Weed it and reap: street vendors / small business / home garden

Top: The circle around the Washington Square Park’s central fountain featured a gaudy open air circus of cash and weed. A short walk away, the park's northwest corner was reserved for hard drugs—heroin, Oxy, Fentanyl. The dealing there was covert and grew more so after locals started pressuring pols and police to act: Some concerned citizens, deploring the lack of housing and good jobs, called for drug treatment and reform rather than jail; others, clutching whatever is the hip white equivalent of pearls, demanded a draconian crackdown.

Middle: Further uptown, the weed market was cheerfully entrepreneurial. This well-kitted-out truck, modeled on NYC’s ubiquitous shwarma and taco vendors, parked genteelly on 35th St. and 6th Ave., right across from Macy’s. On both sides of the street then, private enterprise was alive and cashing in.

Below: What can I say. Although not much of a pot user now, in the old days I enjoyed not only a toke or two, but the pleasure of flouting a stupid law. A tingly reminiscence of that transgressiveness sprang back to life when Vermont made it legal to grow a few cannabis plants for private use. And here they grow happily between the tomatoes and the pole beans.