‘City air makes you free.” Or so it was held among German serfs in the Middle Ages. If they could escape to a city and live there for a year and a day, they were liberated from their masters.
Today, the most salient characteristic of the air in many cities is the smell of marijuana. A strong odor of weed often greets the visitor by train to New York City as soon as he opens the door out of Moynihan Train Hall. Even smaller cities are not immune to pot’s externalities. In my native Cincinnati, which is still navigating the legalization of recreational marijuana that Ohio voters approved last fall, downtown residents and business owners are uneasy about the possibility of drug dispensaries opening near them.
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