If you'd read the article legalization is never mentioned, and this is specifically about smoking cannabis (not, say, eating edibles you could also buy legally).
Although the (very short) article doesn’t delve into increasing legalization of marijuana, the second sentence and majority of the text is indeed dedicated to the fact that cigarettes are vanishing.
NPR is a federation of smaller public radio stations. The quality of content under the NPR banner is a broad spectrum: they have good stories and they have some that are crap - biased editorials costumed as objective journalism.
NPR stories on average tend to be higher quality than corporate media news, but I think 'accepted paragon' is quite superlative, out of touch, and lacking imagination.
Second off, this is absolutely not accepted fact and they have a lot of controversy, both in their lack of neutral point of view as a government-funded media sources, as well as their coverage of corporate sponsors. NPR is not the American BBC.
