Thursday I wrote a headline that played on the Hot Pockets commercial and gave a nod to the golden age of newspapers, Reefer Madness hysteria and cop shows like Dragnet.

As the ghost of William Randolph Hearst as my witness I will never do that again because I fear I insulted every pothead that has ever read rrspin.com or will read it in the future.

You see, after the Hot Pockets joke in the lead of the headline, I inserted the word dope for marijuana. This was a big no-no because I was informed that, according to the Urban Dictionary, dope is what people who do not do drugs call marijuana. People who do marijuana call heroin dope.

The horror of it all, I thought to myself when I was essentially informed I was an imbecile who has the street credentials of a mule, how will I be able to sleep at night when I know I have offended the pot-smoking masses?

So I looked up the word dope in some other sources, not that I don’t trust the Urban Dictionary because I use it frequently, especially when I hear some phrases that I can’t repeat in a family website.

The online Urban Dictionary is much like Wikipedia in that anybody can go in and give any definition they want to. I suppose potheads got together on this one to make themselves look good or maybe to make a person like me, who was merely throwing in some veiled references, look like I threw the baby out with the bong water.

The American Slang Dictionary includes marijuana as dope and Merriam-Webster specifically defines dope as an illicit, habit-forming or narcotic drug, especially marijuana.

Not that any of this matters because I still deeply and egregiously offended my dope fiend readers when writing a headline that meant more than it was supposed to anyway.

I was weaned on Dragnet reunions, have a passion for the decades spanning roughly from the 1920s to the early 1960s and am especially a fan of anything faintly related to film noir.

Papers then commonly referred to marijuana as dope and even in a Mad Men episode the drug dealer who sold one of the joints that Peggy Olson would eventually smoke called marijuana dope. Any cop show worth its salt in the golden age is going to call marijuana dope.

All that matters not, however, because I was insensitive to the users of marijuana in my headline without even knowing I was being insensitive or “pot-litically” incorrect when all I was doing was being clever.

The crazy thing about the whole faux “pot” is that I have never been ashamed to write in this forum I believe dope should be legalized because of its economic viability and for the fact it’s probably no more or no less harmful than smoking cigarettes.

Maybe the next the time I try to be clever when writing a headline I’ll consult the editorial board and they, in a smoke-filmed room reminiscent of the That 70s Show roundtable, can write one for me and spare me the trouble of writing an apology column that I was never to going to write in the first place.

The problem is they’d probably be too busy to help me because they’re out trading stolen merchandise for dope. That’ll show ‘em — Lance Martin