More than 100 people smoked marijuana in front of the SAP Center in downtown San Jose Tuesday to raise awareness about the racial injustices of marijuana crimes in the U.S.
April 20 or “4/20” is recognized as a holiday for cannabis culture. It was popularized by members of the band Grateful Dead who picked up the trend from a group of friends who would smoke cannabis everyday at 4:20 p.m. according to an April 19, 2016 Time article.
The “Public Spark Rally” was organized by San Jose Roll Call, a community-based roller skating group, and Bay Area Latino Cannabis Alliance (BALCA), a nonprofit that helps Latinos reclaim herbal medicine from the cannabis industry.
One event organizer, who prefers to use the alias UFO, said the rally was put together in response to racial biases observed through cannabis-related incarceration rates.
UFO is a member of the San Jose Brown Berets, a Chicano organization that focuses on resolving issues including police brutality and immigration. She said law enforcement targets Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities for these crimes, while cannabis companies profit from them.
“We [organizers] got together, we're talking, we're legit having a joint and [decided] we should do it,” UFO said. “We should protest about how there [are] a lot of people of color still in jail, rotting over like five ounces for the rest of their life. You see these big [marijuana] companies are owned by white people just getting rich off what we wanted to do to survive.”
Miguel Kultura, a local bilingual musician, performed at the rally and said the event demonstrated how trivial cannabis-related incarcerations are.
“Cannabis as an industry is being monopolized by rich white people, while there’s mass incarcerations,” Kultura said. “Even some of my homies, locked up over small petty shit because of the government deciding what's right or wrong.”
Justin, a co-organizer for San Jose Roll Call who preferred not to use his last name, said the cannabis industry is problematic.
“Cops, the war on drugs and the American war system in general has put us [society] into a machine where all we do is feed the fucking beast,” Justin said during the rally. “All we do is keep pumping more money in the police, have these laws that use things like cannabis to imprison our people and break up our families.”
The event was calm and harmonic and organizers provided free pizza, agua de jamaica, beef jerky and marijuana for those who wanted to partake in 4/20 celebrations.
Speaker Joey Iyolopixtli Torres, a Muwekma Ohlone Native American tribe member, said Indigenous communities used marijuana as a spiritual practice.
“Understand our people did smoke,” Torres said during the rally. “We smoked, we exhaled spirit. It's a very sacred thing that you all bring it back and now we break that stigma, that colonized way of, it being a ‘poison’ to us.”
An event attendee, who prefers to go by the name Flower, performed free tarot card readings while selling succulent plants. She said smoking marijuana has helped her deal with PTSD, anxiety and chronic health problems.
“The government has to back off and let us take care of ourselves herbally, because marijuana has been around a lot longer than America has,” Flower said. “It's ridiculous that [marijuana] is legal now but there are still people in prison who got arrested a long time ago, whose lives have been destroyed by our government telling us what we can and can't put in our bodies.”
The event included an array of vendors selling food, handcrafted items and other goods. Torres recommended everyone support local businesses, including flea markets.
“Support their businesses, buy from our people,” Torres said. “They sell nothing but handcrafts, they pray over it, they struggle over it, they put their last dollar into it. You need to actually take into consideration what you're buying, instead of getting the big jumbo pack at Costco.”
