A Washington, DC, resident has won a landmark legal victory to bar her neighbor from smoking pot inside his home, according to a new report.
DC Superior Court Judge Ebony Scott on Monday ruled in favor of Josefa Ippolito-Shepherd, 75, who claimed in a lawsuit that the weed smell coming from neighbor Thomas Cackett’s home was a nuisance and harmed her health — including by making it hard for her to sleep, the Washington Post reported.
The judge, in a likely precedent-setting decision, banned Cackett, 73, from smoking marijuana at his home or within 25 feet of Ippolito-Shepherd’s residence, according to the report.
She found that while Cackett has a license to buy and smoke cannabis — which is legal in DC — he “does not possess a license to disrupt the full use and enjoyment of one’s land.”
“It’s a big win from the public health perspective because it’s setting a precedent for all the people that are in similar situations,” Ippolito-Shepherd, who represented herself in the case, told the newspaper.
The septuagenarian, a resident of the Cleveland Park section of DC, argued at a January trial in her suit that she had faced health issues since the smell of marijuana infiltrated her home.
She blamed both Cackett — who lives on the ground level of an adjoining home — and his landlord, Angella Farserotu, for allegedly allowing the fuming to go unchecked.
Josefa Ippolito-Shepherd won a likely unprecedented court victory this week when a judge ruled her neighbor can’t smoke in his apartment or within 25 feet of her house. The Washington Post via Getty ImagesAt trial, Cackett said he usually took eight to 12 puffs of the drug at night after he got home from shifts as a manager at a restaurant to ease aches and pains and help him fall asleep.
But he claimed that he mostly smoked outside, when the weather allowed, and denied Ippolito-Shepherd’s allegations that he smoked “all day and all nights.”
“I am not Snoop Dogg,” he testified, according to the Washington Post.
Both Cackett and Farserotu claimed they didn’t legally have any responsibility for Ippolito-Shepherd’s health.
But Scott said in her ruling late Monday that “the public interest is best served by eliminating the smoking nuisance and the toxins that it deposits into the air, toxins that involuntary smokers have no choice but to inhale.”
DC Judge Ebony Scott ruled that Thomas Cackett didn’t have the right to impose his pot fumes on Ippolito-Shepherd. DC Office of Human RightsComplaints over the smell of pot have been on the rise since the drug has become legal in many states and is much more prevalent. But legally, it’s uncharted territory with the interplay of state laws versus federal law, with the drug still illegal in the latter jurisdiction, the newspaper reported.
Ippolito-Shepherd said since she filed her case, she has gotten many calls from others seeking to bring similar claims.
Ippolito-Shepherd claimed the smell caused her health issues, including making it hard for her to sleep. GoFundMeCannabis rights activist Adam Eidinger told the outlet that the issue “will go away tomorrow” if lawmakers made it legal to smoke in public.
“Hopefully this is a wake-up call for cannabis smokers that they should be fighting for outdoor common use spaces and social use locations,” Eidinger said. “It’s a complicated issue when you [have] people living in an urban environment and they have no lawful place to smoke outdoors.”
Cackett told the Washington Post by email that he didn’t smoke inside his apartment. Farserotu didn’t return a request for comment from the paper.






