Senior citizens are at a record high for getting high. For Fiorella Terenzi, it’s been…not cool, man.
The 64-year-old astrophysicist started to notice wafts of marijuana coming into her home from a nearby unit in her Miami-area high rise. Her neighbors, a married couple in their 70s, told her it was medical marijuana used in small amounts.
Terenzi wasn’t buying it. She set out to stop the fumes.
To argue her case, she held a piece of toilet paper by the crack in their front door to test the skunky draft and found it strong enough to make the tissue “wave like a flag.” She placed multiple calls to police but said officers were reluctant to knock on the couple’s door late at night. She had intense conversations with the neighbors that felt straight out of high school.
“It was actually always that kind of smirk,” Terenzi said. “Like, ‘Oh, come on. If you’re stoned, it’s cool.’”
Seniors are among the fastest-growing demographics for marijuana use in the U.S., taking the drug to manage pain, fall asleep and have fun. But it’s not all bliss.
Tensions are rising as the scent perfumes senior centers and retirement communities. Some elderly adults blame secondhand pot smoke for a host of medical problems, from depression to headaches to breathing issues. There are social pressures, too, with a number of baby boomers saying their peers make them feel like narcs and nerds if they complain.
About 10% of respondents to a recent study of marijuana use by seniors in New York said they use cannabis to “fit in,” said Joseph Palamar, a professor at NYU Langone Medical Center who co-wrote the report.
“If Edna is the one that has the gummies, then it might be like, ‘Oh, I want to be cool like Edna. I don’t really want it, I’m scared, but she’s the cool one and I feel like I have to try it now,’” Palamar said.
Many senior pot smokers are loud and proud. San Antonio grandmother Sandra Bomar, 63, who goes by “Stoner Granny” online, posts pot memes on Facebook to her like-minded community. One recent item features a doctor in a white coat and the line, “In my professional opinion, you should smoke a fatty.”
The cannabis industry is seizing on the shift with targeted brands such as “Senior Moments.” A Cannabis Media Council campaign shows an elderly couple in slinky sleepwear, grinning next to the words: “Can cannabis help a senior in the sack? Good news, Tiger!”
The brand Miss Grass found a star in Nita Freeman, a San Diego octogenarian with five great-grandchildren. In an ad for the company, she’s lying on a lawn in a candy-bright outfit when a grandchild calls and asks about her day. “Oh, today was marvelous,” she says. Then she laughs as she eats a gummy and floats into the sky.
In real life, Freeman eats half an edible to relax every now and then, down from smoking a bowl a day many times in her 70s. “It’s not so much fun anymore because it’s legal,” she said.
Cannabis critics are trapped in a haze of frustration.
“Everyone sides with the marijuana smokers,” said Penelope Livingston, 50.
That includes the police she’s reached out to with complaints about offending neighbors, including an elderly stroke victim whose fumes made Livingston feel sick and contributed to what she called a “marijuana sauna” in the humid air around her home at the time in Tallahassee, Fla.
“The cops talk to me like I’m the nuisance,” she said.
Many say their concerns are drowned out by advocates for senior use of marijuana, including some doctors. The medical establishment is split on the safety of cannabis for older Americans. While some cite the benefits for chronic pain and other conditions, studies have found significant increases in cannabis-related emergency-room visits among seniors.
Still, like the smell itself, marijuana is unavoidable for many seniors and those working around them.
One staffer at a pharmacy in Delray Beach, Fla., a community popular with retirees, posted on Instagram about an “air freshener emergency” not long ago. “Whooooaaaa! LYSOL spray to kill strong cannabis smell from Senior Citizens who reeked of them when they came in!” he wrote. “I had to go in the back room.”
Cannabis brand Life Is Chill is seizing on the senior market. Its Modern Elder Expo in Phoenix last year included a workshop where seniors practiced rolling joints with catnip. The “joint” was then shared with cats from an animal rescue at a companion event. The company will host its second expo in October and expects attendance to double.
But the brand recently had to hit the brakes on plans to install a pot kiosk on the grounds of a gated retirement community in Chandler, Ariz.
“People were freaking out, calling it ‘the devil’s lettuce,’” said Star Simmons, a Life Is Chill co-founder.
Arguments broke out between residents over the kiosk, which would have allowed them to peruse products via an “easy mode” touch screen, followed by home delivery later. “Some were saying, ‘This is my business. If I want it, it’s up to me,’” said Simmons. Online, at least one person raised the issue of retirees driving golf carts stoned.
Though many older people prefer gummies and tinctures, smoking and vaping is popular with those who feel more comfortable with marijuana in a more familiar form. Add in strong-smelling strains, and all of a sudden everybody’s harshing everybody else’s mellow.
Josefa Ippolito-Shepherd, a senior who works as a public-health scientist, called a plumber when she started feeling sick from fumes in her Washington, D.C., home—a smell she described as “like feces.” The plumber told her the issue wasn’t the pipes. She later learned it was pot vapors.
Thus began a yearslong battle with her neighbor over what she alleged were all but constant marijuana smells seeping into her home from the adjoining duplex. The fumes gave her headaches, nausea and breathing trouble, she said. The smell was so bad that one Christmas, she slept in her car.
“If it helps you, go ahead,” she said of weed. “But don’t impose that on someone else.”
Eventually, she sued defendants including neighbor Thomas Cackett, a restaurant manager in his early 70s who said he used medical marijuana legally prescribed by a doctor to treat pain related to past ailments and surgeries. In court, he said cannabis helped him fall asleep after restaurant shifts. He couldn’t eat gummies because they upset his stomach, he said.
“I would also like to say that I’m not Snoop Dogg,” he testified. “I do not, could not smoke marijuana all day and all night.” Attempts to reach Cackett for additional comment were unsuccessful.
In 2023, the D.C. Superior Court ruled Cackett didn’t have the right to “disrupt the full use and enjoyment” of Ippolito-Shepherd’s property and barred him from smoking cannabis in his home. In 2025, the D.C. Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s ruling, setting a legal precedent.
Still, Ippolito-Shepherd said she documented Cackett violating the order more than 145 times. Proving her claims was a challenge. “I don’t have X-ray vision,” she said. “I’m not Superwoman.”
At least one part of her bad trip appears to be over: Her next-door nemesis just moved out.
Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com
