Some Republican lawmakers, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, say that the now-public consumption of marijuana is a nuisance to people who don’t like the smell and a quality-of-life issue.
Meanwhile, advocates of marijuana legalization argue that lawmakers are exaggerating the scale of the problem and using the smell issue as a smoke screen for their actual gripe: cannabis should not be legal.
Earlier this month, Mike, a 52-year-old maintenance worker, sat on a bench at Herbert Von King Park in Brooklyn, smoking a blunt.
“I’ve been doing it for so long, I don’t even smoke to get high,” said Mike, a Brooklyn native who has smoked since he was about 11 years old and declined to give his last name.
Perhaps only one thing about Mike’s marijuana consumption has changed in recent years: In 2021, New York approved adult use of cannabis, which has meant that, like in other states where it’s legal, he and others now smoke the drug openly.
Stroll down a sidewalk in many cities, and you just might catch a whiff of Acapulco Gold. (Or sometimes, on highways and in more rural areas, it really is just a skunk.)