Like the similar event held in the same place on May 1st last year, and the big Weed March around Easter in 1998, this was a great day out attended by many thousands of people, most of them stoned.
Brockwell park was heaving with tokers - sitting down, standing around, running stalls, smoking bongs, skinning up and generally wandering around in an amiable fashion, all in support of an official end to the prohibition which for so long has been so spectacularly failing to stop people from getting stoned.
With 60,000 people in jail worldwide; with scientific research progressing at a snail's pace thanks to hostile government funding policies and the scientific difficulties automatically engendered by prohibition; with hemp grossly under-utilised as a crop, the traditional pest-resistant but psychoactive varieties banned; with medical cannabis still criminalised for fear of 'sending out the wrong message'; and with a government who flat-out refuse to discuss the issues in an adult fashion; it is really about time something was done about this.
The cannabis prohibition will be looked on in history as a bizarre aberration; a hysterically-inspired human rights disaster which was allowed to carry on for most of a century even though at no point was anyone able to produce an argument for its prohibition which actually made sense in light of the evidence available.
