When you live on Salt Spring Island, people who don't live there always joke about the same things: Hippies and pot smoking which proves nothing except that the branding of a place and the myths about it are really difficult to change even when they aren't really that accurate any more.
I'm not saying there aren't a lot of pot smokers, former hippies and wannabe hippies on Salt Spring but it's a really small part of the new Salt Spring reality which has more to do with wealth, young families, the retired, single moms, gay men, lesbian women and the most rugged individualists of all: single women. Then again, I"m a little biased. Yea to us!
But, New Westminster where I currently live, that's a whole other story. When I walk into my apartment which I chose to live in because it has really reasonable rent, a bigger space than I'd find in downtown Vancouver and a landlord who used to be a former prison guard (which means it's super quiet in here and I love that), it's like walking into a pot den. And so, now, it's not just second hand smoke but second hand pot smoke that comes wafting into my open windows daily. It also seeps through the walls of my bedroom and for the record, I hate it. I'm sick of it. If you're going to smoke pot every day, many times a day, I want you to smoke your joint in the park, not in your apartment which essentially means my apartment given the insidious nature of smoke's ability to seep through walls.
Last night, I was downtown in a hi-rise in the middle of the city and sure enough, that skunky smell began wafting into her apartment as well. "I thought it was funny at first," she said, "because it's so cliche." "But, now, it really bugs me because it's every single day." It's an epidemic!
Ever since my new next door neighbor moved in, I wake up feeling completely spaced out and today it dawned on me. I might be stoned off second hand pot smoke before I've even had my morning coffee.
At least when I did live on Salt Spring, there was enough acreage that the pot smoke just wafted into the beautiful blue sky.
What about you? If you're not a pot smoker, do you find yourself inundated with pot in your own living room just because you live in a condo or an apartment in the Lower Mainland? Does it bug you?