My wife and I took a short trip to New York City this past week. Other than getting the chance to visit with our daughter, a nice meal or two, and a couple of museum exhibits, the trip was notable for one thing: The reek of dope.
And when I say reek, I’m not joking. Outside our hotel in mid-town Manhattan, we could smell marijuana, while walking on the sidewalk, more-or-less continuously from the time we left the hotel lobby until the time we returned. Sometimes it was weaker, sometimes it was enough to make me cough. In the congested core of mid-town Manhattan, it was a rare stretch of sidewalk that didn’t smell of ganja smoke.
I am hardly the first to have noted that New York City streets absolutely stink of dope smoking (reference, reference, reference, reference).
This is a distinct change from the last time I visited New York, just a few years ago, and is almost certainly consequence of the 2021 legalization of recreational marijuana in New York State. In New York, as of 2021, anywhere it is legal to smoke cigarettes, it’s legal to smoke pot.
Note, however, the seminal New York Times article by Ginia Bellafante is dated June 21, 2018. Three years before the law changed. Plausibly, NYC enforcement of marijuana laws may have slackened in anticipation of the 2021 change in state law. But that’s guesswork. All I can say is that a decade or so ago, the pervasive odor of marijuana was not there. Best I can recall. So something has changed, and if nothing else, the 2021 law change fully codifies it.
In the morning? At noon? In the evening? It didn’t seem to matter.
Cripes, it smelled like every third Manhattanite must be lighting up a blunt as soon as they hit the sidewalk.
I smell you, but I don’t see you.
Now for the weird part. In the entire time I was there, I only saw one person smoking marijuana. The entire rest of the trip, it was if there were dope-smoking ghosts everywhere. Always the smell of ganja, never the sight of it.
Why?
In particular, since you can smoke cigarettes anywhere you can legally smoke dope, why was the odor of marijuana so vastly more pervasive than the smell of second-hand tobacco smoke? Why does mid-town Manhattan stink of dope, and not tobacco?
First, it’s not because dope smokers so outnumber tobacco smokers in New York. In 2020, New York State included questions on marijuana consumption in the CDC’s Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) phone-based survey. Based on those 2020 responses, roughly 12 percent of New York residents smoke cigarettes, and roughly 12 percent smoke marijuana.
Source: New York State Department of Health, two different publications analyzing CDC BRFSS data for New York.
Instead, the more I looked, the more it boiled down to the potency of the stench. Based on this semi-quantitative anecdote out of Canada (reference), a marijuana smoker 30 meters upwind produced odors that were about 160 times stronger than a tobacco smoker 15 meters upwind (calculated as 5000 odor units / 30 odor units, as reported).
In short, a typical puff of marijuana smoke is far easier for the human nose to detect, from a distance, than a puff of cigarette smoke. If I had to grab a round number, I’d say that the odor of marijuana smoke is 200 to 300 times more potent, per unit smoked, than the odor of tobacco. A single puff of marijuana smoke produces thousands of times the odor density needed for the average human to smell it.
And that appears to be the answer.
It’s not that there are huge numbers of persons lighting up a joint while strolling the sidewalk. At least, not that I could see, mid-day, mid-town Manhattan. Manhattan has not become some sort of Woodstock-on-the-Hudson.
Instead, it’s that the smell of burning marijuana is incredibly potent. It only takes a few people to stink up an extremely large area, because it takes a huge amount of dilution with fresh air to bring the smell below the threshold where the nose can detect it. Given equal numbers of cigarette smokers and dope smokers in an area, you’d be about 300 times as likely to detect the odor of dope as you would the odor of cigarettes.
It’s the dead-skunk-in-the-middle-of-the-road effect. There are probably 50 dead squirrels for every dead skunk. But the skunk makes itself known.
The upshot is that Manhattan isn’t populated by dope-smoking ghosts. Despite the way it smells. All it takes is the occasional dope smoker to stink up the entire cityscape.
And that’s why it smells like everybody in Manhattan is lighting up, when in fact, almost nobody is. Doesn’t take many skunks to make a place stink.
There’s probably a life lesson in there, somewhere.
