Do we really need Hempfest anymore? Seattle’s 28-year-old pot “protestival” has been on the conceptual chopping block ever since 2012, when voters in Washington state legalized weed. Is there anything left to protest now that anyone with an ID that says they’re 21+ and $5 in their pocket can buy a pre-rolled joint?
After attending last weekend’s festival, I can report that the answer is an unequivocal yes.
Hempfest could use some updating (actually, a lot of updating—more on that in a minute) but now that billions of dollars are flowing into the legal weed industry, Hempfest’s message of common sense pot policy is as necessary today as it was when the protest started in 1991. In fact, it might be even more vital now.
Let’s start with the most of obvious reason Hempfest should still exist: Weed is not actually legal. Washington and 11 other states have legalized recreational pot but weed is still extremely illegal according to federal law. This has profound negative consequences: continuing the racist war on drugs (people are still getting locked up for pot, and those people are still overwhelmingly people of color), tearing kids away from parents, stunting medical research, and many other terrible implications. Until pot is fully legal, there’s no reason to stop protesting.
And then there’s the somewhat less obvious reason: state legalization is far from perfect, especially when it comes to directing the benefits of legalization to communities that have been devastated by the unnecessary and racist war on drugs. Washington’s government makes hundreds of millions of dollars in weed tax revenue, big businesses sell tens of millions of dollars in legal weed a year, yet our state government has done almost nothing to direct those profits to communities of color.
The few piecemeal diversity programs launched by the private weed industry are as trivial as a “diversity sticker,” as Rae Burruss, a Seattle-based attorney, said at a panel during Hempfest last Saturday.
“You throw one black person in a photo and all of a sudden you’re diverse,” Burruss said during a panel. “And that’s just not real. Look at this panel. We are professional people in this industry who are constantly tokenized in order to be a part of it and that’s not acceptable… it’s a band aid on a wound that needs a suture.”
Solving the industry’s diversity problem will take widespread reform at the state level and leadership by the people who are running the state’s largest weed businesses. Those people are overwhelmingly white. Mss Oregon, a cannabis activist who was on the same panel as Burruss, pointed out that the burden of action falls on the white people in power, not the black people currently blocked from the industry.
“Talk about it amongst yourselves, you don’t need us to sit here and tell you it’s fucked up. You know it’s fucked up. So go and talk about it and y’all come back and tell us what y’all are going to do,” Mss Oregon said. “I am a firm believer that you don’t need black people to hold these conversations. If these businesses want to have conversations about social equity and what they can do to help the black community, you don’t have to find a black person to put at the mic.”
Roz McCarthy, the founder of Minorities for Medical Marijuana, agreed with Mss Oregon, saying people of color are ready to help out whenever the people in power get around to action.
“We don’t care who starts it, we just want that conversation started so you can go in and be the boots on the ground and push it forward,” McCarthy said.
Hempfest is in the perfect position to push action on reforming the weed industry to make it more inclusive and see more company ownership and profits going to POC. The festival is already having these conversations, and having conversations is good, but if only a dozen people attend that panel, how good is it? More importantly: what is the next step? The festival could, if they wanted to, set the agenda on what we should be fighting for next. They could be giving us something to protest for. That’s part of what I mean about the festival needing an update. If they want to remain vital, they need to lead us into the future.
Thousands of people were at Hempfest on Saturday but as mentioned, I counted only about a dozen people watching the panels inside the so-called “Hemposium.” Dozens of fascinating speakers and panelists were at the weekend-long conference, but the average person would be forgiven for not knowing that. If you look at Hempfest’s marketing materials, a Rolling Stone columnist and groundbreaking pot researcher had the same prominence as any of the hundreds of people who were given five-minute time slots to shout about their pet topic. And the layout of the festival did not make it clear which panels were more interesting than others. The rambling protest nature of the stages is endearing, but why not promote the more interesting panels and speakers in a way that draws emphasis to them?
Meanwhile, Hempfest is running close to financial peril while remaining stubbornly tied to its 1990s roots. (By the way, has the website been updated since the 1990s?) Every year, we hear that this might be the last year of Hempfest. The festival’s target market doesn’t seem to be people who want to figure out the future of this industry, the future of this culture, a bold plan for righting historical wrongs. The target market still seems to be… people who want to get as high as possible in public. In other words, hardcore stoners. But the festival needs more than just hardcore stoners to survive. Nothing about the festival is aimed at making itself relevant to the modern cannabis supporter, a key demographic Hempfest needs to embrace if it wants to survive.
Why not bring in more educational opportunities? There’s a massive information gap when it comes to navigating the products and new technologies of the legal market. Why not bring in better food? Why not better entertainment? Hempfest is constrained by the fact that it’s a free-speech event, not a for-profit convention, but there are still ways they can make their festival more approachable to more people.
Hempfest should not abandon its roots, and it shouldn’t turn its back on the medical patients and longtime activists who laid the ground work for pulling down prohibition. Those people should be celebrated and welcomed. Hardcore stoners still have a place here too—and judging from last weekend, they’re still showing up. But if the festival organizers want to keep Hempfest around, and use it to keep pushing for positive change in the world, they need to do some soul searching.
