Nearly everyone I know who was excited about the legalization of pot has told me that it "doesn't hurt anyone" and "has no side effects". Trouble is that I know that's not true. I worked in a clinical reference research and development lab about 20 years ago and learned that there is a 1/1000 chance that a patient will have the exact opposite reaction to a pharmaceutical/chemical. In this case, I'm the exception.
Most people smoke or consume marijuana to assuage pain. It also tends to increase appetite, open their minds to asinine conversations, and calm them down. For me, I learned it gives me migraines, makes me lose my appetite and get agitated. I first noticed these things at university where I must have had neighbors who were smoking weed, but since I wasn't doing it and didn't know any of them personally to see them do this, I didn't make any connections until after I moved into my house. One spring, my neighbor's teenage son started sneaking out his window in the middle of the night to smoke weed, and the smoke would waft into my open bedroom window upstairs and I awoke in pain. This disappeared during quarantine and then returned when new people moved in on the OTHER side of me. Apparently they smoke pot in the middle of the night between the houses too.
A few weeks back, I told this to my class, and one of my students admitted that he suffers the same issue. I usually bring it up to aspiring medical professionals to prepare them for the eventuality that a treatment they are sure will work fails completely. Some people get cramps from muscle relaxants, get hyper from sleeping pills, and feel MORE pain from cannaboids. It's simply a function of how the chemicals interact with each other, and apparently if the receptors are aligned incorrectly you get the exact opposite response. He is the first student to manifest the exact same issue as I.
So, when you smoke to "alleviate your pain" it does hurt others. It might not hurt many, but it does hurt. Unfortunately, based on the other behaviors of these neighbors, I don't think there is any way to alleviate this. They have shown over the past two years that they don't respect me or care about what I think. They park in front of my house so I can't, try to bury irrigation lines on my property, throw beer bottles into my back yard, play music into the wee hours of the night. In almost every way these people are a headache.
I'm not sure if they're better than the squatters they replaced.
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