10,000 weed lovers gather on campus green at 4:20 on 4/20 for a tea party

They came, they lit up, they blew on the Boulder CU campus

 

 

 

It has become a tradition at 4:20 on April 20 each year.  Pot lovers gather on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder and light their joints, their pipes, their bongs, whatever they have lugged along.  Yesterday's gathering was about 10,000.

University officials say that only about a fourth of those gathered were students.  But a 4:20, a huge cloud covered the campus as 10,000 sets of lungs expelled smoke into the afternoon air.  Boulder's newspaper, The Daily Camera, covered it. 

Over the years,  a lot of pot lore has accumulated on campuses.  The police react differently than they did in the lore of yore.

While I was attending graduate school at the University of Iowa, an incident happened down the Interstate a piece at the ramp to Grinnell College.  The police noticed a horde of students scouring the Interstate 80 median.  At first the police thought the students were volunteering to pick up litter off the roadside, but then they noticed that the students seemed to be harvesting something.


During World War II, a bit crop raised for the war effort was hemp.  It was loaded on box cars and as it bumped across the country, the raw material dropped its seeds along the way.  Those seeds took root in places like railroad right-of-ways and roadsides that weren't cultivated.  The students had discovered a motherlode along the Interstate, and when the police realized what they were doing, they gave chase and tried to round up a bunch of pot inspired kids who felt like playing with them.  The kids had a good time and the police were pissed.


Conventional wisdom said that rope-grade hemp was not the best for ingestion purposes, but students told me it would do.


At Northern during my first year, some entrepreneurs flew a DC-7 loaded with bales of pot up from Columbia and landed along the Missouri River at Akaska.  Some nosy ice fishermen thought that was a suspicious thing to do and called the police, who confiscated the airplane before anyone had a chance to unload.


The pot was impounded as evidence along with the plane, and after the entrepreneurs went to trial, the state burned all the pot.  Or so officials said.  However, students informed me they would not be in class the day of the burning because they would be standing down wind from the big bonfire of their dreams.

That gathering at Boulder is the kind of tea party that suggests that maybe the country might be alright after all.  So, blow, babies, blow.