DALLAS — Sitting in a cramped booth at a local diner, Melody Smith, 37, teases her daughter over the waffles she ordered just moments ago and now refuses to eat.

It’s this soccer mom persona, Smith said [although Smith is not her real name], that helps her bypass watchful cops when she returns from semiannual trips to Colorado, where the sale of recreational marijuana was legalized last year, with a few ounces of pot.

“I tend to just be overlooked by authorities in general,” she said in a later interview.

Smith considers herself a pot tourist, a term used for those who casually buy in newly legal jurisdictions like Colorado. Like others, she transports what she buys back to states like Texas, where possessing marijuana remains a prosecutable offense.

The risks that even small-time pot traffickers take to transport weed across Colorado state lines are increasing as law enforcement in neighboring states set up more border checkpoints, increase inspections of storage facilities and shipping containers and even take Colorado to court. In December the attorneys general for Nebraska and Oklahoma sued Colorado in a Supreme Court case to roll back the state’s voter-approved laws legalizing marijuana, claiming cops in their states can’t keep up with an influx of weed that they argue is originating from Colorado.

But Smith has no plans to halt her trips. Despite the heightened crackdown, she and others interviewed for this story concede that their race and income make them less likely to get caught. The white, suburban mom said she eats or inhales marijuana twice a month, preferring a vaporizer and her couch to drinks at a bar. She earns a six-figure salary as the customer service manager for a prominent energy company.

Traffickers like Smith are rankling Nebraska and Oklahoma, which claimed in their Supreme Court suit that Colorado's legalization measure is undermining their own “marijuana bans, draining their treasuries, and placing stress on their criminal justice systems.”

Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson defended his state's decision in an op-ed, vowing that he and other officials wouldn’t “stand idle and watch Colorado’s failed experiment as it spills over to our state.”

The Supreme Court has asked Barack Obama’s administration to weigh in on the case. The court’s reluctance to take the case is telling as weed legalization and decriminalization sweeps through state legislatures but suffers from an impasse on Capitol Hill, even with marijuana now legal in Washington, D.C.

Sam Kamin, a professor of marijuana law and policy at the University of Denver, said these legal uncertainties help perpetuate the black market. “It won’t be resolved until federal prohibition disappears,” he said.

These small-time pot traffickers often draw comparisons to Prohibition-era bootleggers. As with alcohol, analysts say legalization is increasingly less about if it will happen than it is about when.

The Pew Research Center reported in March that a majority of Americans back legalizing marijuana. Stunningly, the poll found that fewer than half the respondents said they have tried it, with 7 in 10 convinced that alcohol is more harmful to society.

Changing attitudes about pot clash also with the reality of law enforcement. Marijuana-related offenses still make up a sizable chunk of arrests nationwide. Of the 1.5 million arrests for drug use violations that law enforcement agencies made in 2012, the FBI estimated in a crime report that roughly half stemmed from simple possession cases involving marijuana.

Those numbers contribute to the United States’ exploding prison population, with more than 95,000 people, or almost half of inmates, serving sentences for drug offenses, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

“What [my buyers] get from me is they know they’re not going to get arrested,” said one source, John Paulson [not his real name], a businessman who lives outside Tampa. “They know it’s safe.”

He chalked up what he does to a cause familiar with libertarians: consumer choice, with the reassurance that he sells only to a discreet clientele.

Another source from Texas, who asked to be identified as Casper Jones, said she felt proud of her work in the pot industry. “This was product that I felt really good about,” she said.