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The problem with 4/20

Maybe it’s what everybody is smoking, but there seems to be a lot of confusion around Vancouver’s largest contraband cannabis festival, otherwise known as 4/20.
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Cannabis vendors show off their dried plant products during the 4/20 rally at Sunset Beach in Vancouver April 20, 2016.

 

Maybe it’s what everybody is smoking, but there seems to be a lot of confusion around Vancouver’s largest contraband cannabis festival, otherwise known as 4/20.

There are still some folks in this town who don’t even know what it is, or what it means, or the plume of its legacy. Even stoners! I recently spoke to a couple of clearly baked potatoes at the 7-11 Doritos display. They were stunned to learn that the marijuana prohibition protest event began way back in 1995, on the steps of Vancouver Art Gallery: “What? Dude! I was like one years old then!”

Will you be attending 4/20 this year?

“Fuck, yeah!”

The annual marijuana smoke-in takes place on April 20, because it’s the 20th day of the fourth month, a tip of the rastacap to the age-old belief that chronic pot smokers toke up every day at around 4:20pm. Sure enough, for more than 20 years, the air over Georgia and Hornby Streets was thicker than a London fog and reeked like an angry skunk at roughly 4:20pm. By roughly 5:20pm, the dollar pizza joints down on Pender Street were doing a ripping trade.

Last year, due to the event’s ever-billowing size and popularity, and the simultaneous art gallery renovations, organizers relocated Canada’s biggest community bong hit to Sunset Beach in the heart of the West End. This sparked reefer madness of a different kind for local residents, many of whom complained of the noise, air quality, trash, and, uh, well, 25,000-plus people lighting doobies all at once.

Therein lies the inherent irony with 4/20. Most Canadians are tolerant and accepting of marijuana. Quite frankly, most of us don’t really care if you smoke pot. We can even mostly agree that it’s taken far too long to legalize it. But the taxes imposed on legal pot will probably be higher than Justin Trudeau at a dinner party, and legalization is coming, so don't piss us off!

When 25,000 potheads show up without a legal permit for their green day at the beach, citing their fundamental freedom of assembly and protest, it forces the city to be accommodating, to the tune of about 150K. (I’m not sure where, in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it says it’s cool for 200-ish ganjapreneurs to set up retail booths, or for attendees to break the no-smoking bylaw en masse, but whatever, man!)

As recently as last week, Vancouver city councilor Adriane Carr gamely attempted to put forward a motion to weed out a new location for the fried festivities, but when organizers huffed and puffed that they were going ahead with the Sunset Beach location no matter what, the motion was changed to focus on 2018 and beyond. Included was suggesting the possible new location of the PNE, conveniently located as far away from Sunset Beach as possible. At the PNE, the city could probably find a strip of unused concrete between a derelict barn and a drained swamp that might work.

Look, if 4/20 is your Chronic Christmas, I don’t want to bogart your joint, but let me lay it on the line for you: the celebration has become a harsh toke, and quite frankly has begun to do more harm than good for the marijuana cause. Inhale that, Mary Jane.