Sunset Beach, the new shoreline location for Vancouver’s annual 4-20 cannabis rally, was an open-air marketplace for pot vendors and consumers on Wednesday.
Suppliers, retailers, dispensers and dealers occupied many of the roughly 180 tents on the grass in front of the stage where they sold a wide range of marijuana information, products and paraphernalia, from clever T-shirts and glass pipes to crystal-heavy flowers out of 10-litre vats and cannabis-infused edibles such as honey, five-cent candies, pastries and suckers.
Out of wicker baskets strung over their arms, Chelsea McConnell and Michelle Warden sold lollipops and sugar cookies shaped like marijuana leaves.
McConnell said they operated in a “grey area” of the law, but both women supported decriminalization and, with that, regulation of a budding culinary scene.
By attending the rally, Warden said they were participating in an important protest over the country’s prohibition on marijuana and also helping expand an emerging economy.
“What we’re doing, it’s such a great opportunity,” Warden said of the economic potential. Regulation could mean her small business is legitimized, which could allow her to insure her enterprise and help protect her against the risk of theft as well as ensure a safe product.
As she spoke, pot activist Jodie Emery was on the main stage, commenting on the morning’s news announcement the Trudeau government will take the next year to revise and eventually introduce new legislation on marijuana in Canada.
“We have fought peacefully for this kind of freedom,” said Emery. “This is only because of people like you, activists and patients and dispensers who have bravely ignored and defied unjust laws that we should not be criminals.
The federal health minister said new regulations will be announced a year from now next spring.
“We have built this industry,” said Emery, pointing out that, for the next 365 days, people will be arrested until and if the laws change.
Across the paved seawall path, another 80 tents were set up on the sand. A vendor sold joints from a giant zip-lock bag, which he estimated held nearly $5,000 worth of weed.
All around, groups of people sat on logs and blankets near the water or under the trees.
“I’m here to meet with friends and smoke a joint before we all go our separate ways for the summer,” said Tony Bross, who was about to be reunited with his dog, Jagger after three weeks apart. “Next time we will see our friends is at Shambhala.”
A woman with 10-inch spikes in her Mohawk and an albino rat on her shoulder, didn’t linger for an interview but said she attended the rally for one reason. “To smoke pot, man.”
A group of four friends walked past four police officers towards the stage as one woman among them said protest was not what drew her to the event. “I’m here to smoke weed. Make new pals. I couldn’t care less about where it’s held,” said Bryanne Matzelle.
While many people attended the rally because the sunny day presented a chance to get high at the beach, others were more deliberate in their choice to sell, purchase and consume cannabis.
Informal hawkers held hand-drawn signs and either walked through the crowd or let people come to them. One woman, who declined to give her name, sold “shatter candy,” gummies like fuzzy peaches and Coke bottles she had purchased at a corner store and then infused with cannabis oil in her home kitchen. She sold baggies of three candies for $5.
Openly flaunting Canada’s drug laws by making and selling marijuana was an act of resistance, she said, adding that many people prefer eating cannabis to smoking it. “It’s civil disobedience. There are so many seniors with mobility issues or who live in group homes and this way they can medicate discreetly.”
Shatter is one of many names for oil and non-dried forms of the plant that can be eaten or used in food products as a cannabis extract that concentrates chemical and psychoactive compounds.
Dori Dempster with the medicinal cannabis dispensary, which has operated on East Hastings Street since 2008 and initially had a Board of Variance hearing scheduled today at city hall, said the rally draws a crowd that knows little about the protest at the heart of openly using cannabis or about the expanded municipal bylaws.
“A lot of people don’t understand what is going on at a deeper level but that is true for all walks of society,” she said. “That is why we’re here — because we care and the reason [the rally] exists is because we’re standing up for our rights.”
Demptster said she would leave the rally to be outside city hall at 4:20 p.m., the time of a massive light up at Sunset Beach, because she was expressing her solidarity with the B.C. Compassion Club when it went before the Board of Variance to discuss its ability to operate.
“This is the largest open market of its kind anywhere in the world,” said Dempster’s husband, Tim Sproule. “It’s a farmers market for cannabis.”
Sproule is part of a group of patients challenging federal medical marijuana possession laws through the B.C. Supreme Court.
There was also a palpable corporate element at the grassroots movement that had its first Vancouver rally in 1995 at Victory Square Park with open pot smoking and a P.A. system powered by an electric cord running from Marc Emery’s initial Hemp B.C. store.
Dispensaries handed out flyers and gave away coupons to entice buyers inside booths and to their stores at locations around the city. A bottle blonde woman and four lookalikes in matching skirts who could have suited a Molson beer commercial handed out $10 discounts for phyto extractions, a cannabis concentrate.
At the vendor tent for First Class Medicinal, Stormy Ent prepared a dose of honey mixed with cannabis oil extract for Mathew Lalancette, who bent over a glass pipe and inhaled.
“I think there is a lot of benefit to be had from [marijuana],” he said. “We just need to be responsible.”
See More Photos: Smoke on the water at 4-20 rally
Twitter: @MHStewart
