This lemon kush really stings the nostrils, via Flickr/CC.
Weed stinks. At least the good shit does.
Just ask Ben Siller, an investigator with the Department of Environmental Health in Denver. He holds what’s perhaps a highly-coveted position in Weed 2.0: dropping by big cannabis grows in and around Colorado’s capitol to get a whiff of just how skunky those operations are. Recently, a local news station tagged along with Siller to a local unidentified grow house that faced an odor complaint. Armed with the Nasal Ranger, a gadget that detects odor intensity by filtering out stinky air, he went to work.
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It’s one of the bigger environmental issues hanging over the wake of last year’s pot legalization measures in both Washington state and Colorado, where applications for purely recreational bud shops are now being accepted. Much like noise, light, and other ambient pollution, how should we deal with, well, dank smell pollution (if you want to call it that)? I had the chance to roll through a number of Denver’s bigger grows while shooting for our doc High Country, and while I’m not normally one to plug my noise at the scent of sticky fire, I will say that at times the all-pervasive stank of bud proved extremely overwhelming.
Siller says the DEH initially received complaints “just because (marijuana businesses) were starting up”, and that some of those complaints were merely rooted in “the unknown that there was this new business in the area” whose facility smells scrunched a few nostrils. The total number of cannabis-related smell complaints is down in Denver this year, though marijuana still accounts for one out of eight odor complaints.
The Nasal Ranger
As for Seattle and the Puget Sound region, the sole agency tasked with handling odors “doesn’t have the rules on its books or permitting leverage to do anything about the smell of growing marijuana,” the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports:
The Puget Sound Clean Air Agency has had a “handful of complaints” about marijuana odors, said Mario Pedroza, the agency’s supervising inspector. And the agency has discussed the issue internally, …but there’s nothing they can do.
Not so for Denver’s DEH, which Siller says has reached out to operating staffs at weed grows, informing them that should an odor complaint be filed against their grow they must “be proactive to try and mitigate the odors” creeping out of their facility. (Keep in mind that Denver’s pot shops adhere to what’s known as vertical integration, a sort of craft-brewing-esque model that requires dispensaries to grow at least 70 percent of their product, sometimes in house.) Odors of 8:1 or greater will violate Denver’s odor ordinance, potentially resulting in a fine of up to $2,000—chump change for a big operation enjoying a new onslaught of customers.
Back at the unidentified grow, Siller took a reading on the Nasal Ranger. Through the roof? Warrant worthy? Hardly.
“We went through the Nasal Ranger and all the ports and nothing was picked up at even 2:1,” he said.
