A businessman named Patrick Hannaford is standing on a bridge in the Derbyshire village of Cressbrook, peering down into the River Wye. He’s escaped London for a weekend of fly-fishing and is scanning the water for trout, enjoying the pristine air.

Then a young hoodied couple arrive, wreathed in plumes of cannabis smoke. The idyll is broken.

“It was the boldness of them that got me,” says Hannaford*, 64. “The lad even came up and started chatting to me, spliff in his hand, about whether the fish were biting. I could have been a policeman or anyone — they just couldn’t care.”

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From genteel parts of the Peak District to the dingiest squares in central Manchester, the acrid smell of cannabis smoke is increasingly hard to avoid.

In an alarming admission to The Sunday Times last month, Sir Andy Marsh, a chief constable and head of the College of Policing, said: “I smell it in communities I would never have smelt it in before, from little villages to towns. We should be prepared to do something about it.”

Yet most of the time, overstretched police do nothing about it. In their absence, some councils, receiving increasing numbers of complaints from residents, are trialling their own interventions to tackle nuisance cannabis smoke.

Experts say that smoking of the drug in public has increased notably since the Covid lockdowns.

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“There’s definitely more [cannabis] smoking in public and it’s for two reasons,” says Simon Harding, professor of criminology and sociology at St Mary’s University in Twickenham. “First, it’s a provocation: ‘what are you gonna do about it?’

“The other part is just a nonchalance. It’s so much part of everyday life at home that they no longer have the boundaries between their private social space and their public space. You see it on the bus, where people think it’s fine to have loud music or videos on their phones.”

Non-smokers are becoming increasingly frustrated. An Ipsos poll of 1,081 adults conducted for The Sunday Times found 64 per cent bothered by the smell of cannabis smoke in their area. Forty-three per cent said it had become more prevalent in the past year.

Nor is this just an urban issue. Nearly a third (31 per cent) of people living in rural areas had smelt cannabis smoke near their homes in the previous month, compared with 45 per cent of city dwellers. In fact, cannabis smoke was in the top five gripes about modern British life, beaten only by littering/fly-tipping, phone theft, shoplifting and badly parked e-bikes.

To get a better sense of how and why cannabis has become so prevalent, we visited and conducted interviews in West Yorkshire, Berkshire, London and East Anglia, regularly encountering its distinctive waft, and finding a nation caught between tolerance and mounting frustration.

According to the Office for National Statistics, 6.8 per cent of people in England and Wales reported using cannabis in 2023-24, which is about 2.3 million people. Surprisingly, given the apparent increase in public smoking, that marked a 200,000 decline in overall use.

The picture is mixed. In Hebden Bridge, the artsy Pennines town, cannabis use is remarkably public and commonplace. In a late afternoon audit of the town centre on a Thursday last month, we came across eight groups of people or individuals who appeared to be smoking it, and one apparent cannabis deal taking place in broad daylight in the town square. We saw no police.

On a bench in Calder Holmes Park, we met Jahan, 27-years-old, with a long, black ponytail, who was smoking a joint with his mother. “There are loads of pubs here who allow people to smoke cannabis in their beer gardens,” said Jahan. “Locals round here don’t care.”

Not everyone in the town is so relaxed. Michael Hylands, 75, retired and with neatly cropped white hair, angrily described it as an “epidemic”, pointing out that this is not just a crime and disorder issue. The strength of high-grade skunk being smoked today doesn’t just smell more pungent, but is having a major psychological impact on users.

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“Everywhere you go, it’s really bad,” he said. “The young ones here are really struggling with it psychologically. The weed’s so strong today, and it’s everywhere. You’d think it was legal.”

When asked about our findings, Hebden Bridge’s local police inspector, Craig Collins, said his officers were carrying out “proactive policing operations” and had made six stop-and-searches in the past month, resulting in one arrest and some “community resolutions”.

The authorities are certainly supposed to police cannabis use; the drug retains a class B classification, with those caught in possession facing up to five years in prison, a fine or both. But in reality, many cannabis smokers operate with something close to impunity.

Police resources are mostly devoted elsewhere. In December, a survey of 253 police officers conducted by Opinium for the Centre for Social Justice think tank found that 66 per cent believed the drug has, in practice, been fully, partially or mostly decriminalised. An even greater number said the state’s approach doesn’t work:

One experienced policeman based in Camden, north London, told us it was impractical to expect them to do any more, particularly with the paperwork involved in arresting and processing offenders. “When an average officer might have 15 or 20 cases on their hands for assaults and other more serious stuff, they’re just not going to go around arresting people for smoking a joint,” they said.

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More effort goes into pursuing the cultivation of the drug, but police are overwhelmed with the number of new “grows” — cannabis farms — setting up across the country. From vacant rooms above shops to flats, houses and industrial estates, gangs have been setting up grows to supply their local markets, says Harding.

In recent years cannabis farming has been dominated by Albanians who have aggressively expanded their operations across the country. The drug is now also widely available online, with advertisements stuck to lampposts and advertising posted on social media.

Is there more that can be done? Councils across the UK have been receiving increasing numbers of complaints from residents about public cannabis smoking. In Ipswich, councillor John Cook’s environmental health team saw a particular spike in concern from residents whose neighbour’s smoke was persistently wafting into their property.

His team launched a pilot programme where, rather than treating public cannabis smoking as a crime for the police to handle, they treated it as a nuisance, like loud music or regular bonfire smoke, meaning council officers could intervene more easily.

A hotline was set up last year for residents. Council officials would start off by monitoring the property, then knock on the door to tell the offending smoker of the complaint. If that did not work, they would follow up with formal warning letters and, finally, sterner mediation.

This had a significant impact. Some 80 per cent of the cases were resolved with the initial “words of advice”, with three quarters of the remainder ceasing after receiving the letter. Only a minority required further mediation.

“I was sceptical at first, but it’s been a great success,” says Cook. The nine-month pilot has been made permanent, and complaints have slowed down to a dozen or so a month. Other councils are now looking at launching similar “cannabis odour” projects.

Simon Harding’s fear is that antisocial behaviour such as public cannabis smoking is sending wealthier people to live, work and play in privately managed and well-policed housing, office and retail developments, leaving everyone else stuck in crime-infested high streets and housing estates.

But even in glossy, privately owned public spaces, the authorities’ attitudes to cannabis smoking seem relaxed. Canada Water is a 53-acre expanse of shiny new shops, bars, offices and apartments being developed in what was once a tough area of southeast London.

A handful of uniformed security staff employed by British Land, which owns and manages the development, keep watch over the shiny new development.

As we began interviewing British Land’s operations director Mark Evans about his cannabis policy, we were engulfed in a cloud of smoke. A twentysomething man in sunglasses and a bandana had lit himself a long, pungent joint. On the bench next to him, a father and his young son gazed out over the lake eating ice creams. Nobody said a word.

“I don’t see any harm,” Evans explained as we watched the scene. “Nobody seems bothered and if no one’s being affected, and no one’s complained, we’d probably let it ride. We don’t want to go looking for trouble unnecessarily.”

It was similar near the neatly clipped playing fields of Eton College in Berkshire, where we met Dave*, a 50-year-old music teacher and father of two.

An advocate of legalisation, he said he usually smokes cannabis twice a week. But he also believes it should be done away from other members of the public.

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As we walked on a footpath through the grounds, by a cricket match being played by boys from the famous school, a man cycled past smoking a joint. Dave tutted in irritation. We had already seen three people smoking cannabis in busy areas on the 20-minute walk from the train station.

“It’s just inconsiderate,” he said. “Most people don’t want to smell it or see it, particularly when there’s children around. I don’t see why they can’t just smoke somewhere more private.”

He headed into wild grassland lining a lazy River Thames where he found an isolated bench in view of Windsor Castle. “Beautiful,” he said, producing a neatly rolled joint, which he lit, inhaling deeply. “And I’m not bothering anyone.”

*Some names have been changed