About a half-dozen men in their 20s and 30s stood next to the Logan Square monument Thursday passing three blunts between them as they celebrated the unofficial holiday known as National Weed Day. When Sammy, a 35-year-old Logan Square native who declined to provide his last name, looked at his cell phone and realized it was 4:20 PM on April 20, he and a few other people clapped and cheered.
I told her I was a reporter from the Reader and that I liked her and her dog’s outfits (I did), but she declined to be interviewed. She tells me she’s on the hunt for a new job. “I’m avoiding photographs and the press,” she says.
Twenty-five years after then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton said he had once “experimented with marijuana” but “didn’t inhale,” a former FBI agent and candidate for federal office, Benjamin Thomas Wolf, says he hopes that by encouraging people to smoke weed openly at his campaign event, he’ll inspire them to come out and vote for him next year.
While with the exception of Brouwer and Wolf, no one I spoke to at the smoke out agreed to provide his or her full name, the vast majority of attendees seemed fairly at ease openly smoking weed—still a federally scheduled substance—in public and in plain view. The police also appeared disinterested in the event. A couple of Chicago Police Department officers in SUVs drove by, but they didn’t stop.
“We need the money,” says Sammy, who was wearing a couple “Wolf 2018” buttons. “The people from Ohio, Michigan, from Wisconsin, from Kentucky and Missouri, they come here for it anyway. We might as well get the tax. We might as well make that money.”
“You know, I like to think they they will [vote],” he says. “If they know there is a candidate endorsing their lifestyle, they’ll actually show up to vote.”
