay. I’m too stoned and it’s worse than a bad acid trip.”

My plan for this article was to spend the weekend trying my best to overdose on weed.

I was too scared to do anything but sit there, listening to the nonsensical words swirling in my head on repeat like a scratched record. There were no coherent thoughts. Just sounds. My brain had become like a dog’s.

When I was younger, my friends and I used to go camping and take acid and do nitrous. A wealthy and adventurous buddy of ours had bought a tank from a sketchy dentist. We’d lay back, inhale the nitrous balloon, and the world around us would move up and down, like human breath. We’d almost die for a minute. Really, we would. Our lips would go blue, we’d tremor, and we’d begin to die. Then we’d be shot back into reality so hard we’d have to shake our heads and yelp. It was wild. And as I sat there in my acute cannabis psychosis, bound to my couch with invisible nails, I remembered how nearly killing myself with nitrous felt a thousand times saner.

My sister’s boyfriend works as a 911 operator. One of the most common calls he gets is from fully grown adults who have taken too many edibles. “Their heart rate increases so they assume they are going to die,” he told me. “It’s a timeless 911 call.”

I did not call 911. I did not call anyone. I was too afraid of my phone. I sat for ten hours, barely moving and focusing on my breath. When I woke up the next day, the anxiety clung to me like a film. I finally felt normal on Monday.

I’m not proud of it, but I haven’t exactly said “no” to drugs in my life. I started young and I’ve tried it all. I’ve had my issues with heavy, addictive substances, and I’m glad I got that figured out early. Cannabis may be one of the hardest drugs to get “too high” from, and it may not cause your lungs to stop functioning, but that purgatory of paranoia, anxiety, and paralysis is its own special hell.

No. No one that I know of has technically overdosed on cannabis, but you can go temporarily insane trying. So don’t do it.

PHOTO: JUANMONINO