Back in my home state, you’d get in a lot of trouble for smoking marijuana out in public.
Our police officers showed no discretion towards drug use, regardless of whether you only consumed cannabis. I had a friend who was arrested for smoking a joint in a park when he was just 19 years old. This is a recurring theme with cops in that area. My parents grew up in Michigan near Ann Arbor which was famous for its $5 pot fine going back to the early 1970s. They were surprised when they moved before having my siblings and I. The climate towards weed forced them to quit for fear of losing their children to CWS. But everything changed when I moved to southern California to attend undergraduate school. I attended the University of California at Riverside and lived in Jurupa Valley for a few years. By some stroke of luck, I got a job at a major tech company with its offices in Los Angeles, which is what got me to move further west out of the Riverside area. It’s not cheap to live here, but I chose Tarzana as my preferred neighborhood following a few stints living in places like Encino, Glendale, and Pasadena. We have a pretty open cannabis community here in Tarzana. I was driving down Ventura Blvd yesterday and saw someone sitting in front of the gates to their house smoking a blunt. Not only did it have that characteristic skinny cigar look, but I also got a whiff of the burning cannabis in my driver’s side window as I passed the man on the street.