[420 Girl]

Denver: Marijuana smokers across America lit up in public parks, outside statehouses and pot gardening superstores to observe the 4/20 movement’s annual event on Tuesday, reports Daily Mail.

Tuesday was ‘4/20’, the celebration-cum-mass civil disobedience derived from ‘420’ — insider shorthand for cannabis consumption.

Advocates from New Hampshire to California trumpeted marijuana’s rising commercial and political acceptance while producing collective clouds of pungent smoke — often under the watchful eyes of law enforcement officers who, for the most part, let the parties proceed.

A day-long rally in Denver’s Civil Centre Park drew thousands of people, as did the public smoking event that persisted at the University of Colorado in Boulder despite discouragement from college administrators.

Colorado politicians coincidentally marked the day by backing new regulations for dispensaries selling medical marijuana. In New Hampshire, about 100 people rallied in the state capital of Concord on the eve of a Senate vote to decriminalise small amounts of pot.

Governor John Lynch said he will veto the bill if it reaches him. In California, where voters in November will consider whether to tax the sale of marijuana for recreational use, a three-month-old cultivation equipment emporium in Oakland got a 24-hour jump start, sponsoring a ‘420 Eve’ festival on Monday.

Most Americans still oppose legalising marijuana, but larger majorities believe pot has medical benefits and the government should allow its use for that purpose, according to an Associated Press-CNBC poll released on Tuesday.

Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said the drug’s steady movement from counterculture indulgence to mainstream acceptance was evident on Tuesday, when four cable television channels dedicated ‘a good chunk of programming to 420’.

There are a variety of stories about the origin of 420, but pot advocates generally attribute the term to the time when a group of San Francisco Bay area high schoolers would gather to smoke marijuana during the early 1970s.


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