Editor's Note: The MM Report discourages any violation of the Michigan Governor's executive orders regarding gatherings and social distancing. All non-essential people need to stay home. Hopefully the events related to Hash Bash will be rescheduled and or postponed till next year. This does not prevent folks from participating in spirit, on April 4th at high noon, from a distance and using modern technology to connect. We urge the public to not show up in Ann Arbor for Hash Bash facilities.
Hi everybody, and welcome to the annual Hash Bash issue of the Michigan Marijuana Report. It was nine years ago when I wrote my first column for this magazine’s 2011 Hash Bash issue, and here we are once again but in the light of startling new developments.
The City of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan have cancelled the 2020 Hash Bash—the 49th annual—and the accompanying Monroe Street Fair on the grounds of public health preservation with respect to the coronavirus epidemic which as of this writing has claimed 25 deaths in our state.
The State of Michigan has additionally decreed that no public gatherings of 250 people or more will be allowed after April 5th, thus shutting down Adam Brook’s brilliant Hash Bash Cup festivities held at a pair of hotels on the west side of Ann Arbor where all rooms are purchased by Hash Bash Cup participants and smoking of the sacrament is allowed everywhere in the hotels but in one’s room.
The Hash Bash Cup is in this writer’s opinion the greatest marijuana event out of countless examples in the United States. It solves the question of where to get high at these gatherings by allowing smoking in all public areas and maintaining the reasonable prohibition against smoking in one’s room. Plus Brook presents top-quality music by people like Boogie Bob Baldori, the Planet D Nonet, and this writer’s ensemble, the Blues Scholars, without catering to the crass hip-hop bullshit featured by High Times and others at their gatherings.
It’s a shame to see this great event placed on hold, but all three gatherings will be staged at a later date when the fear of the epidemic has subsided. It’s hilarious to see the organizers of the UM Hash Bash and the Monroe Street Fair posturing as people concerned about public health when in fact the authorities have prohibited them from going forward with their events at this time.
The head of the UM Hash Bash, a character called Nicholas Zettell, not only puts forth this sanctimonious horseshit but has leveled a scurrilous attack on veteran marijuana warriors like Adam Brook, Tim Beck, Ben Horner and myself who have vowed to meet on the Diag to smoke some joints together at noon on April 4.
“I would also like to address the defiant and hardcore attendees who are adamant about attending: Please reconsider….All this does is give cannabis people a bad name….There may be attendees, but their very action becomes nothing more than an act of defiance against a sensible public health decisions. Zealotry may be displayed, but not channeled. Egos will be stroked, but not recognized. A protest may be had, but not against bad laws and instead against the very ideals of health and well-being we often espouse.”
What an unmitigated tissue of horseshit! What we will be doing is returning to the roots of Hash Bash when a bunch of us gathered on the Diag to smoke weed and protest the re-institution of the anti-marijuana laws after the statutes that named marijuana a narcotic were overturned by the Michigan Supreme Court in response to my appeal of a conviction for possession of two joints with a prison sentence of 9-1/2 to ten years.
Over the past 48 years Hash Bash has swelled into a gaudy, unwieldy event that features two hours of self-serving speeches on the steps of the Diag by politicians and minor celebrities followed by some lame musical acts. The Monroe Street Fair is closer to the spirit of the original Hash Bashes but likewise offers a slew of bad music and a serious money-grubbing festival of selling products.
Zettell, who took over the UM Hash Bash when Adam Brook was sent to prison for two years and transformed it into a showcase for the local money grubbers and their dispensaries, goes on to say that “Hash Bash is more than an annual event. It is a tradition, a holiday, a protest, a cultural phenomenon, a beacon of hope, and a community forum for speaking traditional event that encompasses more than you or me or any one person and has served as a beacon [sic].
”This [cancellation] is difficult for all of us,….but believe me when I say this: we will be working very, very hard to make sure the next Hash Bash is the biggest and best ever.” Bullshit! The Hash Bash is not about bigness but about the quality of defiance with which the participants approach the government and the repressive legal system that continues to bully and oppress marijuana smokers and dealers even after we have voted the draconian drug laws out of existence in one of the few remaining examples of direct American democracy.
I know it’s not a popular view but I for one am sort of happy that the extravaganza they call Hash Bash on the Diag will not be held this year, and I’m hoping when it starts up again that it will seek to return to its roots as an informal gathering of potheads on the UM campus to smoke weed and get high together and raise our middle fingers in protest against the societal repression that follows the weed smoker around. We don’t need no Debbie Dingell to validate our existence!
I take great offense at this Zettell character who came to the Hash Bash as a student at UM, seized control of the event when Adam Brook was imprisoned, brought in some rich dude from California as the keynote speaker to teach us how properly to grub money from weed, graduated from college and became a weed salesman himself at Om of Medicine, and now poses as some kind of responsible spokesman for the marijuana movement who’s worried about the “bad name” some of us are giving it.
Me, I’ve had a bad name since I was first busted for selling $10 worth of weed in the fall of 1964. My second arrest came in August 1965 when I copped a small bag of weed for an undercover agent who drove me to the dealer’s house, after which I was instructed to withdraw from my graduate school studies at Wayne State University. My third and final (god willing) arrest came in January 1967 when I was charged with giving two joints to an undercover policewoman. I began my challenge to the state marijuana laws at that point and fought to get them declared unconstitutional for 2-1/2 years prior to my trial in July 1969 and then for the 2-1/2 years I was incarcerated at Jackson and Marquette prisons and the Wayne County Jail.
My successful appeal overturned the marijuana laws on March 9, 1972 and for three weeks there were no marijuana laws in Michigan until the new law calling weed a “controlled substance” went into effect ion April 1 of that year. It was at that point that we gathered on the Diag under the name Hash Bash to protest the reinstatement of penalties against smokers and affirm that we would continue to smoke weed whenever and wherever we wanted.
That’s what some of us will be doing on April 4, 2020—meeting informally on the Diag as citizens getting high together and celebrating our victory in legalizing recreational use of marijuana last November, and may I say that if Nicholas Zettell doesn’t approve, he can kiss my motherfucking ass. Free The Weed!
—Detroit
Friday, March 13, 2020
© 2020 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
