Aryna Sabalenka, the two-time defending U.S. Open champion and the best women’s tennis player on the planet, had to stop mid-service game at Louis Armstrong Stadium a few days ago because someone in or around the crowd was smoking weed hard enough to reach the court. She flagged the umpire, said the smell was so strong she couldn’t focus, and later told reporters she wasn’t trying to ruin anyone’s good time — she just wanted it kept away from the tennis. She went on to win in straight sets and, to her credit, laughed the whole thing off afterward. But the story went everywhere, because of course it did, and it did nothing to make cannabis look more normal or more welcome in public life.
That bugs me. Not because I think Sabalenka was wrong — she wasn’t — but because stories like this become ammunition for the people who still want to treat cannabis users as inherently inconsiderate. And the frustrating part is, sometimes we are. Not because the plant makes us that way, but because a chunk of the cannabis community hasn’t caught up to the fact that we’re not an underground anymore. We’re mainstream. More Americans are lighting up joints than lighting up cigarettes these days. That’s a real cultural shift, and it comes with real cultural obligations, the same way any behavior does once it moves from the margins to the middle of the room.
So let’s talk about etiquette. Not the classics — sharing is caring, he who rolls it sparks it, you already know those. Let’s talk about the stuff people keep getting wrong in 2026, the behavior that makes the rest of us look bad by association.
1. Smoking in public isn’t a blanket right — read the room. Some spaces have earned leniency. Concerts, smoke-outs, cannabis festivals, certain 4/20 gatherings — places where the culture is baked into the event itself. Nobody’s clutching their pearls if you spark up at a Cypress Hill show. But a public fair, a crowded stadium, or a professional tennis match at Flushing Meadows is not one of those spaces, no matter how many strains you can name or how normalized weed has become in your own life. This should be common sense, but apparently it isn’t, because we just watched the world’s top-ranked tennis player have to interrupt play over it. If the event isn’t weed-friendly by design, don’t make the decision for everyone else in the crowd. There are entire dispensary delivery services now operating around events like the Open — use one, find a private spot, or just wait. The freedom to smoke where you live doesn’t automatically extend to the seat next to a stranger who didn’t sign up for a contact high.
2. Nobody needs the play-by-play of your high. I get it. I’ve probably written more words about weed than most people alive will ever read. I love this plant, I love what it’s done for culture, medicine, and my own life. But there’s a difference between loving something and needing everyone within earshot to know exactly how baked you are, what strain did it, and how much you vaped in the parking lot. Some of you are too young to remember when cannabis use could get you a felony, when Visine and a pack of cigarettes were standard equipment just to mask the smell, when everything had a code name because saying “weed” out loud in the wrong place could cost you your job or your freedom. That history built a culture of discretion, and discretion wasn’t just paranoia — it was survival. Somewhere along the way, as the legal landscape loosened up, a chunk of the newer cannabis crowd decided discretion was optional, and now we’ve got people narrating their high like it’s a Twitch stream. You’re entitled to live loudly. You’re also, at that point, just a loud person whose whole personality is a plant. Enjoy your weed. You don’t have to announce it.
3. Never dose someone without their consent — full stop. This shouldn’t need saying, but it does: don’t get anyone high who didn’t agree to it. It’s not a prank, it’s not funny, and depending on where you live, it’s a crime. Slipping cannabis into someone’s food or drink without telling them strips away their ability to make a basic decision about their own body and mind, and that’s not a cannabis-culture problem, that’s a consent problem — the same one that applies to alcohol, medication, or anything else you might be tempted to sneak into someone’s system “for their own good” or as a joke. If you want a historical reminder of exactly how ugly that road gets, look up MK-Ultra. Dosing people without consent has always been a government move, not a stoner move. Don’t borrow their playbook.
None of this is about policing how people enjoy the plant. I’ve spent my career arguing for the opposite — fewer rules, fewer arrests, fewer lives ruined over a joint. But there’s a difference between fighting for the right to use cannabis and using that right in a way that makes the argument harder for everyone else. Every time a headline reads like the Sabalenka story, it hands ammunition to the people who still think legalization was a mistake, and it does that regardless of whether the actual offender was some rando in the upper deck who’s never read a word I’ve written.
Legalization was never just about winning the legal fight. It was about proving we could handle the freedom responsibly enough that nobody could credibly argue for taking it back. That means smoking where it’s welcome instead of wherever we feel like it. It means enjoying our own experience without turning it into a performance for people who didn’t ask. And it means respecting the most basic rule of any substance use, cannabis included: nobody gets dosed who didn’t say yes.
Sabalenka wasn’t asking anyone to quit weed. She was asking for it to stay out of her workplace while she was trying to do her job at the highest level in the world. That’s not prohibition. That’s just being a decent neighbor. We can manage that. We’d better, because the culture’s watching, and so is the opposition.
3 BIG RULES OF CANNABIS ETIQUETTE, READ ON..
