I’m sorry we don’t have photos for this one, because the visual juxtaposition in my Sunday Ann Arbor News was a real stitch. At the bottom of the Metro page, coverage of the 33rd annual Ann Arbor Hash Bash, the city’s annual celebration of some of the most indulgent marijuana possession laws in the country.
After John Sinclair, the White Panther/manager of the MC5 commonly described as a “political activist,” was jailed for possession of a couple joints way back when, he led a campaign to decriminalize weed within the city limits, and for some time, Ann Arbor penalized personal-use marijuana possession with a $5 fine. (It’s up to $25 now.) Every year around April Fool’s Day, potheads gather in and around the U-M campus to light up and, y’know, mellow out. (But only off-campus; on-campus penalties are much stiffer.)
Anyway, I wish you could have seen the photos: Sinclair Himself was speaker this year, and there was a priceless photo of him flanked by a couple of unidentified supporters, all of them well into AARP-land. Dude, the ’60s are, like, so over.
Elsewhere on the Metro front, though, was a photo-and-caption account of the “annual Easter egg hunt and marshmallow drop” in Ypsilanti, where an actual helicopter hovered over Frog Island Park and dropped 10,950 unpackaged marshmallows on scrambling children below.
All I could think was, man, wouldn’t it have been too cool if the chopper lost its way and dropped the payload on the Hash Bash? Now that would be something to see.
alex said on April 5, 2004 at 6:31 pm
Until a few years ago, Chicago was the scene of the annual Windy City Weedfest, a big smoke-in on the lakefront. Dennis Byrne, a Sun-Times columnist with a stick up his ass a mile long, wrote with indignation about how the city had been looking the other way all these years while upwards of fifty thousand lawbreakers were convening in the park to thumb their noses at God, applie pie and Old Glory. In turn, the city banished the event to the parking lot of Soldier Field and stepped up police presence, which was pretty much the death knell.
I interviewed the event’s organizers for the Reader that year�an odd crowd ranging from young hippie wannabes to the most ancient burnouts I’d ever seen. This was in the basement of an old, decrepit mansion on Sheridan. My memory of the evening is, of course, very hazy. And I was to amotivational to actually make it to the event.
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Dick W. said on April 5, 2004 at 9:08 pm
It’s been fifteen years since I toked up, but the thought of all them marshmallows just floating down from the sky got real interesting for a minute there. Worst I ever did was get high once down in Miami and go to the hobby shop. I bought shit I never could figure out how to put together…
Drunk, sometimes it was necessary for me to go to jail.
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Lex said on April 6, 2004 at 6:25 am
“As God is my witness, I thought marshmallows could fly.”
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Nance said on April 6, 2004 at 8:37 am
One of my faves, Lex. When I worked in Ohio, I always wanted to win the Buckeye Silver Sow award, or whatever the hell it was called.
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