Yesterday afternoon, minding my own business, I was victimized by the New York State Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act of 2021.

Here’s how it went down: I was walking south along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, on the Central Park side, and I lit up a cigar. At a certain point, I crossed into the park itself, barely 10 yards from the wall that separates the Fifth Avenue sidewalk from the tree-lined border, and I sat on a bench to use my phone.

THE RACE IS ON: WHO COULD REPLACE MCCARTHY AS SPEAKER?

Full disclosure: I am aware that it is illegal to smoke in Central Park. I thought I might get away with it, briefly, because I was so close to Fifth Avenue, where it is legal to smoke, even though people give you dirty looks when you do it. Yesterday, though, a few people were sitting some distance away from me, and they gave me more than dirty looks.

“There’s no smoking in the park!” they shouted at me. One of them, for emphasis, inserted a colorful Anglo-Saxon modifier between the words “no” and “smoking” and “the” and “park.”

I pointed with my cigar hand to another group of young gentlemen nearby who seemed to be convening a meeting of the Bob Marley Appreciation Society. They were wreathed in oily, resinous blue smoke. Great clouds of nasty, skunk-smelling marijuana drifted along in the October breeze. Even from 30 or 40 yards away, it was clear they were smoking the good stuff.

What about them? My gesture seemed to ask.

“That’s not smoking smoking,” one of my shouters shouted. “That’s just weed.”

That’s just weed is pretty much the new motto for the city of New York. It’s impossible to walk down the streets in this city, even in buttoned-up midtown Manhattan, and not be assaulted by the smell of marijuana.

The decades of fierce opposition to tobacco, the rules and taxes and public service announcements and nanny-state interventions, have evaporated into a relaxed tolerance, even tacit encouragement, for marijuana.

The New York State Marijuana Regulation and Taxation Act of 2021 has transformed the city from a place of jittery, brittle energies, a place for nicotine-fueled go-getters and pushy type-A neurotics and in-your-face-fuggeddaboutits, into a place where everyone just wants to kick back and, like, chill. Which isn’t really New York, to be honest. It’s more like a dorm room in a large state university circa 1978.

The guys sitting by Hudson River Park are high. The young woman pushing a stroller in Washington Square Park is high. And so is the doorman of the building next door, taking a seat on the bench outside and lighting up, plain as day, until his eyes are red and puffy.

Or, more worryingly, the guys working on a large construction site in midtown, whom I passed last week around lunchtime as they were leaning against the security fence, passing a joint back and forth.

I suppose we have to take it on faith that whatever they were tasked with that afternoon wasn’t electrical or structural or didn’t require clear-headed calculations or precision work. Although I guess we’ll all find out together, in a few years, as the skyscrapers and apartment blocks and townhouses that have been built during the years that New York went to pot either stay erect or come crashing down suddenly all around us.

“Imagine,” a friend said to me recently, “that all of those people you see around town smoking joints, imagine if those joints were suddenly replaced by cans of beer. People drinking beer on the street, in the subway, on the job, on the construction site. Do you think people would be OK with that?”

I thought about this for a moment. It was an interesting thought experiment. There is deep hypocrisy in how we treat on-the-job beer drinking (not good!) and on-the-job marijuana smoking (perfectly cool!).

“I’m not sure anyone would really care,” I said. “New Yorkers have gotten soft. We’re a relaxed, laid-back city now. There’s probably only one thing that would get people agitated.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Watch this,” I said, and I pulled out a cigar and started to light it.

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Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and he is the co-founder of Ricochet.com.