This April 20 is high time to stigmatize public marijuana smoking like cigarettes

Step on any city subway, sidewalk, or even public park or library, and every observer with a functional sinus tract must admit: the great libertarian experiment to “legalize and regulate” marijuana has failed.

It has not merely failed in the sense that reasonable instinctively want to protect their neighbors from themselves, as cannabis use among adolescents — whose brain and grey matter development can be irreparably harmed by the drug, unlike fully grown adults — has skyrocketed by 245% since 2000, even while teenage alcohol abuse has mercifully fallen. Rather, the raw, negative externalities of cannabis consumption have exploded past the point of public tolerance.

It’s ironic that in a time when it has never been easier and cheaper to consume odorless and smoke-free marijuana, the smell of marijuana has never been more pungent and omnipresent. I’ve covered presidential campaigns in rural New Hampshire, antifa rallies in Denver, migrant camps in Manhattan, riots in the nation’s capital, confabs in Chicago, and conferences across the Florida coast, and the one thing almost all of the continental United States share, red or blue, is the inescapable stench of skunk. While the more red and rural the area, the more muted the marijuana smell, the average street corner in a city reeks worse than Outside Lands in 2015.

I’m no prude and though I don’t worship at the altar of St. Fauci, I do consider myself partial to following the science. Especially in the aftermath of the opioid crisis, the evidence seems compelling that regulated, low-dose marijuana has compelling medical purposes, and among adults who wish to light up, I’m not going to object — so long as it’s on your own private property.

The real problem is that the palpable wave of marijuana smoke that overtakes Midtown every mid-morning New York minute has become so expected that passersby treat those loitering with an A.M. joint as no different than the businessman waiting for his bus. A civilized people understand that the hobo throwing back a handle of booze in broad daylight is an offender of public peace and common decency, so why aren’t MJ junkies stigmatized just the same?

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The long-term risks of marijuana to psychiatric disorders in adults and brain development in adolescents remain dangerously underexplored, though it is true that at acute level, skunk is less imminently dangerous than spirits when binged. But booze hasn’t gotten four times as powerful in the past quarter century, and marijuana has. While public policy could render the effort futile to put Pandora back in the box, us normal folks ought to consider the daytime pot puffer with the same disdain we reserve for blackout drunks in public parks and smokers who spew secondhand carcinogens around children.

In other words, cannabis culture absolutely should be gentrified, smokers forced to replace stinky spliffs for smell-free vapes, and shamed if they light up at lunch like the junkie who sneaks shots during the day. Nobody should be stupid enough to expect our cities to smell like roses, but the absence of spunky funk would be a game-changer indeed.