Annual Ontario Hempfest festivities will cease this year due to police harassment

Ontario Provincial Police have harshed the Hempfest buzz once too often, say event organizers who plan to make this year’s celebration of medicinal marijuana the region’s last.

In recent years, the four-day event has been the focus of what organizer Rob Waddell contends is unwarranted police presence, with RIDE checks that focus on “interrogation,” and hindering access, rather than weeding out impaired drivers.

“It’s the harassment of people travelling to and from the festival. The constitution and Charter of Rights guarantee us the right to gather peacefully and demonstrate against unjust laws, which we’re doing,” said Waddell.

“The police keep interfering with our people and the right to gather.”

Waddell said the vehicle infractions and questioning of vehicle occupants are “petty things,”meant to interfere with a staunchly pro-marijuana event, and questioned why OPP have been accompanied by law enforcement from the U. S.

This year’s Aug. 27-30 gathering will be called Hempfest: The End of An Era.

via End of an era: annual Hempfest festivities will cease this year – The Sault Star – Ontario, CA .

Here’s something fun you can do next year if nobody else takes over and keeps this hempfest alive: count parked cars in bar parking lots that weekend and note how many people leave in them.  Because all those cars in bar parking lots are the cars of designated drivers, right?  That means you have to have at least two people per car; at least one sober one and the other who may or may not be sober.

Don’t count the employees’ cars.  We don’t expect them to be drunk.  Just the patrons who leave and their cars.  If you divide the people by the cars and come up with less than 2, we can pretty much guarantee somebody’s driving after drinking.  Maybe they were drinking Sprite.  Maybe they stopped drinking beer a couple hours before they left.  Maybe their blood alcohol content is only .04 and they will drive fairly well.  But don’t you think we should have a squad car from the Ontario Provincial Police parked out by that bar just in case?

Now let’s count up how many bars there are in province of Ontario.  I’m not going to bother to look it up, but I’ll hazard a wild-ass guess that it is a number greater than the number of Ontario Provincial Police squad cars.  Suffice to say that even if we parked every squad car near a bar’s parking lot, there would be plenty of bars without one.  Whatever that number is times whatever that car-to-patron ratio tells us suggests to me that there are a whole lot of people driving drunk, we know where they are, and we’re not doing much about it.

Why does the police vigilance against hemp festivals in the name of protecting the public from impaired drivers on one summer weekend not seem to apply every weekend to places where we know drunks park their cars?