Just The Facts About Marijuana
Thousands streamed into a Seattle waterfront park Friday for the opening of a three-day marijuana festival — an event that is part party, part protest and part victory celebration after the legalization of pot in Washington and Colorado last fall.
“This is going to be the biggest year for Hempfest,” said Jack Beattie, an 18-year-old Seattle University student, as he shared a joint with two friends. “In past years, people were a little bit sketched out about smoking in public. Now, there’s going to be a lot more.”
The free, annual event was expected to draw as many as 85,000 people per day. On Friday, many strolled by vendor stands, joints in hand as they checked out colorful glass pipes, tie-dyed clothing, bags of “ideal cultivation soil,” and hemp wares, including purses and necklaces.
Others sprawled on the grass in the steamy sunshine, listening to bands and speeches, or lit bongs on the beach and watched ferries cross Elliott Bay.
Hempfest is in its 22nd year of advocating for the legalization of marijuana, and this is the first time it’s been held since last fall, when Washington’s vo. . . . . READ MORE
Thousands streamed into a Seattle waterfront park Friday for the opening of a three-day marijuana festival — an event that is part party, part protest and part victory celebration after the legalization of pot in Washington and Colorado last fall.
“This is going to be the biggest year for Hempfest,” said Jack Beattie, an 18-year-old Seattle University student, as he shared a joint with two friends. “In past years, people were a little bit sketched out about smoking in public. Now, there’s going to be a lot more.”
The free, annual event was expected to draw as many as 85,000 people per day. On Friday, many strolled by vendor stands, joints in hand as they checked out colorful glass pipes, tie-dyed clothing, bags of “ideal cultivation soil,” and hemp wares, including purses and necklaces.
Others sprawled on the grass in the steamy sunshine, listening to bands and speeches, or lit bongs on the beach and watched ferries cross Elliott Bay.
Hempfest is in its 22nd year of advocating for . . . . . READ MORE
Americans like wars: the war on poverty — we lost that one when a bigger war came along. In 1971, while losing the war in Vietnam, President Nixon declared a war on drugs. The two wars got mixed together in some unpleasant ways. American soldiers began using drugs in Vietnam as a way of deadening the fear and loathing in fighting a war where civilians were indistinguishable from enemy soldiers.
Back home, a youthful revolution developed: a rejection not just of the war and the draft that was taking so many young men to death or injury but of the humbug that had preceded it. The revolution rejected apple pie, stars-and-stripes morality with its undertones of bigotry and overtones of hypocrisy and embraced the emerging marijuana plant as a principal source of recreational pleasure.
The increased solidarity among young blacks and whites, many of whom had been part of the racial rebelliousness that brought about the civil rights acts of the sixties did not sit comfortably with the older ruling class still, particularly in the South, resisting the civil rights movement.
