The clue is in the name. The vast majority of cannabis sold in the UK these days is superstrong skunk, so called not just because it’s very potent in what it does to your brain, but because it’s also very smelly.
I smell it pretty much every day, on the street on the way home from work. I tried to talk to a stoner about whether blazing at 11 on the smelly scale made it harder to do without alerting the feds, but I couldn’t find one who had got out of bed by the time I had to file this. But in many UK cities, it is part of the 21st-century daily olfactory experience.
Not, apparently, for everyone. Not, a little ironically, for Britain’s most senior police officer, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Cressida Dick. “My colleagues think it is hilarious that I simply cannot smell – ever – the smell of cannabis,” she told Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs. Is that even possible?
Yes! “It’s certainly possible that there’s one particular thing she can’t smell,” says Carl Philpott, a professor of rhinology and olfactology at Norwich Medical School, UEA. “I guess it’s also possible she has a poor sense of smell, and doesn’t pick up other things either.”
Nope, that’s not it. Dick also told Laverne, between her audio picks (hearing fine, apparently) that scent was very important to her, and her luxury item was soap. So, it’s just the weed, then.
Philpott explains that most things we smell are a mixture of molecules, and that we recognise patterns. “Each cell is coded genetically to have one receptor on it for a particular molecule. Each of those receptors feeds into a different part of the structure above the nose, called the olfactory bulb, where you get pattern recognition. It may be she is missing the recognition for those patterns that would be around marijuana.”
Not being able to smell cannabis is not one he has come across before, though. The best known one is musk; pleasant smelling to some, urinous to other, while some people don’t smell it at all. But it is certainly possible she may never have been able to smell it. Dick: you are hereby released without charge.
