The smell near the Columbia Heights Metro station Wednesday night was unmistakable. A lit joint in hand, Tony Lee stood outside a residence talking with friends as the evening bustle passed them by, no one paying the group of men any special attention. "The community I'm in, everyone engages in smoking," said Lee, 34, a District resident who runs his own small construction firm. Plus, he said, if he's not smoking, he detects the odor of other people getting high throughout the city on a daily basis anyway. [continues 1049 words]
When Samson Paisely entered the buds of his marijuana plant in the D.C. State Fair's first-ever marijuana competition Saturday, he wanted to pay tribute to a man who legalized another once-illicit substance. So he named the strain of marijuana "Delano," after Franklin Delano Roosevelt - the president who repealed the country's prohibition of alcohol in 1933. "If we can repeal prohibition, then surely we can smoke [marijuana] in America," said Paisely, 45, who grew the plants in his Adams Morgan home. [continues 539 words]
The weekend after marijuana became legal in the District, Capital City Hydroponics ran a sale on the indoor gardening kits needed to grow it. Business doubled. In a narrow Petworth basement stuffed with high-end gardening supplies, Michael Bayard gingerly explains that tomatoes are best grown indoors given the District's unfavorably dank weather. Tomatoes, it turns out, are cultivated similarly to marijuana. And since his shop, Capital City Hydroponics, opened in 2011, Bayard has often explained to customers how to grow the food - tacitly aware that some of them just go home and use their new tomato knowledge to grow pot. [continues 968 words]
