BY: TREVOR HEWITT
A Colorado marijuana club is offering anyone who comes out to pick up trash on 4/20 a free joint.
The Pothole, a weed club in Colorado Springs, Colo., already hosted its first clean-up event on March 20. They offered a free joint to anyone 21 or older who participated. For every additional bag the volunteers filled with trash, the club would give them another joint. Their next event is on April 20.
The club’s owner Steve Pacheco says that enough is enough, and that it’s time his city cleans up its act. “I was born and raised in Colorado Springs,” he says. “We shouldn’t have our parks filled with liquor bottles.”
In addition to helping clean up the community, Pacheco says that events like this establish marijuana clubs as members of the community, especially after city council voted 6-3 in favor of banning private cannabis clubs on March 22, despite hours of protest from him and others. The vote requires existing clubs to shut down within eight years. Pacheco says it’s particularly frustrating because the owners of the clubs, which are largely unregulated by the city, had almost unanimously supported a tax by the city, adding, “We sat there at city hall, begging them.” Colorado Springs, Colo., already passed a previous ban on recreational marijuana shops in 2013.
In response to the ban, Pacheco says he’d like the city to realize that marijuana clubs are not a bad thing, and that, for the most part, the people who use them cause much less trouble than those at bars. “[We want] to show that we are a positive impact, you know, there’s nothing wrong with weed and there’s nothing wrong with our kind of people,” Pacheco told KRDO. Pacheco also points to the fact that busy bar-filled strips in the city often require extra policing on weekends, due to increased bar activity (ironically, he says, the cleanup group on March 20 found lots of alcohol bottles). The Pothole has previously run other events to help give back to the public, such as a holiday toy drive in past years.
Public support after the event has been overwhelming, with many people, including lots of non-smokers, showing up to The Pothole to say thanks to Pacheco and the rest of his team. With the first event ending up as such a success, Pacheco says he plans to continue the effort as long as there are places that need to be cleaned.
“We’re doing this one park at a time.”
Image sourcing: Istock.com
