Still blowing in the wind, my friend

Gilbert Shelton

From Slate:

....For a long time, the smell of weed was something private, thrilling. It was the signal to a stoner that, oh yes, it was on—a good smell, evoking strong and pleasant memories of past sessions with friends long gone. To people who didn’t partake, to smell it was to smell another world. 

I recently rewatched the Onion’s 2013 video “Back of Library Smells like Weed,” a faux-local news report in which an off-screen reporter interviews a trio of women who are identified as “Library Ladies,” and who are extremely excited—positively a-twitter—about what they smelled. 

....To make a positive ID, another calls her husband, the sheriff, who calls the high school’s ceramics teacher, who “lived in Seattle for a few months in the ’ 70s.” This man, in a mustache and an apron, enters the scene, stands around, then says, “Yep, that’s weed.”

The smell is something different now. That whole social drama around weed smell—whiffing it, hiding it, getting busted for it—is becoming a thing of the past....