From "Sick of smelling her neighbor’s legal pot, this woman sued" (WaPo).
As more states give marijuana the green light, more litigation from squabbles over scent will likely arise. Ippolito-Shepherd, who is representing herself, said she is not seeking the illegalization of marijuana but rather a restriction on smoking in multiunit buildings. She said she will never move and has resolved to take her case as far up the judicial chain as she must until she prevails.
So precedent will be established by a litigant who is impaired by lack of expertise. Good news for the stink-making smokers.
... Ippolito-Shepherd is convinced that traces of marijuana are all over her house: in the fibers of her eggshell-colored mid-century couches, her numerous Oriental rugs, the embroidered pillow [the neighbor] once gifted her that exclaims “Snowflakes, Friendship, And Winter Cheer!”
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37 comments:
I used to hate the smell of my neighbors cooking fish...are we going to outlaw that too?
How about essential oils..those stink too.
The woman who works next to me wears too much perfume.
She's right. And I refer her to that SCOTUS case where one state (Massachusetts) sued other states for the nuisance of its pollution travelling into MA.
So precedent will be established by a litigant who is impaired by lack of expertise. Good news for the stink-making smokers.
Recent history suggests it takes about 49 years before the court fixes precedent established by litigants impaired by lack of expertise, so the weed camp is good to go for a while...
Is marijuana smoke any worse than having to smell other people's cigarette smoke? That must have come up at some point in our long history of litigiousness.
How about Indian families and the disgusting (to me) smell of curry and cumin? Enduring that every day would be hell. Doubt I would have the right to force them to change or move.
I'd go the second-hand smoke route. It's well established that second-hand smoke causes cancer. Make them all smoke outside. While waiting for justice, reason and the American way to prevail., get an air filter.
I’d like to know when California going to do pot…California politicians are already struggling to get the tax benefit they anticipated from legalization.
Smoke-Free Air Laws Matter
Smoking and secondhand smoke cause life threatening diseases. It is estimated that nearly 40,000 Californians die each year from diseases caused by smoking and secondhand smoke exposure.1 California has long led the way in adopting strong and innovative smoke-free air laws that protect people from secondhand smoke exposure. These laws protect Californians at most workplaces and in spaces often frequented by children and youth, who are especially vulnerable to the negative health effects of secondhand smoke. California’s smoke-free laws include tobacco products such as cigarettes, cigars, and pipes, as well as electronic smoking devices. Certain laws prohibit the use of all tobacco products, including tobacco that is chewed or dissolved.
…
Smoking is Prohibited
Multi-Unit Housing
In apartment and condominium indoor common areas (including hallways, stairwells, laundry rooms and recreation rooms). In addition, it is legal for landlords to make all housing they own and manage smoke-free.
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DCDIC/CTCB/CDPH%20Document%20Library/Policy/SecondhandSmoke/SHSLawsBrochure.pdf?TSPD_101_R0=087ed344cfab20009552d1cb552e426975d8b7d914606cd350f4f8f0419ebb049d711c58e4fd0371088ec376bc143000f0bf68f27f7616925e8fa582032c5f75eb1947b85dedb30deb84534d853aa2fcd04864c8de4b976287f72ad7bf256dc9
Different people have very different abilities to detect the smell. My wife can detect it at a part per billion it sometimes seems, including on her clothes later if she walks through a stinky space. (That time I left some in her car overnight and she thought a skunk had died -- and she was on her way to her job at a high school!!! She has to hide her jacket in the bushes before going in the building...)
I'm very sympathetic to this woman -- it's a very "heavy" smell, especially when stale, and it would suck to live constantly amidst it if you're not the source. And yes Gharie, fish from your neighbors is also horrid.
Still, this:
"She asked the neighboring landlord to evict her tenant"
I know who I'm voting for if this is AITA.
Use the second-hand smoke precedent to make them smoke outside: Part 2
Remember - if you die early, it will help your case.
I work for the Department of Justice, and our building smells like weed inside, apparently because the HVAC system picks it up from the homeless people smoking it right outside. The irony is not lost on visiting defense lawyers. Life in the modern world.
My husband and I had fun debating a San Diego law that would prohibit flavored vaping products because they are too enticing to children. He was for the prohibition and I was against. He was really surprised because it’s for “the children”. The law didn’t address pot gummies, brownies, ice cream, etc. and just seemed hypocritical to allow one and not the other.
Also, I live in California so it really doesn’t matter how I vote.
Rideshare pax wreaking of pot are the worst. I have to pull over and spray the vehicle with a smoke odor eliminator i found at dollar tree. Otherwise, I run the risk the next pax is not a weed smoker and writes me up believing I'm the culprit.
The "contact buzz' is way overrated.
"It's well established that second-hand smoke causes cancer."
If by "well established" you mean 'asserted by the public health bureaucracy' then yeah. If you mean by actual science, not so much.
Here in Oregon - have to be 10' away from any building to smoke/vape your material of choice. In Washington its 25'. Seems to work ok. No such drama needed.
No smoking buildings are everywhere. It includes MJ.
And as far as I know, you don't get to "make a stink" without regard for your neighbors. Nor do you get to make noise at all hours of the day and night. Your right to "do what you want" stops when you infring on others.
Personally, I find MJ smoke disgusting. Its even worse than Tobbacco. Much worse. I've even smelt it walking outside and going past some homeless person encampment. That's how strong it can get. Its sad this person had to sue, because you can get one of those electric ashtrays that will suck up all the smoke, they're made for cigars/cigarettes but can be used for any burning piece of crap that people smoke.
For all the druggies out there, why smoke MJ and not eat it? Isn't the effect the same?
While we can't reasonably contain nuclear fusion, surely we can contain noxious fumes. Sell weed with fans on the cheap, vacuums in dense populations, which can be powered with Green energy, thereby further limiting their viable life.
I used to like the smell of marijuana. But then it became legal and prevalent and now I find it revolting.
An apartment-dwelling friend of mine had neighbors who were smoking pot constantly. My friend baby's room smelled like it. He complained to the landlord, who went ballistic over the thought of eventually having to clean out the smoke smell. Not sure what finally happened.
BarrySanders20 said...
Is marijuana smoke any worse than having to smell other people's cigarette smoke? That must have come up at some point in our long history of litigiousness.
can people smoke tobacco in that building? just asking
I used to work in a skyscraper in SF. The ground floor had the lobby and a grill. The grill exhausted from the roof covering the ground floor outside eating area, thrusting downwards. Above this roof was 44 floors of office space, so venting from the top of the building was not an option. The grill smell would distribute through the office space. It had to be illegal, but it was SF . . .
The last California city I lived in banned tobacco smoking in multiunit housing, even in your own apartment. This was just an extension of the CA rules about public areas in multiuser housing.
What combustion products of a smoked arijuana joint will be the first to require warning labels, and lead to a class action suit against pot sales, demanding revenue from sales go to victims of wacky weed marketers? It seems exactly like the cigarette litigation, waiting to happen. I bet it harshes the mellow of the legal pot growers.
Here in N. CA you can’t walk around pretty much any public space without the rank smell of pot smoke. I haven’t smelled the live growing kind but in any park or parking lot you’ll run into the skunk-smelling smoke. Even driving down the road or waiting at a stop light you smell the guy in front of you smoking a joint. I don’t want to go back to locking people up for holding pot but there’s a time and a place for getting high. Hell, even my own backyard isn’t safe from it. The neighbor’s kid likes to sit by the pool and burn one and it drifts over the fence. I’m no prude. I smoked a ton of weed as a young man but today’s weed is to strong and so smelly it’s a whole different thing.
"Ippolito-Shepherd believed it drifted into her house through the cracks along her stairs, behind the web of pipes underneath a kitchen sink and above the recessed lights from her downstairs neighbor"
The various fire-codes in the USA have for decades required sealing between multifamily units to prevent spread of flame and hot gasses. And fire-rated construction of the walls and ceiling/floor assemblies that divide between the units. Even sealing that web of pipes in kitchen and bathrooms, which is often 'left out' after repairs.
It is amazing to me that people will cut holes into the such ceilings for recessed downlights.
If you can smell odors from a neighboring unit and the odor is not coming in through windows or doorways, you have a major safety problem in the event of a fire.
Yet I could swear that MJ is still illegal under Federal law. Isn't DC entirely governed by Federal law?
BarrySanders20, I make a lot of Indian food -- contemplating a Chettinad curry tonight!
(One I've never made before, involving fresh coconut among other things.) OTOH, we live in a detached, single-family house, so we disturb no one. I am not sure whether that would fly in an apartment building. The one time I actually lived in one, our bete noire was the Vietnamese guy next door who'd go out on his balcony (a couple feet from our window) early in the morning. But neither of us complained to anyone; we just kept the window shut as much as possible, though when it got very hot (this was in San Rafael, CA), it was difficult.
I can think of several specific ethnic foods that struck me as unpleasant when living in the closely packed married student housing at UCR and later in a tiny ‘20s-era house in San Bernardino. Of course those were not the usual, and most potheads are continuously smoking at least every day.
As much as CA is a pain, sometimes it does do somethings right. Back in about 2006 the state recognized the research that second hand smoke is as harmful as direct inhalation. On the basis of that I was able to pressure the management where I live to ban smoking. It didn't apply to most of the people who were already living here because they didn't want to have to deal with those tenants, but they did enforce it in the case of a rather horrible person who was living below me. After she finally left. the apartment had to be treated with ozone to get rid of the stink, it was that bad. It had to be repainted numerous coats and the carpeting replaced. She was smoking crack, MJ and chain smoking cigarettes.
Then several years later some elderly chain smoking woman had to be moved ASAP to another apartment after being beat up and hospitalized because she picked a fight with some teenager neighbor. The management put the old chain smoking women in the apartment below me (even though they knew I was allergic and it was going to be a problem) and they claimed she would only smoke outside. This was of course a lie and a nightmare ensued. I actually developed asthma after being exposed day in and day out to the smoke which traveled through the walls until that elderly lying creep was moved. On the way out she took to screaming at me in the parking lot, calling me a "f__king b_tch." Obviously she thought I should move for her benefit.
I'm thinking that woman in DC might use allergies as her defense. It was not the smell in my case that bothered me, which a lot of people assumed, as if I was just being fussy. I just can not breathe around cigarettes/pot/camp fires/gas driven leaf blowers.
I'm OK now that I don't have to deal with that stuff on a daily basis. So it's not "asthma" now, it's reactive airway disease. It's all a matter of degrees.
I do not know if DC has similar laws about second hand smoke in multi family dwellings, otherwise I doubt that the woman's case of not liking the smell is going to be win. I wish her well.
I am very confused. I am pro-legalization.
However, Cannabis possession is illegal under Federal law. DC is governed (maybe I'm wrong about this?) by federal law. How can cannabis be legal in DC?
My first though was that she should have brought her case in Federal court. But she did.
So. I'm confused.
It really does reek. I don't know what the solution is, but it does seem that skunking up people's environs is in need of a remedy.
She should have called the DEA and the FBI to report her neighbor's federal crimes.
"For all the druggies out there, why smoke MJ and not eat it? Isn't the effect the same?"
Much easier to control the dose when smoking. Quick effect allows you to have what you want and not more or less. Edibles take 45 mins to start working, then last longer. Timeline varies with what else is in your belly too.
When I worked at Boeing, the woman in a nearby cubicle always had a small fan on the floor, and aimed at her crotch.
For the longest time, I could not understand why that fan was there.
She didn't like the smell of her own farts.
The woman who works next to me wears too much perfume.
To quote Joe Biden, "The answer to that is a three letter word......Patchouli Oil."
My wife always claimed that she could smell MJ a mile away, and in truth she was pretty sensitive to it, and other strong aromas. Less so over time.
It's still illegal here, and I catch a whiff while walking or driving sometime; I know that it's ubiquitous and unavoidable in some locales around here, but those are not in my usual rounds.
Two things: One, the initial criminalization of marijuana was ill-advised and stupidly implemented. I suspect that a strict reading of the Constitution would find it unconstitutional.
Second thing: The legalization of this substance was equally ill-advised, stupidly implemented, and even though I find it to be less objectionable in terms of civil rights, I also find the fact that the laws were not thought out very well.
Functionally, there are so many things about marijuana legalization that weren't considered; minor things like "Can we effectively test for this substance for the equivalent of drunk driving adjudication...?" and so forth.
The stoners probably complain about her gas stove.
Never liked the smell of pot, probably why I never tried it. Smelled/encountered more in the military than any other place!
A few years ago my neighbor came over and said "I found pot growing on my property". Sure enough there were 10-12 large plants and they stunk (close to harvesting time?). They were almost 500 feet off the road in a fallow field, near a wood line. We dug up all the plants and burned over at his burn pile. I wore overalls and threw those on the fire as well - they stunk!. Took all the tools, the trail cam, everything we could find they had stashed and the neighbor kept it as rent for the land.
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