Last week, the board of The Fontaine, a luxury Upper East Side co-op, sued a resident over what it alleges is a constant, overwhelming smell of marijuana wafting from his apartment. This may just be a glimpse of our future.
After all, Colorado and Washington state voters just passed ballot initiatives to allow state-regulated marijuana sales. And Gov. Cuomo in his State of the State Address just suggested that pot possession shouldn’t be illegal.
But legalization raises a host of neglected issues. As one Fontaine resident complains in the lawsuit, “It is 10:45 p.m. and my apartment smells like a party was going on while I was out for the evening . . . The stench of musty pot that is lingering in my closet is unbearable.”
Lots of high-end New York buildings go (tobacco) smoke-free now — surely plenty will want the same if marijuana’s legal.
What else changes in this brave new world of pot legalization?
Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Yale, estimates that pot consumption would rise 10 percent the first year after legalization, then edge back down to a net gain of 3 percent or 4 percent. But just who would be smoking more?
In photos of the celebrations after those ballot measures passed, we see a lot of college students having a good time, along with a few shabbily dressed grown-ups. But businessmen, doctors, lawyers, teachers and stay-at-home moms didn’t rush out into the street to light up.
Cuomo cited racial disparities in arrests as the main reason to legalize, saying, “It’s not fair, it’s not right. It must end, and it must end now.” But what about the disparate impact of legalization?
Anthony Daniels, a retired British prison doctor and psychiatrist, says that, if legalization increases consumption, “My suspicion is that it will mainly increase among people with comparatively little responsibility” — that is, the young and the poor.
He compares it with heroin. In the 1920s and 30s, it was mostly an occasional habit of the middle classes, he says, “But as it permeated into lower classes, it became a way of life in and of itself.” And the effects were devastating.
Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, worries that legalizing pot opens up a “Pandora’s box that will only create one more potential problem” for the lower classes. He explains, “The new world we live in is about freedom and choice in any number of domains. People who are well-educated and affluent can successfully navigate those choices. But Americans with fewer advantages fall into self-destructive patterns.”
Says Daniels: “For the most part, drug use is not going to rise among people who have important jobs and will not want to lose their important jobs because they are stoned.”
Nor will it affect what middle-class parents teach their children. As Wildeman notes, “Smoking [cigarettes] is legal, but if you look at the average middle-class parent, the stigma they attach to smoking is so strong that whether it’s legal or illegal has a tiny effect on that population.”
But among the lower classes, it’s a different story. In a 2006 study, a Harvard economist found that more than a third of Americans with a ninth- to 11th-grade education smoked, compared to only 7 percent of people with a graduate degree. The lower life expectancy of poor people has been tied to higher smoking rates.
Yes, tobacco smoke is far more toxic than pot fumes. But marijuana still has detrimental effects. As Wilcox notes, “If pot is indeed a kind of drug that makes people more likely to become kind of docile, if it saps the will to go out and make your mark on the world, then it’s the last thing we need to give to working-class and poor men.” They are already “dropping out of the labor market” at alarming rates. Pot may only “accentuate the problem.”
As for the rest of us, we can just head to the Upper East Side.