April 20 has become its own kind of holiday, celebrated by devotees to cannabis and the culture it has created.
But this year’s 4/20 looked a little different, thanks to the coronavirus. In some states, marijuana dispensaries were shut down along with schools, churches, and most businesses as part of efforts to contain the spread of the virus. But in many states, the legal marijuana dealers were deemed essential enough to stay open.
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Nevertheless, the holiday was dampened by bans on large communal gatherings.
In Michigan, where marijuana was recently legalized, the dispensaries decided to take their celebrations online. Utopia Gardens, a dispensary in Detroit, livestreamed via Facebook and YouTube its planned festival, which featured DJs and giveaways via online chatrooms. Plenty of smokers celebrated the holiday with their own online parties via Zoom. And across Michigan, dispensaries offered curbside pickup.
So, while Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was making sure nobody picked up a can of paint at Home Depot, since the government has decided that it’s not essential, dispensaries were free to dispense their stuff. Hundreds of customers were picking up marijuana from Steven Dally’s dispensary in River Rouge. Business on 4/20 was 5 times normal, Dally said.
“It’s kind of like our Black Friday,” he told the Detroit News.
Why April 20? Legend has it that 420 was a secret code among a group of California high schoolers who called themselves “the Waldos” in the early 1970s. They would often meet to smoke at 4:20 p.m., which back then, was the perfect time: It was right after school had let out, but still too early for their parents to be done with work. Eventually, 420 became a symbol — not just of marijuana, but of unsupervised freedom.
But that’s just legend. The bottom line is that smokers like an excuse to get high. And no virus will get in their way.
