It’s High Time We Judged the Smell of Weed

American cities stink, and it’s because of weed. “Skunky” isn’t harsh enough. It’s the smell of a putrefied skunk that was in heat when it died three days ago. On a radiator. The modern smell of cities doesn’t seem to be anything like the marijuana of olden times, which people may remember as having a gentle smell whose distinctiveness announced its illegality. It was the smell of lassitude and inertia. The average dose of weed was as mild as Wally Cox, compared to today’s super-scientifically engineered varieties.

Apparently, the weed agronomists, armed with modern techniques, asked themselves: “What if we took that mild sense of euphoria and false sense of enhanced consciousness that made you stare at the folds of your hands for 35 minutes, and made it into something so powerful that it would stupefy a silverback gorilla?”

“That would be cool. What if we also made it smell like a silverback gorilla slathered with 30 pounds of expired goat cheese?”

When legalization started working its way through state legislatures, the Boomer solons shrugged, falling back on the merry distant hippie-dippie memories of mild herbs wafting through the dorm room. Oh, what’s the harm? And besides, the state can make tax revenue from people turning their quicksilver minds into muttering mud. But nobody seemed to anticipate how the streets would now smell of weed. The parks as well. Your apartment building. Your neighbor would blaze up, and a cloud would roll over into your backyard, and you had to take it. Well, Arizona is taking some action: Six years after legalizing recreational marijuana use, a bill has now been introduced to penalize its smell.

There are, of course, voices outraged at the idea of criminalizing a smell. Another form of glowering Puritanism come to scowl at the harmless pleasures of the good folk. Who are you to say it’s a bad smell? Oh, I don’t know — somebody with a few operating olfactory nerves left after a lifetime around gasoline and cigarettes, both of which I prefer to weed. Odd how the culture became intolerant of the smell of good rich pipe tobacco but regards the need to inhale secondhand weed smoke as a moral imperative.

Surely, the people in favor of letting dank cumulonimbus formations drift into your neighbor’s yard and get in their hair and clothes would agree that some scents are not acceptable. If your neighbor bought an entire dead orca and left it to rot in the backyard, you should be able to complain. Yes, you say, but beached whales build up internal gases as they decay and then explode in a horrid shower of guts. That’s different. Yes, and the response would be: You can hose down the guts off your patio. You can’t hose down the weed smell in your backyard.

Likewise, if you had an open septic tank, and it was 95 degrees out, that would be a problem. And not just because your child was knocked unconscious by a buzzard that fell from the sky.

Yes, these are ridiculous examples, of course, because we can all agree that decaying whales and open septic systems are bad. Weed people obviously like the smell of weed smoke, just like the guy who gets in the elevator, who apparently has soaked his entire set of clothing in Drakkar Noir cologne, likes the scent of Drakkar Noir.

We will also be told that cities historically had a rich tapestry of smells. Why, modern sensibilities would be appalled to go back to the early 1900s, when the air was a fugue of animal, industrial, human, and vegetable smells. People were glad when the wind shifted from the north to the south, because it meant the tanning factory odors were replaced by those of the slaughterhouse. Is it so bad if our current antiseptic EPA-cleansed environments have an occasional tendril of something you particularly don’t like for some picky, petty reason?

Well, it is a series of competing rights, one supposes. Your right to light a fire in a crowded theater stops at my nose, or something like that. But in a sane and civil world, we all tolerate the actions of our fellow citizens with a shrug and the realization that a little live-and-let-live is a necessary lubricant for the million-toothed gears of human society to work.

Just so the stoners realize: You’re stinking up the joint, and everyone judges you for it.