Ga Ga Land

Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that I like. There’s a new whiff in town, and it’s a bad one. Weed.

The smell of marijuana hangs over LA like an invisible menace. It’s an omnipresent fug. To walk from one end of a street to the other, whether it’s along the chaotic Hollywood Boulevard or the half-gentrified, half-terrifying Broadway in downtown LA, is to risk developing a skunk habit. I swear I almost got high popping out for a bottle of Dr Pepper.

It’s such an awful smell. It’s the smell of a Nietzsche-reading teenager’s bedroom, the smell of an old hippy’s laundry, the smell of teenage delinquency sprinkled with some foul thing from nature that should have been left in the earth.

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It’s so bad that a savvy 62-year-old dope-user in Venice Beach has had the brainwave of selling odour-controlling purses. Jeanine Moss has invented pouches that keep the rank stench of your resin locked inside, for those who want to ‘smell like Chanel, not cannabis’. Funnily enough, it was a combo of Chanel and cannabis that invaded my nostrils as I strolled along the plusher part of Melrose Avenue.

The colonisation of LA with the musk of hash is down to the legalisation of the drug for recreational use last year. California, long the home of hippies and hedonism, made it legal to smoke dope for medical reasons in 1996. Perhaps realising ‘medical reasons’ was largely a ruse used by refugees from the 1960s who wanted easier access to ganja, California last year went ahead and legalised smoking dope for the craic. And now everyone’s at it, everywhere.

You’re not meant to smoke it in public, but people do. I’ve seen hipster shopkeepers puffing on the street by their stores; a rotund man in his forties smoking outside a cinema as his wife/girlfriend gave him that ‘-movie’s about to start’ glare; two delivery men sharing a toke on their lunch break.