For those of you living around the world you may not quite understand our traditional 420 smoke in here in Vancouver. Each year thousands of people gather infront of the art gallery here in downtown Van city to in one impressive toke fill an entire city block with the sweet smoke of the cannabis plant. Every year it is so impressive to see so many people of every different kind coming together to show their love and support for what should be our legal right. There are booths and street vendors all over selling bud and edibles, bongs and pipes, and generally promoting the use of the herb to the public.
The highlights of the event being of course the on-the-dot cloud rising above Vancouver’s biggest session in history, the speakers of course, David Malmo Levine, Jody Emery and many others, Marc Emery who was there through the whole of the event politicin’ shaking hands and kissing babies (not that there were any babies there, that would be entirely inappropriate). The music was good and the atmosphere was amazing.
However this year’s traditionally peaceful celebration was a bit tainted and if I may say no exactly “putting our best foot forward” for the cannabis community. The state of the affair was complete chaos from when I arrived to when I left. There was immense amounts of trash all over the grounds, there were people tagging on the art gallery, a girl passed out and had to be taken off by paramedics, and if thats not bad enough for the first time in over 20 years of 420 celebrations a fight even broke out dead center of the crowd.
Now this sort of thing makes me very sad because the entire statement that everyone there had come together to support was lost. Now this was little to no surprise considering there was over 10,000 people crammed together on one downtown city block. This to me is simply poor planning. They desperately need to move the celebration to a new venue and judging by the number of people they bring out its gonna need to be a big one.
So here is what I propose!
The Vancouver International Cannabis Festival!
Now much like the operation of the Jazz festival in Gastown every year, we could host something similar with stages and booths up and down water st. and extending up to queen elizabeth square right in front of the Cannabis Culture headquarters. I think this would be fantastic, more space would mean less chance of fights and we could bring in bands from all over the world to perform infront of thousands of people. Political leaders and activists could speak from different stages and get their messages out to a wider group of people who instead of trying to fight though crowds without burning themselves on a blunt could comfortably smoke and listen to what they have to say.
However the concern is due to the poor execution of this years event it may be possible that BC Marijuana Party may not have much bargaining power with the city to continue this event let alone host it in a bigger space next year.
On another note, I’ve got some great shots of this year’s event and will have them up for you guys to check out on here very soon!
As always, Peace and blow that smoke proud.
~The Hempen Journeyman
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