from the Detroit Free Press:
Posted: 6:11 p.m. April 2, 2010
Ann Arbor Hash Bash could have record crowdBY BILL LAITNER
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Saturday’s 39th annual Hash Bash, the yearly gathering where people openly smoke marijuana on the University of Michigan’s Diag plaza, could draw the event’s biggest turnout ever, organizer Adam Brook said.
The record was about 10,000 pot smokers, who jammed “almost shoulder to shoulder” on a fine spring day a decade or so ago, but perhaps 12,000 or more will squeeze in on Saturday, from noon to1 p.m., thanks to the good weather that’s expected combined with widespread enthusiasm for Michigan’s 15-month-old medical-marijuana law, Brook, 42, of Royal Oak said today.
Public smoking or other use of marijuana remains illegal, even for state-approved medical patients, according to the Michigan Department of Community Health. Still, enforcement has been minimal, if not non-existent, at previous Hash Bashes, Brook said.
“The next step is clarification of the state law,” said Anthony Freed, 32, of Clark Lake (near Jackson), who is scheduled to speak at the Hash Bash. Freed, who heads a group seeking to ensure the civil rights of medical users of marijuana, said today that “we’re experiencing freedoms now that we never expected to get back,” but that “we have a lot of municipalities stepping in with a lot of moratoriums” on the commercial growing of medical marijuana for others.
The moratoriums and other local ordinances restricting medical marijuana production “basically create panic. All of a sudden, the closet that has your medicine is now illegal,” Freed said.
http://www.freep.com/article/20100402/NEWS05/100402067/1320/Hash-Bash-could-have-record-crowd