Seattle Hempfest is this weekend so that means the wildfire smoke that has permeated Seattle all week will be replaced by clouds of smoke from thousands of people taking bong rips at the same time. Downtown Seattle’s Myrtle Edwards Park is going to be ground zero for getting so fucking high you can’t tell the difference between a joint and a Greek french fry.
While getting high in public is an important, nay necessary part of experiencing Hempfest there’s actually a lot of interesting shit going down this year. There’s a weekend full of media panels where you can hear some of the industry’s smartest people talk about the future of pot. The DOPE Cup, the state’s most respected pot competition, is happening Saturday night. And more than 100 vendors will be showing off some of the coolest new stoner technology.
Oh, and there’s live glassblowing demonstrations, that’s pretty cool, too.
Here are some tips on how to both get high and have fun at Hempfest:
How to Get In
This is likely the most difficult part of your Hempfest experience. Myrtle Edwards Park stretches for over a mile along Seattle's waterfront, starting at the Olympic Sculpture Park and heading north along the edge of Belltown. But there are only three entrances to the festival. The security lines can be long and always confuse me—do I need to hide my pot? Why can’t I bring my water bottle in but that guy can bring 300 glass bongs? Why are you yelling at me, man with security written 10 times on your black t-shirt? These are the questions I’ve asked myself over the years.
Basically, the security seems to be mostly focused on weapons, although the security staff is always confused every year as to what is allowed and what isn’t. My most important piece of advice is to avoid the south entrance at the Olympic Sculpture Park, where there is always a long line and the security staff always seems to be the most intent on freaking stoners out.
I suggest hitting the Thomas Street Footbridge and Overpass, which you can access just west of Key Arena near the corner of West Harrison Street and 3rd Avenue West. Or you can go to the north entrance, which is near Centennial Park and is sure to be empty.
The festival is free but Hempfest is always running out of money, so $10 donations for admission are encouraged.
You can't buy pot inside the festival, so make sure to bring some, and a little extra to share. The closest stores are Have A Heart on Blanchard Street in Belltown, and Herban Legends on Bell Street near Pike Place Market.
Enjoy a Talk at the Hemposium
Hempfest has four stages spread across Myrtle Edwards Park, but the Ric Smith Hemposium Stage always has the most interesting guests. The other three stages are filled with a never-ending line up of speakers hawking causes, with an occasional music act or comedian mixed in. Some of the slots are as short as five minutes, creating a dizzying mix of different people yelling about different pot causes nonstop for about eight hours. It is honestly one of the oddest arrangements I have ever seen at a festival.
But underneath the tent at the Hemposium stage, the chaos of the other stages is replaced by thematically organized, hour-long discussions with some of the smartest people working in the world of weed. Friday has some of the best talks of the weekend, with a 1:35 p.m. panel on sustainability that is likely to be enlightening, as Washington’s pot industry faces more consumer pressure to clean up its environmental impact. The state’s new organic certification program, which we recently reported was inching close to reality, will likely be discussed in detail.
Don’t miss a talk about pot genetics on Friday at 3:15 p.m. from DJ Short, one of the country’s most famous pot breeders. When Grantland profiled him in 2013—during a visit to Hempfest—they called him the “Willy Wonka of Pot” and “ arguably the most skillful and creative American cannabis breeder of the last 40 years.” His most famous strain, DJ Short’s Blueberry, was once the trendiest bag of pot you could get thanks to its sedative effects and pleasant berry-like flavor. I remember dealers in the mid-'00s were always claiming that they had some Blueberrry; they almost never did. But now you can see this sought after breeder in person.
The DOPE Cup
There are well over 1,000 farms selling pot in Washington state. How do you find the good stuff amongst all these different farmers? You look at who won the DOPE Cup. This is the most widely followed pot competition in our state, meaning farmers are always trying to win, which keeps the field of entries competitive. Winning the DOPE Cup shows a farmer or processor is doing the right stuff.
You can just look up the list of winners and hunt for these brands on your next trip to the pot store, but going to the actual award ceremony at the Seeley Black Stage at 6 p.m. on Saturday is a fun way to see the best of Washington's weed industry. The top growers in the state will be on hand waiting to see if they won. And when pot farmers get together with other pot farmers, they are always trying to one up each other, so the blunts being passed around in this crowd are guaranteed to be top shelf.
Wait, This Is Actually Important?
Without Hempfest, Washington would not have legalized weed in 2012.*
This free speech event is one of the most important parts of Washington’s 30-year history of groundbreaking cannabis reform. When it started in 1991, the majority of Americans still thought pot was on par with heroin, and Hempfest attendees were regularly harassed and arrested by the Seattle Police Department. Hempfest is a free speech festival, not some kind of trade show or music fest, and when it first started, it was people bravely exercising their constitutional rights to argue and organize against cruel and inhumane American laws.
Hempfest’s yearly event, and the work its volunteers did the rest of the year, helped pass successful voter initiatives and organize court cases that changed the way Washington and Seattle treated pot. Initiatives like 1998’s I-692 that decriminalized medical marijuana across the state, or 2003’s I-75, which made marijuana arrests the lowest priority in Seattle, were all organized and rallied around at Hempfest. Washington didn’t legalize pot in a vacuum; it was only after these successful ballot reforms that voters became comfortable with full legalization. It's not an overstatement to say that without Hempfest, 2012’s I-502 initiatives would have never become a reality.
Is Hempfest still important now, six years after we legalized pot and four years after legal weed first went on sale? I think so. There’s plenty of reform left to make happen. Pot is still completely illegal according to federal law. And even in our state, where pot is legal, there are still some fucked up laws dictating packaging requirements, homegrows, and public consumption that need to change.
Until pot is normalized, safe, and environmentally friendly, there is still work to be done. And a reason to get stoned as fuck at Hempfest.
*Before you “well, actually” me, and explain that Hempfest didn’t wholeheartedly support 2012’s Initiative I-502, let me point out that Hempfest’s most important work on legalization was not in July of 2012 but in the preceding 20 years, when the festival’s organizers did wholeheartedly support ballot reform measures and raise money for court cases that made it possible for the majority of Washington’s voters to support 2012’s I-502, even if a few Hempfesters ended up voting against it.