A peace process for the war on drugs

The case for narcotics licences

I’ve just been in New York for the first time in two decades. It’s a young person’s city, it has to be said, but my view was slightly darkened by being far out in Brooklyn and having to spend a lot of time on the subway, perhaps the most depressing public transport network on earth.

Aesthetically horrific, incredibly dirty, full of madmen, unusually uncomfortable and bumpy (the only train service where one can actually experience turbulence). Worst of all, it stinks of weed, almost everywhere. You could pump in the urine smell of the Paris Metro and it would be a vast improvement.

You never know what you’re gonna run into out there

On one particular occasion the subway stunk of weed because some young men were openly smoking it in front of everyone, but more often it was because someone was rolling up a joint, or they just permanently smell of the stuff. On the morning journey to Manhattan there was usually one person smoking a spliff outside the subway station before their daily commute. Nothing like a brain damage-inducing intoxicant to start the day before a shift at the office!

In fact, pretty much everywhere in the city now smells of weed, with the exception of Little Italy, where suddenly one is surrounded by the captivating whiff of cigarette smoke – the odour of civilisation. There are huge billboards in Times Square advertising cannabis, and as The Tablet described it, ‘in tony Park Slope, a marijuana “dispensary” with Apple Store-like aesthetics is mere feet away from the youth soccer fields at the Old Stone House.’ The combination of the weed aesthetic, with the scores of insane, drug-addled or broken people lying on the pavement, is incredibly grim, ‘Back to the Future if Biff became rich’ sort of stuff.