I’ve just been in New York for the first time in two decades. It’s a young person’s city, it has to be said, but my view was slightly darkened by being far out in Brooklyn and having to spend a lot of time on the subway, perhaps the most depressing public transport network on earth.

Aesthetically horrific, incredibly dirty, full of madmen, unusually uncomfortable and bumpy (the only train service where one can actually experience turbulence). Worst of all, it stinks of weed, almost everywhere. You could pump in the urine smell of the Paris Metro and it would be a vast improvement. 

On one particular occasion the subway stunk of weed because some young men were openly smoking it in front of everyone, but more often it was because someone was rolling up a joint, or they just permanently smell of the stuff. On the morning journey to Manhattan there was usually one person smoking a spliff outside the subway station before their daily commute. Nothing like a brain damage-inducing intoxicant to start the day before a shift at the office!

In fact, pretty much everywhere in the city now smells of weed, with the exception of Little Italy, where suddenly one is surrounded by the captivating whiff of cigarette smoke – the odour of civilisation. There are huge billboards in Times Square advertising cannabis, and as The Tablet described it, ‘in tony Park Slope, a marijuana “dispensary” with Apple Store-like aesthetics is mere feet away from the youth soccer fields at the Old Stone House.’ The combination of the weed aesthetic, with the scores of insane, drug-addled or broken people lying on the pavement, is incredibly grim, ‘Back to the Future if Biff became rich’ sort of stuff.

Cannabis legalisation, or at least decriminalisation, once had the force of history on its side. Younger people were in favour of it – I broadly was – the proportion using it was on the rise, and there was a widespread feeling that it was less harmful than alcohol (which, for many people, it surely is). It wasn’t addictive, I was often told, although the people who said that tended to smoke it every day.

When I was younger the US was stricter about marijuana, whereas progressive European countries like the Netherlands were leading the way in harm reduction; while the direction of travel in Europe has also been towards decriminalisation, the US has since gone further, with cannabis now available in 24 US states.

Yet public opinion seems to already be turning against the experiment, at least on the Right, as its effects become clear. In his substack, Alex Berenson wrote that: ‘As more Americans see the problems firsthand, their views of cannabis are slowly turning negative, a recent Gallup poll found. Even in deep-blue New York, almost twice as many residents say cannabis legalization has hurt their quality of life as helped it.’

Much of this is down to recent research, and Berenson noted that ‘In March, scientists in Boston reported cannabis users under 50 had a 

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