4/20 crowd fills Norlin – again

By Sam Dieter in News on Apr 21, 2009 15:48 / comments

A light, gray haze filled the air above Norlin quad once again.

“It was the highlight of my day,” freshman environmental major Alex Malkin said jokingly of Monday’s events.

The annual marijuana-related gathering kicked off Monday, for the third year in a row, right on time at 4:20 p.m. People had gathered on the quad hours earlier, and the crowd appeared to number in the thousands, although CUPD has not yet provided estimates on attendance.

Several police officers stood around the sides of the quad in pairs but did not appear to intervene, aside from getting one woman out of a tree. Another man needed medical assistance for an unknown reason, but was able to walk out of the gathering on his own.

“It’s kind of funny watching the cops,” said a man identifying himself as Zach Smith, 31, a doctoral candidate. “Today you’re allowed to break one law but not all the others.”

Smith stated that he saw a policeman tell a group of youths with, “joints in hand,” to put their puppy on a leash. Smith also called the situation “absurd.”

Not everyone was so enthusiastic about the gathering, however. Sophomore business major Garrett Graff, 19, walked through the crowd with junior political science major Troy Johnson, 21, and another unidentified male friend, carrying a sigh which read “marijuana is an illegal drug every other day, why not today?”

“I think it’s a bad representation of CU and we’re here to voice our opinion,” Graff said, adding that he wanted to “let them know that not every student at CU wants 40,000 people to descend on the campus.”

Johnson said that he thought it was ironic that 4/20 events are said to be peaceful since he said he had a sign ripped from his hands. All three men said that they had bottles thrown at them.

“We hear ‘boo’s’ louder than at Folsom (during) a CU football game,” Graff said.

Many in the gathering had significantly less to complain about.

“It was just really cool,” Malkin said. “It was like our generation’s love fest.”

Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Sam Dieter at samuel.dieter@colorado.edu