Meet the Doobie Brothers

In case you weren’t able to tell by the large clouds rising from across the country, Monday was 4/20, which is when people around the country gather together and, in a showing of true unity, run off the edge of a cliff. Wait… sorry, I’m thinking of lemming migration. 4/20 is actually the day when everybody gets to smoke pot like it’s some kind of nationwide Pink Floyd concert and everybody smells like Willie Nelson’s trailer.

It really is a novel concept when you think about it: something that is normally illegal is suddenly okay for one day because everyone decides to do it all at the same time (let’s just hope that people don’t learn to apply this concept to other illegal activities, like rape). Nobody is really sure how the date came to be decided or when this event started. The History Channel keeps sending out historians to go do research, but they always stumble back with seven bags of Doritos and “Go Green” t-shirts.

So I did some of my own research on 4/20. Now, I research these notes the same way I research for ten-page final papers: I don’t. I look up what I can on Wikipedia (which is responsible for at least 80% of my knowledge of the world) and make the rest up. When some people do papers, they get worried that they might get caught for plagiarizing; I never have that fear, mainly because I almost never put facts in my papers. No professor is going to allege that I plagiarized the sentence “Florida quarterback Tim Tebow is responsible for slavery in the 1800’s,” (although he is responsible for global warming).

Anyway, I looked up 4/20 on Wikipedia and low and behold, my very own school, the University of Colorado, had its own section in the entry. Now, this didn’t exactly surprise me. The city of Boulder is definitely a very green city, and I mean that in more ways than one. Boulder has the second highest per-capita pot usage behind Boston (and I bet Bostonians fudged those stats just so they could finally be first in something), so of course it would be the site of one of the largest 4/20 gatherings in the nation. Every year, thousands of stoners gather at the school to simultaneously kill millions of brain cells. Do you remember that show “The Land Before Time,” where those prepubescent little dinosaurs go on an epic search for “The Great Valley?” Boulder on 4/20 is like the Great Valley for stoners, who every year from across the country wander around hoping to find “tree stars.” This year, we had 10,000 people show up at the event, and police have stopped even trying to arrest people for smoking. There were however some people arrested for some other minor crimes like selling food without a permit (which is sort of like watching a bank robbery and arresting the guy who is overdue on his parking meter).

Of course, not all of those 10,000 people are actually smoking. It’s almost become a tourist event that Boulder could put on those brochures they hand out at travel agencies. For instance, I went last year to see it even though I myself do not smoke weed (really, do I need something that makes me slower and hungrier than I already am?). But a lot of the people there are there for one reason: to provide the stoners with food. With all of the pot being smoked, the area code of Boulder easily consumes in two hours what the entire country of Kenya will eat this month. A Taco Bell near the campus actually ran out of food last year. I was in the line at Wendy’s watching one of the stoners try and order food:

Stoner: I’d like five cheeseburgers, five fries… Do you guys have Big Macs?

Cashier: No sir, this is Wendy’s.

Stoner: Cause I could use a Big Mac.

Cashier: We don’t have Big Macs.

Stoner: Huh? Why?

After his order, he proceeded to go to his seat (by that I mean he fell down two times and stumbled over to his booth) where he promptly fell asleep and did not pick up his order. Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure fast food restaurants probably started 4/20, because they make bank. The food vendors at the actual event do okay too, but they would probably do better if they themselves weren’t also stoned and eating most of their own food and forgetting to charge some people money.

Before you just assume that this thing is just for losers and stoners, I’m pretty sure that at least one of my professors also attended. I walk into my geology class the next day, and the lecture that the professor had prepared was a bunch of random pictures of food and about 20 yes or no clicker questions with no right or wrong answer (“Ah, you all get credit.”) I swear, one of the questions was:

Were dinosaurs cold- or warm- blooded? A. Yes B. No.

As you can probably guess, most of the students had difficulty answering this question. In fact, the only guys who appeared to know the answer were the historians in the back eating Doritos.