Marijuana

 

One thing that surprised the heck out of me while in Atlanta, was pervasive and widespread smell of marijuana use throughout the entirety of downtown.  It smelled like a 60s or 70s era college dormitory nearly everywhere I was at.  

This made me curious about Atlanta and about Georgia.  I looked up their laws, and apparently marijuana use (other than medical use) is still wholly illegal, but the City of Atlanta has completely decriminalized marijuana use.  

It truly surprised me that the apparent use of marijuana in the city was VERY widespread.  If I were to estimate the number of times that I detected the odor of marijuana compared to tobacco during my time in the city.... I would estimate that it was roughly an 8:1 ratio.  In this crude estimate, it would suggest that in Atlanta city, eight times as many folks are using marijuana as indulge in tobacco.  Please do not get me wrong, I am not anti-marijuana for folks who enjoy it.  I have never tried marijuana, although I have have to admit being curious as to what it was like.  In my youth, when I was in graduate school and its popularity was very high (pun intended) on all college campuses... I steered away from trying it because I was a) worried I might like it enough to want to indulge regularly (awfully damn expensive for a penny pincher like me), and b) I was worried it effects would likely encourage me to be even less diligent in (at that time) trying to earn a Ph.D. than I already was.  I tend to worry quite a bit even to this day that I am too lazy in life and do not try sufficiently hard to do good and beneficial things with my life.    

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had taken one of my tobacco pipes with me to Atlanta, thinking there might be a chance that I might find an "old-school" traditional pipe tobacco shop and that I could potentially "coax" myself into having a bowlful of pipe tobacco in the shop with relatively minimal worry about having the endeavor make it too difficult for me to resist returning to pipe smoking full-time. 

Unfortunately, there are NO "old school" tobacconists it seems.  There are many "head shops" (the old phrase we used to use for stores that sold marijuana related materials), there were several cigarette & vape style stores, and there were even two cigar-only establishments that *did* have a smoking area, but only for cigars.  I am sadly realizing even more how apparently utterly arcane my pipes and pipe tobaccos are with regard to current society.   

PipeTobacco