Saturday was April 20th (or 4/20), which is celebrated by those who smoke marijuana as some sort of holiday in case you need another excuse to engage in the practice. (This reportedly originated in 1990 in Oakland, California.) But some people have taken the tradition to new levels, not content with simply staying at home and getting high. In the city of Binghamton, New York, a group of revelers decided to celebrate the state’s move to legalize recreational marijuana use for the fourth year in a row with an event they call “Smoke Weed Outside the Binghamton Police Station.” However, in a shocking turn of events that I’m sure none of them could possibly have seen coming, fourteen of them were promptly arrested. Complaints soon followed.
Fourteen individuals were arrested by the Binghamton Police Department and Broome County Sheriff at the fourth annual “Smoke Weed Outside the Binghamton Police Station” event.
The charges ranged from making graffiti, petit larceny for the theft of a body camera, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest according to the Broome County Sheriff’s Office.
The event, on Saturday, was meant to celebrate New York becoming the 15th state to legalize recreational marijuana use.
Some attendees arrived at 3:30 p.m. and began scrawling graffiti using spray paint and spray chalk on the stone wall at the government plaza parking lot prompting members of the Broome County Sheriff’s Office to stop them.
I won’t pretend to be able to read the minds of these rocket scientists to figure out what they were thinking, but the results only add to suspicions that smoking too much pot doesn’t do much to help your IQ. Having lived in the area, I’m familiar with some officers from both the Binghamton PD and the Sheriff’s Department and most of them are fairly laid-back people. If this crew had shown up and simply sat near the entry to the police station and started smoking, the cops would most likely have sighed and ignored them. After all, provided they didn’t have dealer-level quantities and weren’t observed selling it or using other, harder, drugs, what they were doing would have been legal.
But that’s not what happened at all. The stoners decided to immediately set about painting graffiti and spraying chalk on the walls and the sidewalks. One attempted to steal a body camera from one of the cops and briefly succeeded. Other celebrants began arriving and set up a makeshift roadblock in the road. The police decided to put an end to it and began arresting some of the perpetrators, but some of them fought back. (You should be aware that this is never a good idea.)
Fourteen of them were eventually handcuffed and hauled off to be arraigned, which turned out to be quite convenient since they were immediately in front of the place they needed to be taken anyway. Six other arrests were made in the immediate vicinity. All received appearance tickets to the City of Binghamton Court. While smoking recreational marijuana may no long longer land you in jail, vandalism, assaulting police officers, and stealing public property will do the trick.
Was any of this worth it? I’m struggling to understand the thinking behind organizing an event like this to begin with. If you enjoy smoking marijuana and want to see it be decriminalized, I suppose it’s understandable that you might want to celebrate the day. Flaunting it right in the face of the cops seems rather rude, not to mention risky, but as long as you’re not harming anyone else your behavior will likely be tolerated. But why launch into what was effectively a crime spree right in front of a police station and across the street from a courthouse? Sadly, we are still unable to criminalize stupidity in the country, but if we could, this crowd could have faced a longer list of charges.