ANN ARBOR HASH BASH COULD HAVE RECORD CROWD

Saturday's 39th annual Hash Bash, the yearly gathering where people
openly smoke marijuana on the University of Michigan's Diag plaza,
could draw the event's biggest turnout ever, organizer Adam Brook said.

The record was about 10,000 pot smokers, who jammed "almost shoulder
to shoulder" on a fine spring day a decade or so ago, but perhaps
12,000 or more will squeeze in on Saturday, from noon to1 p.m., thanks
to the good weather that's expected combined with widespread
enthusiasm for Michigan's 15-month-old medical-marijuana law, Brook,
42, of Royal Oak said today.

Public smoking or other use of marijuana remains illegal, even for
state-approved medical patients, according to the Michigan Department
of Community Health. Still, enforcement has been minimal, if not
non-existent, at previous Hash Bashes, Brook said.

"The next step is clarification of the state law," said Anthony Freed,
32, of Clark Lake (near Jackson), who is scheduled to speak at the
Hash Bash. Freed, who heads a group seeking to ensure the civil rights
of medical users of marijuana, said today that "we're experiencing
freedoms now that we never expected to get back," but that "we have a
lot of municipalities stepping in with a lot of moratoriums" on the
commercial growing of medical marijuana for others.

The moratoriums and other local ordinances restricting medical
marijuana production "basically create panic. All of a sudden, the
closet that has your medicine is now illegal," Freed said.