Sick of smelling her neighbor’s legal pot, this woman sued

January 17, 2023
AggregatedNews
Policy & Legal
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Josefa Ippolito-Shepherd tried cleaning, pleading and suing, but she said the attack on her home of 30 years was unrelenting. Sometimes she felt as though she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t live out her retirement in her manicured Cleveland Park colonial.

The assailant? The smell of marijuana.

Ippolito-Shepherd believed it drifted into her house through the cracks along her stairs, behind the web of pipes underneath a kitchen sink and above the recessed lights from her downstairs neighbor, a tenant of the adjoining home’s owner. She asked the neighboring landlord to evict her tenant and she told the smoker to cease lighting up inside, but both refused her.

Before the legalization of marijuana, Ippolito-Shepherd could have called 911 and police would have criminally charged her neighbor; but now officers told her nothing could be done. She wrote to D.C. Council chair Phil Mendelson, who said the only way to rectify her problem would be to undo the legalization of marijuana.

So she took the dispute to court, claiming the smell is a public nuisance, and the trial, which began this week, is the first of its kind to make it this far in the District court.

Marijuana is now permitted in most states in some form, and that has brought complaints of the scent and possible secondhand-smoke exposure from neighbors of marijuana farms, dispensaries and smokers. The debates surfacing around the country have led to new restrictions on where people can smoke as well as lawsuits over the nuisance. [Read More @ The Washington Post]

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