Hash Bash to 420

A long and arduous journey, beginning in London on Feb. 6, has carried me from Amsterdam to Madrid; Barcelona; New Orleans; Oxford and Holly Springs, Miss.; Little Rock and Fayetteville, Ark.; Memphis and Chicago to Detroit just in time for the Hash Bash in Ann Arbor. My colleague Larry Gabriel's excellent report in last week's edition spares me the necessity of filing my own report, but I have to say it was a very beautiful day on the Diag and over on Monroe Street, with thousands of fellow vipers and medical marijuana patients milling around in and out of the sun and having their fun in a joyous diversity of ways.

Not long after the first Hash Bash in 1972 we had changed the marijuana law equation in Ann Arbor for good, setting a vivid precedent for "decriminalization" by establishing a city ordinance that would punish marijuana violations with the issuance of a municipal ticket carrying a $5 fine. This was accomplished by first uniting the progressive elements on campus and in the city around the platform of the Human Rights Party, getting out the vote three days after Hash Bash, and electing two members of the HRP to the seven-member Ann Arbor City Council; they became the swing vote needed to enable either the Republicans or Democrats on the Council to enact laws, approve budgets and carry on the business of the city.

Honoring the party's commitment to the critical weed-smoking wing of the HRP, our newly elected councilpersons made some sort of bargain, the details of which escape me but which resulted in the enactment of the "$5 fine," as the ordinance was known locally. The "Rainbow faction" of the HRP, for which this writer served as a representative in the intra-party negotiations, acknowledged that full legalization wasn't possible, but insisted that the least possible harm must be done by the marijuana laws and that a $5 ticket would be just about as far as could be gone at the time.

Once enacted, the Ann Arbor marijuana ordinance served as a model for the progressives of Ypsilanti and East Lansing, where similar laws were enacted, establishing Michigan as the world leader in harm reduction with respect to marijuana use. Activists in the Netherlands picked up the banner and moved it up a couple of levels, decriminalizing all recreational drug use and providing for over-the-counter sales of marijuana and hashish in the coffee shops that proliferated into the hundreds, entirely without regulation until the mid-1990s.

Unhappily, marijuana legalization in the United States never got any further than Michigan in the early 1970s. Progress stalled until the medical marijuana movement in California led by Dennis Perrone and Scott Immler succeeded in legalizing medical marijuana 20 years later and opened the door to the series of ballot initiatives that's led 15 states and the District of Columbia to recognize the benefits of weed and protect citizens from arrest for smoking. Just now several states — including California and Massachusetts — have effectively decriminalized cannabis by making possession a ticketable, noncriminal offense subject to fines of as much as $100. Breckenridge, Colo., has completely legalized the sacrament within its city limits.

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