4/20 clears with trash, little trouble
Annual pot celebration leaves ‘organized chaos’; crowd was ‘mellow’
The heap of garbage left behind after Wednesday’s 4/20 pot event at Sunset Beach seemed to be the main concern for authorities, who said there was no major damage done and no arrests.
Vancouver’s director of parks Howard Normann surveyed the beach early Thursday morning, calling it “organized chaos” because while vendors collected most of the rubbish, they left two big piles of garbage bags for the city to remove.
“It was pretty messy. There was also lots of debris. Our main concern this morning was removing the plastic stuck in the rocks before the tide took it back out,” said Normann.
Vancouver Police Sgt. Randy Fincham, who noted that the location was an improvement over last year’s event at the Vancouver Art Gallery, said no arrests were made, although the marine unit rescued one person from the middle of False Creek, and directed an overloaded dinghy back to shore.
“There was a 21-year-old man attempting to swim across the inlet to the other side, but at about twothirds the way across he figured he wasn’t going to make it. There was a police boat nearby with a lifeguard and they were able to pull him out of the water,” Fincham said Thursday at a news conference in Vancouver. “Later on, there was a woman who decided to take her clothes off and swim out into the channel where the boats travel back and forth. Obviously this is a safety concern for us.”
Gang unit members dealt with 28 incidents in the downtown core Wednesday, and a number of weapons were seized, said Fincham, though the incidents cannot be directly linked to 4/20.
He said 31 people required medical assistance, and of those, 16 were taken to hospital. In addition, he said there were several medical emergencies in the West End, where it appeared people had attended 4/20 and needed help as a result of items they had ingested at the beach.
Last year, health officials said more than 60 people were treated in hospital for complaints of symptoms ranging from upset stomachs to acute anxiety and psychosis.
Three-quarters of them had consumed edible marijuana products.
Police estimate that 25,000 pot revellers packed the beach Wednesday for the annual 4/20 pot protest and celebration. Hundreds of vendors stretched down the beach, selling an array of cannabis products and other items like beach blankets, bongs and trinkets.
Fincham said the officers were focused on public safety and did not arrest anyone selling weed to a minor.
“There were some efforts to work with organizers and have them ID people who appear to be under 25 years of age, to try and limit the number of people who consume those products,” he said.
“It’s a safety concern for us to wade into a crowd of 25,000 people to make an arrest ... we weigh out the criminality, the risk involved, and the need to make those arrests and in the case of yesterday it wasn’t feasible for officers to go into that crowd and necessarily focus on that. It is something we were monitoring.”
Meanwhile, the parks board sent nine staff members to clean up the beach Thursday morning, said Normann, who estimated it would take most of the day. He said it would take about three loads in city garbage trucks to remove the debris.
“It was similar to the amount of garbage we see at the fireworks. There were a lot of pizza boxes and doughnut boxes, cigarette butts and roaches ... some broken glass. The recyclers were making a small fortune,” he said.
He said there is some damage to the turf, which needs to be fixed, but none of the park buildings were damaged. He did not have an estimate for how much the event will cost taxpayers.
Normann said it was “a mellow crowd” and there was no major violence. “If they had all been drinking it would have been a very different outcome,” he said.
The city is expected to release costs as soon as they are tallied. Fincham said last year’s policing costs were more than $50,000 and this year they expect costs will be higher because they deployed resources to the beach and to the art gallery, where a few protesters were gathered despite the fact the event had moved.
There were a lot of pizza boxes and doughnut boxes, cigarette butts and roaches ... some broken glass.