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Comment by MadManE | Hacker News Reader

The change was very drastic between pre-legalization and a year after. It was already medically legal when I moved here, and I didn't notice it at all, except of course right around the dispensaries.

I do find it funny that everyone here is jumping to find excuses for why it's not that big of a deal. I'm providing my experience, and my opinion on it. It's not all happiness and sunshine.

I'm not even saying that it should be illegal again. I'm not realizing any benefit from it, so I'm leaving. Why am I being downvoted for it?

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I'm guessing it was this part:

"that's all that Colorado is: one big haze of pot smoke"

As a CO resident of over 20 years, I have not noticed any change at all. The only outside consumption I've seen is in people's private yards, just like when I was an undergrad at CU in the 90s.

My neighbor warming up his diesel truck in the morning is far more nauseating.

You're probably right. It's a little over the top editorializing, but it's making the point.

I travel quite a bit, so when I come back it's a very stark difference for me. My wild guess is that it's the boiling frog situation: it's a slow change, but it effects a big difference over time.

On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.

I agree, this is annoying:

> On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.

OTOH, it beats talking about that guy shooting up the abortion clinic and seems to have mostly supplanted memories of Columbine or New Life Church... So it could be worse (and for a while was).

At least for a little bit we can all talk about Peyton and whether bud light is really any better than coors.

> On a side note, pot is the #1 thing that people want to talk about when I tell them where I'm from. In their eyes, CO == pot.

Haha, i sympathise: i lived near Amsterdam for many years (i'm a non-smoker), and almost anyone non-Dutch i ever met outside of the Netherlands would immediately mime smoking when it became clear where i lived. Conversely, this was usually relatively strongly negatively correlated with how cool i was likely to find the person in general, so i tried to see it as a useful people-filter :p.

> "I do find it funny that everyone here is jumping to find excuses for why it's not that big of a deal"

Nah -- just trying to figure out why your experience is so drastically different from ours. You're like "weed EVERYWHERE, it dominates EVERYTHING" and I'm confused because it hasn't impacted my day-to-day existence in the slightest. My grandpa (born in Denver in 1921) hasn't noticed it and he lives across from Kepner middle school. I guess that one stretch of globeville by the Purina plant (I-70 and York) smells terrible, but it's not worse than it always has been, just different (dog food and weed are both stinky.)

But I live in a single-family home with a yard in a low-income neighborhood, rather than an apartment building in a low-income neighborhood, so the airflow from my stoner neighbors 2 houses down is insignificant. On the other hand, my little sister lived in an apartment just south of Glendale before legalization, and she always complained about her stoner neighbors.

So you're saying my experience is unique by providing your sister's experience that is the same?

my sister's experience was pre-legalization. (Please don't be snarky.)

Your experience seems to be unique in this thread, in that you say things got substantially worse as a result of legalization. I'm just trying to make sense of it in light of everything else I know of -- my own experience and those of my family and friends and others commenting here.

I notice a slight change in the type of funk in the air near the Purina plant, but no change in the general public. The complaint that "some stoner in my apartment is making it hard to breathe" is an old one. Did your complex have a sudden influx of stoners? Did they come from out of state because of legalization? Is there something particular about your complex that makes it attractive to people who are coming for the weed? Is there something particular about my neighborhood that makes it unattractive to people who are coming for the weed? I just don't know how to build a pattern with your experience as one data point and all these other experiences as the rest of the data.

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