It takes about a minute. He’s leaning against a tree just off a paved path, holding a skateboard, wearing shorts and a baseball cap, smoking by himself. He says he is 38, and asks that his name not be used so he may freely discuss the law he is casually violating.

The mission: Find someone on Boston Common flouting the ban on the public consumption of marijuana.

He smokes pot in the park “as a protest,” he says, before deciding that it can’t really be a protest with recreational marijuana now legal. What’s left to protest, after all?


“It’s a post-protest action,” he declares. “I don’t know what you’d call it.”

Two police cars are parked within a couple hundred yards, but he says he’s not worried about getting a citation. He says he doesn’t know anyone who has been ticketed for smoking pot in public.

“From what I understand it is the lowest enforcement priority,” he says. “If they catch me off guard, I’ll pay the $100 fine and I’ll be polite to them because they’re just doing their job.”

In the Boston area, a sampling of police departments suggests that our anonymous smoker has little to fear. It seems that authorities, at this point, would rather teach smokers the law than ticket them for breaking it.

Boston Police Captain Kenneth Fong, whose district covers downtown Boston, said the department has written citations in some cases — such as repeat offenders who have ignored warnings — but for the most part have been trying to educate people on the changes in the law.

“We’re not looking to hit people with fines for smoking pot,” he said. “The laws are relatively new. People see a headline that says pot is legal now and they may not realize” public consumption is still prohibited.


“I don’t think there is a lot of clarity.”

The department could not provide statistics on the number of citations written for public consumption, a spokesman said.

New York City police are taking a similar tack, announcing in June that most people caught smoking marijuana in public after Sept. 1 would no longer be subject to arrest, but would instead be issued a summons.

But in Los Angeles, police warned earlier this year, as the sale of recreational marijuana became legal, that they would “take aggressive action in enforcing the law.”

In 2016, Massachusetts voters legalized recreational pot but state law clearly states that “no person shall consume marijuana in a public place or smoke marijuana where smoking tobacco is prohibited.”

But still, as anyone who has strolled through downtown Boston can attest, marijuana users are hardly shy about lighting up in public. Wafting marijuana smoke has become part of the character of the city, and in some places it can smell like a cab hit a family of skunks.

“The scent of marijuana really carries and it is pungent so one person smoking on the street can offend a lot of people,” said Fong, whose department has been fielding complaints about odor.

Across the river in Cambridge, as of several weeks ago, police had not issued any citations this year for public pot smoking, said Jeremy Warnick, a department spokesman.

Like in Boston, “at this point we take this as a matter of public education,” he said. But “frequent flyers” caught repeatedly smoking in public may find themselves with a citation in the future.


“If we keep having the same conversations with the same people it may be elevated,” Warnick said.

Nearby, Arlington police are taking a similar “education first” approach, said Chief Fred Ryan. The department is generally not yet writing citations for public consumption.

“It is new,” Ryan said. “There is a lot of misinformation about public consumption and the decriminalization of marijuana.”

“It boils down to this: a police department is only as good as the trust its community puts into it,” he said. “For us to go out now into gotcha-style policing without first engaging in education, we would erode that trust.”

In 2014, recreational marijuana became legal in the pot pioneer state of Colorado. From the beginning, police in Denver “took a fairly hard stance on public consumption” said Police Commander James Henning. Denver police wrote about 770 citations in 2014, after writing just 184 the year before according to police statistics. They issued 762 citations in 2015, then 590 in 2016.

Now in downtown Denver, he said, “you smell it once in a while but it is not prolific.”

The Massachusetts ban on public consumption means that some apartment dwellers here may not have a legal place to smoke if marijuana is prohibited by their landlord. To address this conundrum, state regulators are looking into the possibility of licensing “social consumption” venues, said Shaleen Title, a member of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission. A decision is expected early next year, she said.


On Boston Common, the pot smoker says that finding a “comfortable place to smoke” is not one of his problems. He has plenty of private places. But even in the era of legal pot, smoking in public has a rebellious edge.

“This is regenerative, biodynamic cannabis,” he says of his Oregon-grown stash. “It is of the highest quality. I’m more than happy to let the smoke fly.”

Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark.arsenault@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @BostonGlobeMark