University of Colorado Spent $100K to Prevent Weed-Smoking on 4/20

The University of Colorado at Boulder spent over a hundred grand this year to prevent a massive annual group pot party on their grounds for the second year in a row. School officials closed campus to anyone who wasn’t a student, saying they wanted to preserve “the academic mission of the institution.” This is almost as bad as the fact that those who go to the Boulder Reservoir this Fourth of July will have to limit their drinking to a specific beer garden. What is HAPPENING to our good nation?!

CU’s 4/20 smoke-out is a time-honored tradition for the college, which is typically ranked as one of the top party schools in the country. You might be thinking, hey, isn’t that stuff legal in Colorado now? Yes. Yes it is. But it’s not legal to smoke in public and it’s only legal for small amounts. A large-scale “smoke-out” featuring 10,000 people on a college campus was apparently too much for the state to handle.

Prevention costs went primarily to pay for police officers, a change from 2012, when fish fertilizer was applied to Norlin Quad to deter people who might want to enter.

If you’d like to learn more about the day that wasn’t, Boulder’s school paper, the CU Independent, has thrilling coverage of the event, or lack thereof. Literally, an entire section of their website is devoted to the topic: “4/20. News. Entertainment. Sports.” The non-event even prompted an opinion piece in the Independent entitled “Spring snow poses bigger disturbance than 4/20.”

You can also relive the glory days that once were with this song/video from 2011 by a musical artist Small Hands named “This is Our Colorado.” It’s a chill jam. And if this one isn’t your thing, there’s hundreds more.