Not many people smoke pot. But for those who do, the City of New York and other urban areas have given them license to stink up the joint with their pot exhalations, forcing the majority to inhale their secondhand smoke in a way that cigarette smokers can only envy.
Puff, puff, puff...
According to mrcTV:
The stench of marijuana in New York City has gotten so bad that it’s alienating tourists, yet the city’s mayor, Democrat Eric Adams, is actually encouraging more of it – and even liberals are getting annoyed.
“Tourists are taken aback by the smell in Times Square,” so much so that a local business alliance has launched a campaign to discourage pot-smoking in the public arena, Spectrum News NY1 reports:
“After the legalization of recreational marijuana, the smell of weed in public places is rampant. Some complaints sparked a new campaign from the Times Square Alliance to put up signs that read ‘Let’s be Blunt: No Smoking in the Plazas.’”
“New York Smells Like a Declining City,” a recent Wall Street Journal piece says, noting that “The stench of weed is ubiquitous, and the mayor is encouraging the ‘industry.’”
On Thursday, the leftist magazine “The Atlantic” ran an OpEd titled, “I Don’t Want to See You Get High,” complaining about the stench of pot and the inconsideration for others exhibited by its users:
“Smelling cannabis has become an inescapable feature of living in (or visiting) the city, an emblem of life in New York akin to sipping a crème at a café table in Paris or strolling through Rome eating a gelato.”
Seems secondhand smoke is O.K., so long as it comes from a reefer or the hot side of a roach clip. And as if New York City didn't have enough problems with unenforced crime, illegals demanding free housing, and bums in tent hovels sleeping on the sidewalk, the whole place smells like a whiff of dirty bong water. That's your quality of life there, and too bad if the babies inhale it, too, which they will.
Now the tourists are noticing -- meaning, they don't want to spend several thousand dollars on air flights, pricey meals, and overpriced hotels only to steep themselves in the smell of vagrant encampments as their "experience." There are a lot of nice places they can go to these days, few of which will force them to inhale someone else's secondhand stench. To go to New York and come back smelling like an ashtray full of roach clips is asking a lot. It might even bring trouble for these tourists when they reenter their home countries and must pass through customs. Imagine returning home as a tourist from Singapore where they just hanged a guy for trafficking two pounds of pot.
The bottom line here is that the failure to enforce pot laws and the decriminalization of marijuana use inevitably leads to public consumption and a lot of bums whose lives revolve around pot-smoking as a lifestyle choice, camping out on the streets. The link between homeless encampments and pot smoking is very strong. The failure to clear those encampments or enforce any laws against petty crime means lots more pot stench to breathe in.
The other issue is that excessive pot-smoking is linked to a lot of crime. Medical studies have shown that pot-smoking in young men with genetic vulnerabilities, is connected to the emergence of schizophrenia. Many schizophreniacs commit hard, impulsive violent crimes. Virtually all mass shooters are prodigious pot consumers. Pot consumption is a part of this whole dysfunctional picture.
While most Americans don't want to see casual marijuana users imprisoned for consuming the illegal substance, the free-for-all legalization of it, with forced inhaling of secondhand smoke throughout the major cities, is problematic on the other extreme, too.
In the article, there are people quoted as saying they want laws against public consumption of pot. Good luck with that one, given that many of the arrestees would be homeless or minorities, and their activist lobbies would be yelling to the rooftops about the discrimination of it all.
And why should this microcrime of secondhand smoke expect to be enforced when subway fare-jumping, vandalism, purse-snatching, shoplifting and other crimes are not? Good luck with that one, too. New York doesn't even have enough cops to enforce the major crimes let alone the quality of life crimes like pot stench.
A wholesale blanket ban on pot would probably be the best solution given the chaos of the city but don't count on that to happen any time soon. It will need to get much, much worse for anyone to wake up and smell the problem.
Hat tip: Issues & Insights
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License