‘No tokers left behind’ is message at 52nd-annual Hash Bash marijuana rally

ANN ARBOR, MI — A little rain on a cold, windy Saturday wasn’t enough to stop committed pot smokers from descending upon downtown Ann Arbor and lighting up.

Despite the drizzle and temperatures below 40 degrees, smoke still billowed from the University of Michigan Diag during the 52nd-annual Hash Bash marijuana rally on April 1.

Between the main smoke fest and political rally on the Diag and coinciding Monroe Street Fair, thousands mingled about and took part in the cannabis celebration on April Fools’ Day.

“Five-dollar edibles!” vendors on the Diag called out to passersby as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg songs blasted from speakers and rolling digital billboards for a local dispensary advertised a free eighth of an ounce of weed with each purchase.

With the inclement weather, the crowd on the Diag was sparser than usual, but diehards still donned marijuana-themed attire — complemented with umbrellas and ponchos — to take in a series of speeches. The crowd joined along in anti-police chants while calling for freeing people in prison for marijuana.

“Free Danny Trevino!” Josey Scoggin of the Great Lakes Expungement Network yelled out, referring to Lansing’s “professor of pot,” a marijuana entrepreneur sentenced in 2020 to nearly 16 years in prison after federal investigators determined he was operating outside of marijuana laws.

“Our rule is no tokers left behind,” said Richard Clement, a longtime marijuana activist from Detroit, who called for freeing all federal pot prisoners and encouraged attendees to call the White House and “tell President Joe to let my people go.”

While Michiganders voted to legalize marijuana in 2018, Clement said he wants to see it legalized nationally, saying weed is a plant from God and should be protected in the U.S. Constitution.

John Sinclair, the Ann Arbor poet whose 10-year prison sentence for two joints led to the first Hash Bash on the Diag in April 1972, made an appearance Saturday. The inaugural event happened after the Michigan Supreme Court declared the state’s marijuana law unconstitutional and Sinclair was freed from prison.

Now in his 80s, he sat in a wheelchair Saturday as he recited a poem and wished the crowd a happy Hash Bash after complaining about the government overtaxing marijuana.

“They’re not done yet — they’ve still got their filthy hands in the pie of marijuana business,” he said. “We have to keep resisting all of these terrible charges they make, all the extra taxes.”

He added, “Remember, these are the people that put us in prison for smoking marijuana. Now they’re trying to get us to pay them for letting us grow marijuana.”

Other speakers recalled past opposition to Hash Bash by the city and UM and police crackdowns that used to happen at the event before pot was legalized in Michigan. Despite attempts to suppress it over the years, the “free the weed” event endured.

Remembering a tense standoff with police at the 1996 Hash Bash

UM police reported no issues or arrests Saturday.

The event is now in a phase where it’s finally accepted by the university and the city and they’re “not working against us,” Hash Bash historian Rich Birkett said.

Birkett also recalled the history of the Monroe Street Fair, the Hash Bash street party that officially started in 2002. Its origins trace back to 1995 when festival-goers started going to Casa Dominick’s on Monroe Street after Hash Bash, he said, noting before that the afterparty was at the Heidelberg on Main Street in 1994 and at Fuller Park in 1993.

A history of Hash Bash and marijuana activism in Ann Arbor

Ann Arbor marijuana activist Chuck Ream, a retired kindergarten teacher and regular Hash Bash speaker who spoke Saturday, said it takes on aspects of religion to still have so many people show up for Hash Bash on a day like Saturday.

“We’re here because we have a deep belief, a very powerful belief, that we can change the world,” he said. “And the Mother God put on this Earth what we need to change the world in all the magical and healthful plants that we have.”

Some attendees puffed on foot-long joints while listening to the speeches and some posed for photos with a giant inflatable Wiz Khalifa RAW joint. “It’s 420 somewhere,” read one of the green pot-leaf flags planted in the Diag lawn.

“We need to remember that, even though we can be out here enjoying cannabis and a community experience, not everybody gets that privilege,” said Allison Bohn, president of Students for Sensible Drug Policy at UM.

Bohn said she gets asked why there’s still a Hash Bash when marijuana is legal here now. She noted there are still people living with criminal records or incarcerated because of pot while others can go to stores and legally buy it like it’s candy.

“We need to think of the marginalized communities, especially the Black and brown bodies that sit in prisons and still serve time when we can be out here,” she said.

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