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The Real Dirt 420 Events Etiquette Guide

The Real Dirt 420 Events Etiquette Guide

With 4/20 happening on a Saturday this year, it’s bound to be a good holiday. But there’s some general rules of etiquette you should follow so you don’t ruin it for others.

4/20 is a great day. It’s one of the only days out of the year where cannabis is not only tolerated by the masses, but celebrated by the cannabis community.

With 420 events happening on a Saturday this year (compared to Friday last year when most people had to work until the evening), theres bound to be more people celebrating than last year. It also means there’s a higher likelihood of something stupid happening that could easily be avoided.

Here’s a few tips for making sure you have a safe and awesome time at your 420 events.

Pick Up After Yourself

When cannabis was first legalized in Colorado, the 420 events that happened that year were massive. However, with the new legalization came a new crowd of cannabis consumers excited to celebrate the plant throughout the city of Denver.

Unfortunately with so many people getting baked across the city, at a wide range of events in both private and public spaces, there was a huge buildup of trash. Not just trash, but also litter.

The event spaces were filled with trash once the festivities were over, with very limited crew to clean it all up. This led a lot of non-celebrators blaming “stoners” for leaving a mess around the city. Suffice to say, it didn’t make the community look good.

With that said, the community has stepped it up, starting 420 events cleanup initiatives to clean up event spaces. But you can still do your part. Don’t leave your roaches all around town, throw them in a trash can.

Recycle that water bottle that you just finished. Yes, it’s annoying getting all the little handouts from businesses at these events, but you can easily so no thanks, or just throw it out instead of onto the ground.

Pace Yourself

You might be thinking that 420 is basically the holiday of smoking as much weed as possible in one day. At least, that’s what I did in college. But as it becomes more accepted in broader society, it isn’t necessary to be so excessive for the sake of celebration at this year’s 420 events.

If you’re in a legal state like Colorado, there’s a ton of events going on across Denver. If you burn through a half ounce at 10 AM, it might make it more difficult to go out later in the day. But if you’re smart and plan it out, you’ll be fine.

Stay away from anything hybrid or indica before lunch. Stick with a straight sativa if you can (even though those labels are really just a myth), until you go out. Once you’re at the Mile High Festival or wherever you decide to go, you can transition to a hybrid. You can relax and enjoy the music without feeling too bogged down at your 420 events.

You should stick with hybrids or sativas as long as you want to be active during the day, and only switch to an indica when you’re winding down for the evening. Most of all, pace yourself.

Don’t pop a bunch of edibles then chase it down with a gram joint. Treat it like alcohol, and just be responsible.

The Smoke Circle

The smoke circle is a delicate ecosystem with unspoken laws especially at 420 events with potential strangers. As long as you know the rules, you have nothing to worry about. Even if you don’t, you don’t really have anything to worry about except for the glares you might get when you put half the joint in your mouth to hit it. Which brings us to the first rule.

Don’t slobber all over whatever you’re smoking, whether it’s a pipe, joint or blunt. A good technique to try with a joint or blunt if you just happen to be a slobbery individual is to hold the joint or blunt between your middle and ring finger and cup both hands to your mouth and pull, and you can hit it without even touching it with your lips.

This can take some practice if your new, but make sure you don’t crush the joint between your fingers when you cup your hands.

Second, and probably the most well-known (and enforced) is the “puff-puff-pass” rule. This rule has been interpreted through the times to mean one of two things. When your passed the joint or blunt, you can either puff-inhale, puff-inhale, or puff-puff-inhale. In close circles, you can get away with two puff-puff-inhales, but in most cases it’s one or the other.

Though to this day, it’s still up for debate among scholars.

The main purpose of the puff-puff-pass rule is to avoid breaking the last rule in the smoke circle, which is commonly referred to as “Bogarting”. Given this unique name from a man named Humphrey Bogart, it refers to holding onto the blunt or joint longer than your turn. Whether you puff-puff-puff-pass on accident or you hold it too long while you tell a rambling story, bogarting has many forms, all of which should be avoided.

Just Have Fun

Let’s get real now. 420 is just a simple holiday to celebrate how far we have come as a cannabis community, how much we have grown. Just look at how the industry is thriving; the boom of legal hemp and CBD, the expanding recreational and medical industries across the US with over half the country now legal in some form.

When I was a freshman in college (6 years ago) I remember saying that cannabis would be federally legal in 5 years. I’ve learned that progress is slow, and the only way to keep this industry thriving and growing is to keep the same enthusiasm we had when we were pushing for state legalization.

But more importantly, we need to appreciate how far we’ve come.

In that spirit, this weekend’s 420 events are about celebrating cannabis however you want. The connection is different for everybody, that’s what makes cannabis, and 420, so incredible. 

YouTube Goes After Cannabis Accounts

YouTube Goes After Cannabis Accounts

YouTube is cutting cannabis content. But you can still learn how to build bombs, so don’t worry.

 

It doesn’t make any sense, yet it isn’t all that surprising. YouTube has been taking down popular cannabis accounts over the past couple weeks with no explanation whatsoever. Some accounts had millions of subscribers, and were still taken down without any notice.

YouTube’s responsibility

You may not be a big YouTube watcher, but millions of people are. Add to that the billions of views that the platform’s videos get on a daily basis, and you get a massive online community with varying opinions, ideologies and the chaos that comes along with it.

Social platforms haven’t been known to manage their communities in the best way — just look at Twitter or FaceBook — but YouTube has taken it to a new level.

 

Cannabis content creators have faced their share of issues in the past, but mostly with resolve. A video would be taken down, they would appeal, and it would later be put back up. If it made it to the extreme of an entire channel being taken down, even then it could be appealed rather easily.

YouTube supposedly runs on a “strike” system, consisting of three strikes for channels. The first strike bans the channel from live-streaming for 90 days, the second prohibits the channel from posting content, and the third strike is channel removal. Yet, for these accounts that have been removed as of late, there were no strikes.

YouTube’s Failure

The issue with this is two-fold. Many people rely on YouTube cannabis channels for information, news updates, and other cannabis related issues they can’t find elsewhere due to its already negative stigma. With these channels removed, people are losing valuable information which can have dangerous consequences.

We all know how the D.A.R.E. program worked out. It is better to teach about safe and controlled, legal drug use than to hide the facts about them and tell them to “just say no”.

The second problem comes when YouTube has taken these channels down with no strikes, no warnings, and no explanation. This sets a dangerous precedent when a global giant like YouTube can pick and choose what content it allows without explaining its reasoning.

While YouTube has every right to restrict certain content (as they should), it makes no sense that the most popular cannabis content creators on YouTube who have built massive, overwhelmingly positive and vibrant communities would be removed while channels showing how to make pipe bombs stay active.

The Future of YouTube

It would actually almost make sense if YouTube’s reasoning was that of safety concerns. I get it, some of those YouTubers take some huge dabs that would knock out a normal person. So take down all the videos of people chugging bottles of whiskey too, because that’s way more dangerous.

Maybe their explanation will be that it isn’t federally legal, so take down the other accounts that inform people on the safe use of LSD, or DMT or Psilocybin. Oh wait, but they didn’t.

So as we wait to hear which accounts might be un-banned and why they were banned in the first place, we should all be wondering what this means. If YouTube can take down content without any explanation and there is no backlash, it will only continue. The channels that don’t YouTube enough money might be next, then the channels that have an opinion they disagree with.

People need these cannabis YouTube channels. They inform, teach, enlighten, inspire, and connect the cannabis community through an online platform that was built on creativity and innovation. Don’t let YouTube start going backward.