> You used to smell pot when walking in NYC sometime, now you smell it consistently everywhere. You are constantly in the presence of high people which did not used to be the case.

This argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me. In a big city like NYC there are a) thousands of people who routinely find it easy to get hold of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamines, etc., and who otherwise are perfectly integrated, functioning and contributing members of society and b) thousands of other people who routinely find it easy to get hold of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and meth, and who are not able to function as part of society on even a basic level (for a whole variety of reasons: involvement in street crime, repeated mental health crises, unstable and scary behavior in public, inability to take care of their own basic needs, etc). It is likely that most of the people who live like this are frequently using hard drugs which remain illegal.

Why does the fact that some people can buy cannabis who couldn't previously change the set of circumstances which determine how safe and convivial a city feels?

- some group of people who previously only used legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine now smoke (a bit of) cannabis. These people are the least likely to be involved in low-level crime or anti-social behavior. They are the people who previously chose not to take a drug merely because it was illegal. They are *more law-abiding* than the average college student, the average cop, the average bass player, the average tourist.
- some group of people who previously frequently got cannabis illegally, now buy it legally. These people are now slightly less likely to get into an altercation with a dealer, slightly less likely to buy coke or pills on a given weekend, slightly less likely to hang out in an unlicensed premises or on a street corner. Apart from those marginal positive effects, not much changes for them.
- possibly some people in the 'chaotic life lived in public' category described above are discouraged a bit from other drugs because they can get weed legally? This is likely to be very very small. If you're suffering from multiple social and health problems, and you're a opiates, crack or speed user, you don't really care much about the legality, and the convenience of legal cannabis is more or less irrelevant to you too.
- some other people whose chaotic lives in which they consume and are addicted to hard drugs now start doing cannabis on top of all the others and their lives get worse (for them or everyone else)? Nah. Crack, meth and fent are used (by this group) exactly because they have the best bang for your buck (if you don't care about enhancing any social or cultural experience, and just want to be off your face). The only people who will move towards smoking legal weed (outside of isolated situations when they can't get hold of any other drug) are people who already have the ability and/or the support to cut down on harder drugs, so the previous category essentially.

People who don't care about the law, or who are unable to live within it, or who are simply unable to function constructively at all, already have unfettered access to drugs (along with the vast majority: people who care about society and generally try to live in a positive way, but who object to or ignore drug laws specifically).