When citizens of Denver inevitably complain about the smell of legalized marijuana, it will be a job for the “Nasal Ranger” to sniff out justice.
Although it sounds like something written by the satirical website The Onion, the Nasal Ranger is a real thing used by the official odor investigators of the Denver Department of Environmental Health.
Far less cool than a cape, it’s a bullhorn-like cone that investigators like Ben Siller clamp around their noses to figure out if something is smelly enough to earn a citation from the city.
Seeing someone using a Nasal Ranger on the streets used to be something of an oddity, employed only in instances where neighbors have complained about industrial operations like a pig-ear dog treat factory or due to the smoke from a wood-fired pizza joint, according to the Denver Post.
But they were poised to become much more ubiquitous when Denver first proposed to make the very smell of marijuana in public a crime. Originally, the city council considered banning pot smoke from wafting over a neighbor’s back fence or being detected on the tourist-popular 16th Street Mall. Opponents raised enough of a fuss that the council backtracked, although its members are still considering some restrictions on the skunky smell of marijuana.
“Odor can be subjective,” Council President Mary Beth Susman told the Post. “It’s hard to legislate odor. The strength that is required to register on the Nasal Ranger is something we need to look at. I also wonder if people will get used to the smell and the dislike of it now may change over time.”
As absurd a tool as it may seem, the Nasal Ranger, which costs about $1,500, is meant to remove the subjectivity from figuring out how bad something smells. To trigger a citation, according to Denver regulations, the device must measure a ratio of stinky air to clean air of at least 7:1.
Siller told the Post that only very strong smells will register that high.
But he still has to respond to complaints about pot stores, which have been on the rise since 2009, when medical marijuana dispensaries and grow operations became much more common in Denver. Denver’s 7News reported that complaints about pot smells doubled from 2010 to 2012.
“Initially, we received complaints just because [marijuana businesses] were starting up,” Siller told 7News. “And some of those complaints were just because of the unknown that there was this new business in the area with odor coming from the facility.”
The city’s Department of Environmental Health expects another spike in complaints starting in January, when licensed retail marijuana stores open their doors for the first time. The department will hire additional noses to cope with them.
“We are going to be increasing our staff level, adding a person that would be devoted strictly to dealing with marijuana,” environmental operations manager Gary Lasswell told 7News.
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