Maybe it is me, but I find that idea unhinged and aesthetically/semantically offputting to a degree you would have to force me to do it. I know that isn't rational, but hey, it is my personal taste and those may differ.

I much prefer the way Rust did it, so just a separate type of comment-prefix for docstrings. In Rust a regular comment may be

  // this is a comment
  foo = 1.5;
  

while a docstring is simply

  /// this shows up in docs
  foo = 1.5;
  

with //! for docstrings at a module level. This is elegant. This is simple. It is a pythonic solution. Treating comments below a variable declaration implicity as a docstring is not. At the beginning of class or function declarations, ok (although I also would have prefered that to be above the declaration), but this.. I need a drink.