EASTER HOLIDAY DOES NOT STIFLE '4/20' EVENT

About 800 Gather During Marijuana Celebration At Farrand Field

Easter dinners didn't keep hundreds from gathering at an annual
word-of-mouth celebration of marijuana at the University of Colorado.

Not just a Christian holiday, Sunday was April 20 -- or 4/20 -- a day that
has spawned loosely organized acts of civil disobedience around the country
in support of legalizing marijuana.

Five police officers were outnumbered for about two hours Sunday afternoon
by about 800 people at Farrand Field, some smoking marijuana, some playing
music and others simply people-watching, said Cpl. Jim Manzanares of the CU
Police Department.

The officers made no arrests, although they did confiscate some drug
paraphernalia.

"Because there were so many people, we decided to keep a low profile,"
Manzanares said. "It was mostly a pretty peaceful group. When you're in
that kind of situation, you try to enforce the laws but make sure you don't
make it into a worse problem than it started out to be."

Ralph Shnelvar, former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, was at the
event that he called a "spontaneous" gathering and estimated that the peak
crowd at 4:20 p.m. was in the thousands.

"There was an enormous amount of pot being smoked," said Shnelvar, 53,
adding that he has never smoked marijuana but is in support of legalizing
it. "If there are five cops and 3,000 people, would you be insane enough to
arrest somebody? In a lot of ways this is the essence of democracy in
action. You have this overwhelming outpouring of people who want the law
changed, and the cops would have been insane to arrest anybody."

Rumored to be a police code for drug busts, 420 simply took on its meaning
because it was the time of day a group of San Rafael High School students
in California known as "The Waldos" had an after-school marijuana meeting
30 years ago, according to the online magazine 420Times.com.

Adam Scavone, a 23-year-old CU continuing education student, took part in
the pot-smoking event Sunday and collected signatures to try to remove a
question that asks students applying for financial aid whether they have
been convicted of drug possession.

"This is the one time everybody comes out in public and very blatantly
breaks the law," Scavone said. "If that's what people can do for the
marijuana reform movement once a year, that's great."