See our FAQs: Virginia’s marijuana laws explained.
Downtown Roanoke is going to pot.
I don’t mean that figuratively, I mean it literally. Whenever I’m in downtown, specifically the City Market, I usually smell cannabis — what we used to call marijuana, and still call weed, pot, reefer, the devil’s lettuce, jazz cabbage or any number of other colorful nicknames.
Once I was walking down Campbell Avenue when a car pulled over to let out a passenger — along with an invisible but pungent cloud of cannabis odor that rolled out and smacked me on the nose. One morning I was on my way to a meeting when I caught a whiff — more than a whiff, actually — of weed. There was a woman in Century Park who was smoking a joint, at 9:30 in the morning. A few months ago I was scheduled to meet someone downtown for dinner; the smell of weed was so strong that my dinner companion insisted we leave downtown and meet elsewhere.
Roanoke is not unusual. Most times when I’m in downtown Richmond I also can’t help but smell the stuff. Once I stepped outside the Barbara Johns Building, across the street from the State Capitol, when I couldn’t help but breathe in a big gulp of weed smell. What makes this particularly notable is that the Barbara Johns Building houses the Office of the Attorney General — and I’d just chatted with Attorney General Jason Miyares in the lobby as he walked by carrying an armload of legal documents. I’ve even gotten a lungful of weed smell at one of the convenience stores in Fincastle; a fellow got of his car to use the pumps and the aroma overpowered that of the gasoline.
All this seems a direct consequence of Virginia’s decision in 2021 to legalize possession of small amounts of cannabis. It’s still illegal to blaze up in a public place, but the penalties for doing so are very slight — a $25 fine. Police have largely given up on enforcing the laws that do remain around cannabis because the penalties are so low and there are always larger public safety priorities elsewhere. In many localities, we’ve seen stores pop up on Main Street to openly sell cannabis — never mind that state law still prohibits retail sales — and law enforcement has generally looked the other way. I’ve investigated many of these stores; they’re often set up to be “membership clubs” or “adult share” businesses where, if you buy an overpriced sticker or T-shirt or hat, the store will, out of the goodness of its heart, “share” a “gift” of some weed. Miyares, in a formal opinion, has said such “adult share” operations are illegal but his office doesn’t have authority to prosecute them (the notion that the attorney general is our “top cop” is often misleading).
Virginia is the only state that has legalized personal possession but still bans retail sales. If Democrats win this fall’s election, they will legalize those retail sales. The Democratic-controlled General Assembly has twice passed a retail sales bill; twice it’s been vetoed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Abigail Spanberger, the Democratic candidate for governor, has indicated she would sign such a bill. Republican Winsome Earle-Sears would not. (See their full answers in our Voter Guide.)
In anticipation of that, the General Assembly this year set up a special commission, chaired by Del. Paul Krizek, D-Fairfax County, “to oversee the transition of the Commonwealth into a retail cannabis market.” This commission will likely draft whatever bill gets introduced in the General Assembly when it convenes in January. At the commission’s first meeting last month, state Sen. Adam Ebbin, D-Alexandria, a longtime proponent of legalization, made some comments that caught my ear: “I think it’s important that children and people on the street not be subjected to public consumption,” he said. “I don’t want to recriminalize it, but I think it’s important to discourage public use.” He said that localities would be more likely to allow, indeed welcome, a legal cannabis store “as long as they knew they weren’t going to have a chimney of marijuana smoke in certain parts of the community.”
However, as we’ve already seen (or, rather, smelled), we don’t need cannabis stores to have the smell of ganja wafting through downtown. We just need more lax attitudes toward the herb — and those lax attitudes are already here.
Legally speaking, we are moving toward treating marijuana in a similar fashion to alcohol and tobacco — those are legal for adults to consume but some restrictions apply. You can’t drink in public. You can’t smoke a cigarette in a restaurant.
Most states that have legalized cannabis ban public consumption — certainly the most famous pot states do (California and Colorado, for instance). The Minnesota Post describes that state as “one of just a handful” that allow public consumption, although cities are allowed to enact local bans. However, Minnesota also enacted a ban on smoking weed in multifamily housing (unless you have a permit for medical marijuana). That’s also sparked objections that this ban discriminates against low-income cannabis consumers.
I will be curious to see what, if anything, Virginia does to try to contain the smell, because there seem so few things that can be done, at least realistically. The basic problem with cannabis is that it, well, smells. It smells a lot.
Alcohol and tobacco have odors, too, but cannabis is stronger.
A study published in the scientific journal Atmospheric Environment found that a marijuana joint produces 3.5 times as many particulate emissions as a tobacco cigarette. That’s not exactly where the smell comes from (science to follow!) but does give a good sense how the two are different. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but not all secondhand smoke is the same.
If you fell asleep in chemistry class, don’t worry — they probably didn’t teach this part anyway. (For those of a certain generation, the important lessons might have taken place out in the high school parking lot anyway, with the vital education delivered on eight-track tapes blasting the Southern philosophers Lynyrd Skynyrd as they held forth on the dangers of improper use of chemistry in “That Smell.”)
There’s too much coke and too much smoke
Look what’s going on inside you
Ooh, that smell
Can’t you smell that smell?
Ooh, that smell
Technically, Skynyrd was singing about “the smell of death” but Skynyrd fans of the ’70s weren’t really inclined to dig that deep into the philosophy behind the song.
The smell in cannabis (and lots of other things) comes from terpenes, a particular type of chemical compound. You can thank the 19th century German chemist August Kekulé for the name. I’m sure Lynyrd Skynyrd would have referenced him in their song if a) the internet had existed in the 1970s to look up such things and b) they could have made his name rhyme.
Different terpenes (there are more than 55,000 of them) produce different smells. Cannabis just happens to have the ones that smell particularly strong. Cannabis connoisseurs classify the odor the same way wine enthusiasts do — certain strains may be fruity or floral, earthy or skunky, and so forth.
The cannabis website NuggMD published an article last year headlined “Why does weed smell so bad (but oh so good)?” Whether it really is a good smell is a matter of opinion, of course. However, the science is not. NuggMD writes: “The key player responsible for the skunk-like smell in marijuana is a volatile organic compound called 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, commonly known as prenylthiol. … It’s fascinating to see that a single, tiny molecule can wield such a remarkable influence on our olfactory senses, evoking immediate associations with the infamous skunk odor.”
Those who object to taking in a lungful of 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol may not care about the formula, they may just want to know: Is this dangerous? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that “secondhand cannabis smoke contains many of the same toxic and cancer-causing chemicals found in tobacco smoke and some in higher amounts.” And, of course, if you inhale enough of it, you can get a contact high. This is where your freedom to take a toke interferes with my freedom to breath fresh air — and walk through downtown Roanoke without the place stinking like the party that another great Southern philosopher, Randy Newman, once warned us about in the song that Three Dog Night made famous as “Mama Told Me Not To Come.”
Open up the window, let some air into this room
I think I’m almost chokin’ from the smell of stale perfume
And that cigarette you’re smokin’ ’bout scare me half to death
Open up the window, sucker, let me catch my breath
We’ve been through all this before when Virginia was dealing with whether to ban smoking in restaurants. The only real difference is the chemistry, and that’s what makes this harder to legislate.
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