Luckily for the attendees at Norlin Quad on Monday, enough brought generic lighters and matches and no lives were lost. Also in the celebrators fortune, the University of Colorado gave up on hosing down the participants,or taking and publishing incriminating pictures of them and stuck with the 2007 and 2008 policy of not contesting the gathering.
From much further than the campus dorms, a record setting number of people with an open schedule at 4:20 in the afternoon descended upon CU’s campus congregating in the Norlin Quad.
Despite issuing no citations on the afternoon, a K-9 Unit was located at a primary entrance to campus. It’s kind of funny how this was its first and last day to be stationed there this year.
The rush onto campus looked like game day traffic showing up for kickoff.
Unlike a football game, few were late for the official start time on this day (but how many jumped the gun?).
You know an event is big when there’s a hippie in a tree with a drum.
Attendees couldn’t have asked for a better day. After three straight days of sleet trading turns with snow and rain, it was sunny and about as perfect as you could get for a day of sitting on the grass on the grass. And they sat everywhere; looking from left to right is the majority of the crowd, not all of it.
The Daily Camera flew a photog over at roughly 4:05pm to shoot this photo:
After the ceremonial hour, I looped around the end near the orange fence (being used to protect fresh sod, not for any nefarious reasons) and saw that area had filled in significantly from the time of the picture being taken. The three previous photos came from a perch in front of the top left corner of the red-roofed building in the bottom right corner of the picture. Got that?
So what would the largest gathering to celebrate a drug’s criminality entail? In the half hour immediately preceding the big event it was nothing but a mad dash up to campus. Then a failing game of “I’m over here! Where are you?”
It’s 4:19, and a roar begins to grow like a New Year’s cheer at a lame bar with no official countdown.
And then!?!?! Not much . . . everyone had their hands full. CU police estimated the crowd to be between 8,000 and 10,000 people. The Colorado Daily has amended their estimation that there were more people in attendance than last year’s record. I have arbitrarily selected 13,000 as my estimation. Bottom line: At least double the number of people that were at the CU and CSU basketball games I attended this year, combined.
If you’re curious, . . . take 10,000 people as a base number. Not everyone on the green brought green. So one in three people brought something to burn in honor of the occasion. 3,333. Like any proper holiday celebration, there were no meager portions being shared. So 3,333 people had roughly a dime of pot. What’s that? $25? So 3,333 spent about $25 in about 3-5 minutes. . . . $83,325 plus papers. Taxed at 6%, that’s $5,000 that could go to other programs than the war on drugs. We'll discuss the residual economic benefits from a bunch of lazy couchsurfers craving food, drink and every other brilliant idea they think up another day.
Finally, before anyone’s eyes popped out, a great exhale was released and a cloud my neighbor claimed to smell eight blocks away took flight.
People had traveled from across the country to be right here at this moment. It was an entrepreneur fair with all kinds of different things being sold or given away. Causes drug and non-drug related were pedaled left and right. Some treated it as Halloween and went all out. (behind the shirt sign is a girl with 8-foot wide headphones on)
And then!?!?!?!?! That was it. Nothing more. Cranky detractors might say they did exactly what you should expect from a lazy stoner – nothing. Many departed. Chibahut queued up patrons around the block. Those that stayed returned to their games of frisbee, hacky sack, or simply a prone position on a blanket. There were no speeches, no songs or chants. No incidents, conflicts or confrontations. The event that warranted a campus-wide email warning of its dangers had been concluded without . . . anything happening.
Yet, it drew nationwide attention and prompted a discussion of a law with which many disagree. It was labeled a protest by many reporting on the event. But was it? There was no request presented. People assembled and at most, demonstrated that they have little concern for one law.
It was a sign of the true significance in organizing any event for political gain – it is not the person yelling through a megaphone or a band on a stage, but simply the sheer size of the crowd. Did all of you Democratic Precinct Captains hear that? It didn’t take a fancy sign explaining Obama’s link to Hitler and Satan. No one obtained a permit for the gathering, and no one rented the space or any kind of equipment. People just showed up and toked up. It had the excitement and buzz of a big concert, but there was no band or exploitation by Ticketmaster.
The largest Foxnews Tea Party was in Atlanta and netted an estimated 15,000 people (fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/tea-party-nonpartisan-attendance.html) that were upset about having to pay for the wars the President they elected got us into. Without the aid of promotion on a national cable television channel, the crowd approached the biggest gathering Foxnews could assemble.
But maybe there is a reason for keeping it illegal and continuing to piss away billions of dollars - does that $83,325 support piracy? It's probably to blame for hog flu, too.
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