Ultimately, this is an ordinary agriculture problem. The media will be all "WOOO POT!" about it because it's new and controversial, but the odor problem is the same problem you get from all sorts of farming practices, some of which smell considerably worse than even a big pot farm (which is pretty stinky). It'll get solved the way all such problems get solved - zoning. Same thing that keeps you from having a hog farm or a chicken slaughtering operation near people's houses.
I don't expect grow operations will ever hit the scale of other agriculture, either - there's just not enough demand, and legalization isn't going to make some order-of-magnitude change in that. When I was in Colorado this spring, in a small town way up in the mountains, my host pointed out multiple well-known growing operations in various buildings in town. All hydroponic, indoor farming, so the light and temperature and water can all be controlled. Easy to air filter that.
Zoning has been the most controversial part of the pot ordinance the jurisdiction I work for is trying to build. The residents resent the smell, but the home medical cannabis growers object to the limitations of the proposed ordinance, and the large growers are trying to reduce their transport costs by insinuating themselves closer to the retail outlets. There are tons of moving parts and many players are part of multiple groups, which means they may have conflicting motivations, and our governing body is certainly not of one mind on the issue either.
Not to mention, one of the people in the article who is complaining about the pot lives right next to a stinky dairy farm:
"But she says she made the choice to live next to a dairy farm and prefers that smell to the odor that drifted over from the marijuana farm next door to her house."
So it's okay to make a smell if it's one you prefer. If you're some whacko anti-pot person who thinks that it's going to destroy society, you'll find any reason to not like the pot.
Well, did she move there before or after the pot farm?
I live out in the country and this issue comes up over and over. People from the suburbs/city decide they want what they think is a peaceful, bucolic country life and move to a rural area without learning enough about the area they're moving to.
And then they find out the farm next door has constant loud machinery noise when planting or harvest time comes. Or when the wind shifts, you're gagging because of the smell from the hog lagoon or dairy farm down the road. The farmers have been there, doing their thing for decades, and they're not about to stop just because someone moved in and can't deal with the reality of living near a farm.
Hell, we used to have a neighbor who complained about horses pooping on the road. Still don't know if she expected us to put diapers on them.
They aren't ordinary legal businesses. It is a fact that they are still illegal under federal law, regardless of whether you or I agree with that. If you have ever spent any time in Humboldt County, you would know that if you don't enjoy being shot at, you should stay away from marijuana grow operations.
The federal government is mostly irrelevant here. If they started busting state-level-legal grow operations in a more than symbolic manner, they'd find themselves in uncomfortable conflict with state governments. And with states decriminalizing at a rapid pace, the problem gets even bigger. Eventually, the federal government will throw in the towel.
As for Humboldt County grow operations... see what I wrote earlier about the benefits of decriminalization. There's no reason for legal businesses to shoot at anyone. They're supposed to call the cops when they need someone shot, and they do. Shooting trespassers at rural grow operations is an anachronism from the days when that was their only recourse to defend their business.
I've got some buyers regret over supporting various decriminalization and legalization pushes merely over how common the smell has become from the increased exposure to individual smokers in So Cal. I never considered what it'd be like to live near production.
I still believe in the principle that the criminal justice system is a poor avenue for addressing most issues related to drug use. But I think the jury is still out whether individual users are generally good at being good neighbors about their use. And industry... honestly, I'd think that an industry that recently had to hide as much production activity as possible would be better about this. But monetary incentives are a hell of a drug, and this isn't going to be the last issue a market oriented society that brings cannabis industrialization into full fellowship is going to face.
Don't worry. Experience from Washington and Colorado shows that over time smokers move to vaping and concentrate because it's vastly more convenient than carrying a bunch of plant matter around.
The vape cartridges and the concentrate wax are essentially scent-free. Certainly less smelly than nicotine and recreational non-drug vapes.
Industrial production will move out into the country as with any agricultural or livestock production that has a smell and you'll never notice it. The shit smell of a beef ranch dwarfs any odor you'll ever get from a pot production facility.
How is a vape pen more convenient than a couple of joints? The joints don't require batteries and after you smoke them there's nothing to carry around!
The pen-style batteries charge from USB and are as easy to carry around as a pen or, say, a lighter. Do you normally light a joint and discard the lighter? Are you carrying around one strike-anywhere match per joint?
The user pushes a button, breathes in some vaporized oil, and puts the battery back in their pocket or bag. It takes about four seconds. A user could do this in a bathroom, a confessional at church, on a bus or on a train.
It is much easier than setting something on fire, passing it around while it's burning, and then putting that fire out.
A gram cartridge is about the size of a pen cap, lasts even a heavy user for a week or more, and doesn't make the user's bag smell like weed.
Are you imagining those giant wizard vapes that are the size of a pack of cards?
Vape pens are more convenient for doses smaller than an entire joint. Putting out a joint and carrying it is messy, smelly, and it won't taste as good when re-lit. They each have pros and cons.
Cannabis smell is not the exact same smell as skunk - you can differentiate between them with your nose alone, and from this one can have a positive preference for the former (and a negative reaction to smelling the latter..) - but they both comprise various thiol compounds, so they are both pretty similar and striking.
Sometimes people think the depth of the scent of the un-smoked weed means it contains a deeper variety of specific volatile organic compounds called terpenes. I'm not sure if the distinct aroma-causing compounds make much of a difference for the end result compared to the cannabinoids, but people use their nose as a quality estimator this way.
You have to hope that after legalization producers will stop competing on how strong it reeks, since we'll all know it's real and won't be evaluating on the fly. Problem is that it might take generations to breed out the smellier=stronger thing.
Somebody here has the power to start branding based on being strong but not smelly; get on it first, you'll find a huge market.
Will pot consumers like that? I think marijuana smells fantastic, I doubt I'm alone on that. It's an acquired taste similar to beer and coffee. This would be like if breweries stopped making IPAs because some people find them too strong.
The trend for almost five years has been less bitter IPAs. IPAs are still the hottest trend in craft beer, but the days of one-upmanship in bitterness stopped around the time Heady Topper gained prominence. Subsequently there was a rise in "session IPAs" - usually about 5% ABV and 45 IBUs. In the last two years, the most hyped style has been the New England IPA. All the hop aroma of yesterday's 100 IBU Double IPA but with half the bitterness.
There are ways around the smell being an issue. Growing indoors, it is quite easy to filter out the smell with activated charcoal filtration, which is how it was done when it was illegal and smelling up your block was a nice way to get caught. The problem is arising from outdoor grows and greenhouse grows which don't treat the smell and can't really in a cost-effective way since they would need to filter all of the air.
Oh yes, there are worse things: chicken farms. Hog farms are certainly smelly but chicken farms are... disgusting in a way all of their own, a nauseating smell which makes you glad you did not eat a big lunch. I've lived on a (small scale) hog farm - studying at an agricultural university, being in need of a place to live and finding a farmer who had a cabin on his farm ready for rent leads to such - and have cycled through areas with chicken farms.
I studied forestry and know what I prefer on a hot summer's day, the orangey tang of a Douglas fir stand or the resinous smell in a pine forest on sandy soil are infinitely preferable over both hogs and chickens. Or weed, for that matter.
Nothing can make shit and rotting carcasses smell good. A lot of people think weed smells amazing. I love the smell. As another poster said, it's like anything else you enjoy. I like the smell of coffee, beer, freshly-cut wood, etc. Mostly because of the memories they invoke. Same with cannabis.
I've wondered if whether the decriminalization and/or legalization of marijuana would eventually lead to people selectively growing strains that don't smell as strong. I guess that it's not a priority for the people that partake, and therefore not a priority for the producers.
Easily controlled via requiring growers to use carbon air filters. They are quite effective. It obviously won't help with the outdoor grows, but most grown in cities isn't grown outdoors.
I think that's the point, though: legal marijuana farms are an industrial process. The fact that we can put them in the same category as a paper mill is noteworthy.
I'd agree that they're less offensive to the sense of smell than paper mills, or dog food manufacturing, or any number of other large scale commercial operations. But now that recreational marijuana is legal in so many places we have to consider (and regulate) it like the industrial process that it is.
activated carbon ventilation filters, maybe? The world’s biggest sploof.
open-air farming is harder to handle. I grew up a few miles away from a pig farm, and late august was unavoidably...special. You get used to it, but the first hot end of summer day was a salient experience.
I don't expect grow operations will ever hit the scale of other agriculture, either - there's just not enough demand, and legalization isn't going to make some order-of-magnitude change in that. When I was in Colorado this spring, in a small town way up in the mountains, my host pointed out multiple well-known growing operations in various buildings in town. All hydroponic, indoor farming, so the light and temperature and water can all be controlled. Easy to air filter that.