Four people, including the driver of a car, were injured Monday afternoon when a Muni bus collided with a car in the Mission District.

The crash happened around 4:20 pm on Monday (4/20), in the area of 17th and Mission streets. The SFMTA posted an alert on X about the Muni-involved collision and consequent bus delays at 4:26 pm, noting that the inbound and outbound 14, 14R, and 49 buses were all impacted by the crash scene.

The scene was cleared as of 5:22 pm the agency said and the buses resumed regular service.

As the Chronicle reports, three bus passengers were injured and went to the hospital, along with the driver of the car, who was alone in the vehicle — and no cause for the crash has been publicized. None of the injuries were considered to be life-threatening.

The SFMTA has not commented on the incident.

This crash occurred just four days after another crash involving a vehicle and a Muni bus. In that Thursday incident, the driver of the car was allegedly fleeing from police in a stolen vehicle, and crashed head-on into the bus near Lake Merced.

Anyone with information about Monday's incident is asked to contact the SFPD tip line at 415-575-4444, or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with “SFPD.” Tipsters can remain anonymous.

While 4/20 at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park has been canceled for the past three years due to budget cuts and low sponsorship, a few thousand diehards still show up annually to mark the occasion.

San Francisco’s official 4/20 celebration at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park remains not an official thing, amid funding shortfalls and stalled sponsorships, but organizers hope to be able to bring it back one day. The event, which for many years was an unsanctioned gathering, once drew roughly 20,000 people at its peak after the city took it over in 2017, but the sanctioned version has been on pause since 2023.

In its place, the area surrounding Hippie Hill has been "reserved" for the past three years for a permitted “Peace, Love, and Volo” field day with organized sports tournaments, as KQED reports.

SFist reported that in 2024 — the first year the city officially canceled the event — between 3,000 and 5,000 joint-sparking revelers still turned up to Hippie Hill, with the 4/20 crowd drastically outnumbering the tournament participants and spectators sprinkled along Robin Williams Meadow. The smaller crowd reportedly made for a much more peaceful afternoon compared to the previously chaotic city-sanctioned events.

Last year, according to KPIX, the crowd on Hippie Hill was even bigger, as 4/20 fell on Easter Sunday.

For those who intend to venture there Monday, FunCheapSF is urging basic etiquette: pack out trash, skip prohibited items like glass and generators, don’t sell anything without a permit, and respect the park's neighbors.

Per KQED, public cannabis use is illegal under California law, which applies to the park without a permitted event, and violations carry a fine of up to $100. However, cannabis enforcement is typically a low priority in SF, and there were only about a dozen law enforcement officers present at the event in 2024, as the crowd was calm, per SFist.

KQED mentions that revelers have also been known to congregate at Dolores Park and UC Berkeley’s Memorial Glade on 4/20.

Per the Chronicle, some other 4/20 highlights include the 21+ “Smokers Dream” festival at the Midway in SF’s Dogpatch, with performances from Berner, B-Legit, The Luniz, and Ted Budz, alongside vendors, food, and indoor-outdoor programming.

SF Space Walk, launched in 2024, expands 4/20 into a week of events across licensed cannabis lounges, dispensaries, and galleries.

Over the weekend, the three-day Psychedelic Culture 2026: A Chacruna Conference at Brava Theater features panels, workshops, and performances focused on plant medicine and psychedelic research.

Rain is also likely in the forecast for Monday, so plan accordingly!

Image: Joe Kukura/SFist

This week, 4/14-20, we present a few stand-out events among a huge roster of Earth Day, Easter, and 420 festivities, including Nerd Nite, a Tenderloin walking tour, a comedy-dating show, and a spirituality and psychedelics conference.

Thursday

• Nerd Nite SF celebrates its 150th show at the Rickshaw Stop this month. Explore the universe, unravel modern evil, and debunk pelvic health myths in one unforgettable evening. Talks include cosmic origins with physicist John Groh, a sharp look at societal darkness from teacher Parsa Moein, and a myth-busting pelvic health session with Dr. Karah Charette. Plus: tunes by DJ&Jelly and a pop-up from SF Public Library.

Friday

• At the Love Isn’t Blind comedy-dating show at the Foundry, silent bachelors compete for one lucky bachelorette through games like unlocking their phones and calling their moms. Audience members join the fun with relationship-status wristbands and help from a roaming wingcouple. “Let's judge a book by its cover,” proclaims the event’s tagline.

Saturday

• Historian Linda Day’s Hot Pads, Cool Town: Living in the 1920s walking tour delves into the Tenderoin’s post-1906 rebirth through its architecture and vibrant nightlife. Learn how residents “lived large” in small spaces, creating a rich cultural scene in early 20th-century San Francisco. (You’re sure to see many Rousseau buildings along the route.) Tour tickets also include admission to the Tenderloin Museum.
• Celebrate Earth Day at Yerba Buena Gardens on April 19 with live music, hands-on eco-activities, and a Green Business Expo featuring local sustainable vendors. Enjoy family-friendly fun like tree planting, nature tours, and giveaways. Free and open to all—RSVP encouraged!
• Sea-loving youngsters should head to the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park for Junior Park Ranger Day, a free day of hands-on fun exploring maritime history and culture. Try activities like boatbuilding, ropemaking, scrimshaw, and catch the returning Mermaid puppet show. All ages welcome.

Sunday

Sunday is jam-packed with a slew of the usual spring festivals and Easter events, including the Cherry Blossom Parade and Festival, Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race, and the beloved Hunky Jesus Contest.

• While 420 was canceled at Hippie Hill, there’s an adults-only 420 Easter egg hunt over in Oakland on Sunday as part of the Spirituality & Beyond 5 + Oakland Psychedelic Conference. This two-day gathering at the Kaiser Center features psychedelic pioneers, spiritual leaders, and community voices exploring the intersection of consciousness, culture, and plant medicine. Expect keynotes, cannabis-friendly zones, and a free outdoor fair with vendors and live programming.

The official 4/20 party on Hippie Hill is up in smoke for a second year in a row, though nearly 5,000 stoners still attended last year’s supposedly “canceled” party, and also this year’s 4/20 coincides with the Hunky Jesus Contest in Dolores Park.

We did not have high hopes that there would be another Hippie Hill 4/20 celebration that drew 20,000 attendees this year for the annual “marijuana day” festivities, after the official, sanctioned 4/20 was canceled last year. Yet despite last year's supposed cancellation, somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 people still showed up to smoke weed on Hippie Hill, despite SF Rec and Park's effort to replace the event with some curious volleyball-and-kickball tournament. That made for the very amusing split-screen situation seen below, where Hippie Hill was absolutely packed with stoners, while the flatter Robin Williams Meadow area had barely anyone on it.

And it may well be the exact same this year. SF Rec and Parks put out a Thursday press release saying the volleyball-and-kickball tournament is back on for 2025, while KQED reports that the official 2025 Hippie Hill 4/20 celebration is once again canceled.  

This cancellation is not acknowledged on the 4/20 Hippie Hill website, nor on their Instagram account. KQED says the event’s organizer Sounds Bazaar “did not respond to multiple requests for comment.” SFist reached out to them too, and we have not heard anything back either.

But SF Rec and Parks sure made it sound as if the sanctioned 4/20 is currently on life support, at best.  

“ There were conversations with organizers early on to see the feasibility of having the 420 festival, but because of economic challenges within the cannabis industry, organizers couldn’t secure sponsorships,” the department’s communications manager Daniel Montes told KQED. “City budget cuts have also affected Recreation and Park’s ability to cover staffing for the event.”

Still there is no shortage of cannabis-related activities on Sunday, April 20, 2025.

That day is also Easter Sunday this year, which means the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s annual Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary Contest in Dolores Park is on 4/20. Dolores Park has also had a traditional (though smaller) 4:20 smoke-out on April 20, so it dovetails pretty well as a 4/20 destination. We imagine there will be some 4/20 pot jokes cracked onstage, maybe a weed-themed Jesus or two, and a discernible cloud of smoke at the magic 4:20 moment.

Meanwhile also in Golden Gate Park, the obviously cannabis-friendly Crucial Reggae Sunday weekly live show will be going down at the Golden Gate Park Bandshell. (It conveniently starts right at 4:20.) The Sunday, April 20 iteration will feature DJ Guid8nce, DJ Sep, Irie Dole, and Prezident Brown.

There’s also some week-long cannabis celebration calling itself SF Space Walk (April 13-20), which last year called itself SF Weed Week. It’s mostly just a week’s worth of “product drops,” that is, promotional events for new retail items, not really community celebrations. Though it does culminate in a 4/20 Gathering at the Mirus Gallery, which by the looks of last year's promotional photos, did draw a couple hundred people.

And as seen above, last year’s “canceled” 4/20 was still pretty lit! It actually worked quite well, sequestering all of the pot smokers up onto the hill, while the volleyball/kickball party also provided some infrastructure of porta-potties and food trucks.

So you will probably not be disappointed if you still go to Hippie Hill on the high holiday of April 20. And you’ll probably still run into people like this fellow.

Related: Video: SF Hippie Hill 4/20 Draws Thousands of Pot Smokers, Despite Being Officially ‘Canceled’ [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

Several thousand marijuana enthusiasts still showed up for a supposedly “canceled” 4/20 at Hippie Hill, and we’ve got pictures and video of Saturday’s weed-smoking shenanigans at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

San Francisco's long-running 4/20 weed-smoking party at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park was officially canceled this year, with organizers citing city budget cuts and sponsorship woes.  But you try telling these thousands of cannabis lovers that 4/20 was canceled, as somewhere between 3,000-5,000 peaceful revelers just showed up anyway, as seen in the video below, taken right at the magic moment of 4:20 pm on 4/20/2024.

There was no proper countdown to 4:20, which there traditionally was when the event had a large permitted stage. And the crowd was nowhere near the size of the usual 20,000-some people who typically show up for this event.

But with the entire 4/20 crowd concentrated just on Hippie Hill, a few DJs still provided smaller-scale entertainment.

And while it was technically an unpermitted, rogue event like it used to be back before 2017, it was very calm and peaceful, without the illegal alcohol vending, fights, and littering that marred this event in those earlier years.

SF Rec and Parks tried to discourage/replace the 4/20 celebration with a kickball, volleyball, and cornhole event called Peace, Love & Volo Field Day Festival, which closed off the flat areas of Robin Williams Meadow to people who’d registered to play. But there was a pretty noticeable crowd size difference between the two events.

This often made for a striking split screen between the concentration of people in the kickball area, and those celebrating 4/20 on the hill.

This was presented via signage that Hippie Hill was a “Spectator’s Area” for supposedly watching kickball and volleyball. But in reality, that’s just where all of the pot-smokers were sitting and chilling.

We’d heard there was going to be substantial volunteer support provided to this event from a “magic mushrooms” church called Church of Ambrosia. Above we see that church’s founder, Pastor Dave Hodges, who prefers to call it a “non-denominational, interfaith church that focuses on the use of Entheogenic Plants.” And indeed, they came through with water and additional porta-potties.

“We brought 10,000 bottles of water,” Hodges told SFist. “We were already planning on bringing a bunch of water. And then when the event got canceled, that’s when we were like, we need to do more than that. We need to at least have some medics out there, and we need to be the ‘Stoner Safety’ crew.”

The number of porta-potties seemed adequate (they were certainly cleaner than the ones at Burning Man!). According to the Chronicle, Rec and Parks provided “about a dozen” portable toilets, while the Church of Ambrosia and the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association funded 22 more.

There was not much law enforcement presence. Over the course of the afternoon, SFist saw maybe a dozen various SFPD, sheriff’s deputies, and park rangers. But the crowd was mellow and just getting high, and there were no troublesome incidents requiring police.

That’s probably because of the lack of alcohol or illegal alcohol vendors, as that’s just not what this crowd was interested in.

And some of the revelers got quite creative. “My girlfriend and I are both involved with Slow Page Street,” the creator of this ‘blazing joint’ bike Anthony Ryan told us. “In the past we’ve had an issue when 4/20 here was more crowded. Our idea, just to slow people down and amuse them, we would put a huge smoking joint on the backs of our bikes. And they couldn’t get mad at us because we looked awesome.”

“But today was not like that at all,” Ryan added. “All day long it’s been super mellow.”

And some seemed to prefer this iteration that was more like the old unstructured, unpermitted, and less commercial 4/20. “I’ve been coming here for years now,” said Amanda Coffelt, who drove all the way from Merced. “Back in 2008, 2007, it was a lot different without all the vendors. And it’s like that vibe once again, and that’s what I love. It’s just natural, us getting together.”

The kickball and volleyball organizers provided three food trucks, which did brisk business all afternoon as people got the munchies. And it should be noted that the Volo Field Day Festival folks contributed many logistics that helped this 4/20 on a Saturday go smoothly.

Naturally, the drum circle crowd was out in full force, though somehow this very good dog managed to sleep through the racket.

Haight Street was also quite lively and celebrating 4/20, though we did not see anything resembling the horrible traffic nightmares that this event has wrought in previous years.

There were even some porta-potties set up on the streets of the Upper Haight, something that maybe ought to be considered on sunny Saturday and Sunday afternoons throughout the summer.  

And Rec and Parks  did an excellent job of getting the hill cleaned up after the party, with workers out picking up trash as soon as the smoke cleared from the 4:20 smoke-out.

So City Hall should be acknowledged for very effective handling of this unpredictable, unpermitted renegade 4/20 on Saturday. Corralling the revelers up onto Hippie Hill proved to be an effective move, and the light footprint of law enforcement also appeared to be the right call. The extra portable toilets and the free water from Church of Ambrosia and the Haight Ashbury Merchants Association went to good use. A lot could have gone wrong Saturday, but the event was mellow and smooth.

The official 4/20 organizers say they hope to bring the permitted event back next year. Though we’re warning you now that next year’s 4/20 falls on Easter Sunday, so any event would be up against the Hunky Jesus Contest in Dolores Park.

Related: Watch: 4/20 Blankets Hippie Hill With Pot Smoke, Erykah Badu Exhorts Crowd To Smoke Even More [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist

The cancellation of Hippie Hill’s official 4/20 celebration seems unlikely to keep thousands of pot-smoking revelers out of Golden Gate Park, and so a psilocybin-themed church is stepping up to provide porta-potties, a medical tent, and water bottles.

When the news broke last month that the official and sanctioned 4/20 Hippie Hill event was canceled for 2024, and would be replaced with some highly counterintuitive kickball and volleyball tournament, many of us figured that throngs of mairjuana smokers would simply show up and mob Hippie Hill anyway. After all, 4/20 falls on a Saturday this year. And you can’t really play kickball or volleyball on a hill, so won’t the hill still be available anyway?

A follow-up report from SFGate noted that the city would still provide some services despite the event being canceled: an on-site ambulance, some police staffing, 11 porta-potties, and three wash stations. That sounded woefully inadequate to the Haight-Ashbury Merchants Association, whose board member (and Mendel’s owner) Naomi Silverman told SFGate, “As merchants, we are prepared for the neighborhood to be overrun.”

So because of that, the merchants association and a “magic mushrooms” church called Church of Ambrosia have teamed up to massively bolster services at Hippie Hill on Saturday, according to NBC Bay Area. The Church of Ambrosia says they’ll be providing more than 30 porta-potties, a medical tent with four medics, a station providing free water bottles, plus Narcan and free opioid testing strips.

“This is like a pilgrimage to Mecca,” the Church of Ambrosia’s Pastor Dave Hodges said in a press release. “We see this as a religious event. Anybody who is going out to Hippie Hill on 420 to smoke a joint, they’re doing that religiously, whether or not they realize it.”

That release also notes that “Urban Alchemy is staffing the event with 10 people,” but those Urban Alchemy “street ambassadors” are usually contracted by the City of SF. So it’s unclear if the Church of Ambrosia is footing the bill for them. But the church claims they will have other support staff who will be recognizable in their “Stoner Safety” t-shirts.

As for the kickball and volleyball event, known as Volo Field Day Festival, there is no indication if the event’s footprint or size, nor how many attendees are expected.

But notably, the kickball event lists its time range as 10 am to 4 pm. That means it will have finished by the time that the magic minute of 4:20 pm strikes.

So what will happen at Hippie Hill on Saturday? Will the scruffy stoners trample the kickball counterprogramming, or will the games keep the riff-raff out? Will Rec and Parks use fences or water sprinklers to block access to Hippie Hill, as they did during COVID? Will the lack of dedicated services result in 22,000 pounds of trash being left behind, as it did back in 2016 before this event was permitted?

We don’t know now. But SFist will have a report first thing Sunday morning on whatever happens at 4/20 Hippie Hill this Saturday afternoon.

Related: SF Police Vow DUI Patrols Will Be Out in Force for 4/20 [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

The “DUI Saturation Patrols” we normally associate with Saint Patrick’s Day and Super Bowl Sunday will be rolling out for this Saturday’s 4/20 observances, as SFPD hopes to discourage people from driving while stoned.

SFist has many times reminded you the times when the SF Police Department was planning DUI checkpoints. These are usually scheduled for popular drinking holidays, like Saint Patrick’s Day or Super Bowl Sunday. But this year they’re adding another popular intoxication holiday to their mix, and despite the cancellation of the Hippie Hill bacchanalia, the SFPD announced they’ve scheduled DUI Saturation Patrols for 4/20.  

“The San Francisco Police Department’s Traffic Unit will be conducting DUI saturation patrol this Saturday, April 20, 2024, between the hours of 7:00 PM and 3:00 AM,” the department said in a Wednesday announcement. “Research shows that crashes involving an impaired driver can be reduced by up to 20 percent when well-publicized DUI checkpoints and proactive DUI patrols are conducted routinely.”

Though if they’re out with these DUI patrols from 7 pm to 3 am, they’re likely to miss the people that smoked up at the magic hour of 4:20.

Yet SFPD also argues that people driving whilst high on cannabis is an legitimate problem.  

“Recent statistics reveal that 30 percent of drivers in fatal crashes had one or more drugs in their systems,” the SFPD announcement adds. “A study of active drivers showed more tested positive for drugs that may impair driving (14 percent) than did for alcohol (7.3 percent). Of the drugs, marijuana was most prevalent, at 7.4 percent, slightly more than alcohol.”

Those numbers may be influenced by the fact that cannabis stays in your system for days or even weeks after you’ve smoked it. So there may be some false positives in that marijuana statistic. But either way, you’re looking at a world of expensive trouble if you get pulled over for DUI, even if you beat the charges. Probably better to just take Lyft, Uber, or a taxi if you’re planning on traveling about town after blazing up on 4/20.

Related: Stanley Roberts Reports From This Year's 4/20, 'A Street Fair With Weed' [SFist]

Image: Paramount Pictures

Would you rather go to branded promotional industry events for 4/20 instead of whatever party might happen at Hippie Hill? If so, boy does SF Weed Week have a marketing-type lineup for you.

We cannot begrudge industries that try to juice up their slow seasons by creating events that hope to draw paying customers out. Spring SF Restaurant Week, for instance, begins today and runs through April 14. SF Beer Week rolled out the barrel this past February. And now KRON4 reports that something called SF Weed Week is rolling up for its first-ever iteration from April 13-22, and may provide an alternative to the canceled Hippie Hill 4/20 event, at least, for those who don’t just go to Hippie Hill on 4/20 anyway.

“Weed growers are rock stars, and strains are celebrities,” SF Weed Week creator David Downs told KRON4. “I want to give these strain releases the same rock star treatment that album releases get. It’s going to be dope. 4/20 is on in San Francisco.”

But honestly, you everyday pot-smokers out there… Are weed growers rock stars? Are strains celebrities? Or are these merely the words of an industry hype man?

SF Mayor London Breed, who has always hated the 4/20 celebration with a passion, showed up to speak at today's SF Weed Week kick-off. Though back in 2013, her thoughts on the Golden Gate Park 4/20 event were that "I have serious concerns about the appropriateness of the event. I spent the last decade working with children, many of whom come from families scarred by drug abuse. I am not comfortable with an event that encourages such rampant drug use by adults and minors alike."

Update: Following the publication of this post, we heard back from Mayor Breed's former Chief of Staff and co-owner the Blaze on Haight dispensary Conor Johnston. "Your characterization of her 'always hat[ing]' 4/20 is totally untrue and unfounded," Johnston says. "She's always said the event needs resources and support—and that's specifically because she supports it."

Who knows, maybe there is some tourism value to this, if people who come here for 4/20 realize that Hippie Hill’s official event is canceled and decide not to go.

Though above we see one of SF Weed Week’s “events,” which Downs describes as “cannabis producers releasing new flowers in 7 licensed lounges and stores over 7 nights.” This is basically the exact same thing you see at your neighborhood dispensary when you walk in and there’s a promotional booth set up. Except it’s seven nights in a row.

Do branded industry promotions sound like a good time to you? If so, knock yourself out. If not, consider things like the Alamo Drafthouse’s stoner film festival, which actually does try to cater to consumer interests over what the investors want to see.

A tiny number of these events might be fun. There ‘s an art show “Get to the Bag”: Cannabis Mylar Art Exhibition” opening on Friday night, April 5 at Mirus Gallery, a show of branded commercial weed packaging whose official invite describes as representing “billions of dollars in intellectual property” (not how I would have described an art show I wanted people to attend, but hey, what do I know).

There’s a daytime event at Mirus Gallery on 4/20, hosted by Ngaio Bealum, who's sort of the go-to weed stand up comedian. But the other events that actually sound fun are only for industry insiders, like “San Francisco cannabis store owners, grow operators, and other licensed cannabis execs.”

Otherwise, the SF Weed Week events are all for brand representatives to talk about (and I’m using SF Weed Week’s words here), their “brand journey.”

And this may be a big part of why the legal cannabis industry is struggling. All the owners and investors thought they were going to get Google/Facebook rich. They did not! And they blame regulations and the underground market.

But the bigger problem may be that the legal cannabis industry has a huge disconnect between what consumers want, and what the investors want the consumers to want. In this economy, consumers want budget-friendly deals. Investors want hype around premium, pricey products. SF Weed Week seems a celebration of hyping premium, pricey products and their “brand journeys.”

There may be nice events for industry bigwigs. But for normal cannabis consumers, it appears SF Weed Week is mostly just seeds and stems.

Note: This post has been updated with comment from then-Supervisor Breed's former chief of staff.

Related: Debt-Ravaged Dispensary Chain MedMen Closing SF Store, They Claim ‘Temporarily’ [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

The organizers of the official Hippie Hill 4/20 event have canceled this year’s smoke-filled festivities over budget cuts and lack of sponsorship. But considering 4/20 falls on a Saturday this year, mobs of stoners are probably going to show up anyway.

Last year’s 4/20 at Hippie Hill celebration seemed to show the event maturing from its early outlaw days of fistfights and trash, into a legitimate music festival that drew an estimated 20,000 people. And this year, with 4/20 (April 20) again falling on a Saturday, one would expect those attendance numbers to be even higher.

But bummer, duuuude… SFGate was early to report that the official Hippie Hill 4/20 event has been canceled for 2024, according to a Monday announcement on the organizers’ website.

“Unfortunately, the 420 Hippie Hill event in Golden Gate Park will not be happening as planned this year—due to city wide budget cutbacks, the climate of the cannabis industry & economy we have been unable to secure enough financial sponsorship to get everything required for a safe, clean, city & state compliant event,” the announcement says. “We will be back next year! Until then, please join us at Carnaval SF May 25-26,2024.”

Sure, that teases that there may be legal cannabis sales at Carnaval again this year (and that the official 4/20 event may return next year). But it’s a huge disappointment for the local pot-smoking community that the organized 4/20 event in Golden Gate Park has been smoked out for 2024.

Of course, with 4/20 falling on a Saturday, thousands of people are surely going to show up anyway, just as they did in the event’s early years before it became a sanctioned and permitted thing in 2017. And legal on-site cannabis sales were introduced in 2022. This year’s official “cancellation” will probably equate to a financial windfall for the illegal, street-level pot dealers who descend upon the park.

The cancellation of this year’s official 4/20 celebration is surely welcome news to Mayor London Breed, because she absolutely hates 4/20. But the event being unregulated opens up a Pandora’s hot-box of problems this event used to have before it was permitted.

In recent years, the cleanup effort has been remarkable, as opposed to the 20,000 pounds of trash left behind in 2016. A lack of security may also lead to rampant alcohol vending again, which characterized the pre-permitted era, and god knows what else those inevitable vendors will be selling.

So the “official” 4/20 being canceled may simply lead to the same attendance of 20,000 or more; but with a lot more waste, and a lot more wasted people.

Update: SF Rec and Parks just acknowledged that the official 4/20 event is not happening, and instead says that they’ll be holding “volleyball & kickball tournaments” in hopes of keeping the pot-smoking riff-raff out of the park. Yeah, good luck with that!

Related: Watch: 4/20 Blankets Hippie Hill With Pot Smoke, Erykah Badu Exhorts Crowd To Smoke Even More [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

Erykah Badu hit high notes at the most entertaining 4:20 countdown yet at Hippie Hill, as what appeared to be 20,000 happy stoners blazed up a gargantuan cloud of marijuana smoke for a blissed-out 4/20 celebration.

We’re still following reports that shots were fired near Golden Gate Park during Thursday afternoon’ s 4/20 celebrations. That certainly sounds concerning, but as of Friday morning, there are no reported injuries from that suspected gunfire, and there is currently no apparent connection between those alleged shots and the proceedings of the annual 4/20 massive outdoor weed-dispensary-slash-Grateful Dead-parking-lot bacchanalia on Hippie Hill.

In years past, that 4/20 Hippie Hill celebration had a highly problematic reputation for rampant illegal alcohol vending, generating treasuries of YouTube bro-fight videos, and leaving behind more than 20,000 pounds of trash. But this year’s 4/20 was a well-organized and peaceful event, it appeared to draw the expected 20,000 people in full, and the 2023 edition with Erykah Badu as the headline act brought the most deliriously happy 4:20 countdown and unreasonably enormous cloud of marijuana smoke this event has seen since it added a main stage in 2017.

Badu handled the 4:20 countdown with aplomb, and more people smoked more marijuana because she kept instigating them to keep smoking more. This effective stagecraft stands in contrast to last year’s fumbling of the countdown to the magic moment of 4:20 p.m., when rapper Berner seemed to not even realize it was 4:20.

“I’ve been smoking weed since I was three years old,” Badu bellowed to the crowd, one of many extremely off-color jokes in her 40-minute set that started after the 4:20 countdown. She also played her old hit “Back in the Day,” and did her own take on Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday.”

Yes there was legal weed being sold at authorized and permitted dispensary booths. There were also unauthorized dealers along all the pedestrian corridors selling bags of weed in the most popular denominations, plus plenty of vendors hawking high-octane Rice Krispie treats and mushroom gummies.

But the event effectively kept the alcohol out, which is why there was a huge bottleneck to get in. Everyone was scanned with a metal detector, and bags were thoroughly checked for alcohol. That of course resulted in people shotgunning large volumes of booze before they got to security where their alcohol would be otherwise confiscated.

Still, it worked. The lack of access to large volumes of alcohol resulted in people only having their weed to smoke, and helped maintain a mellow vibe despite a very, very large crowd.

As we all know, people behave differently when they’re just smoking pot all day instead of getting drunk as hell all day.

Corporate weed branding was everywhere you looked, but that’s just necessary for this event to remain free while requiring large-scale security and logistics. A few non-cannabis brands were also on hand, and clearly Zippo lighters’ investment in their 4/20 booth was money well spent.

We will critique that this year’s crowd was a little more haphazard in leaving trash on the lawn, though it was nowhere near as bad as this festival’s early years. And Rec and Parks had an army of cleanup personnel dispatched at 5 p.m. to ensure the park was left spotless.

Illegal vending ran completely amok in the eastern end of the park outside the event’s entrance gates; I have never before seen such a high concentration of bacon-wrapped hot dog carts in a one-acre radius. Countless other vendors were shouting the availability of cocktails, cold beer, joints, eighths, and quarter-pounds galore.

The western end of Haight Street was not as clogged with post-event traffic as it was in some of those previous disastrous 4/20 years, but the street vending is getting more brazen and organized. These trucks had highly efficient food and apparel sales operations going on inside, and one beverage stand next to them was selling “Shroom Juice” that promised to “calm/stimulate the mind.”

These are minor problems. Overall, the 4/20 event has successfully pulled off an unlikely transformation from a sketchy free-for-all menace to a well-managed music festival with a smooth and peaceful vibe where people just get too high to cause trouble. That’s largely thanks to the organizing efforts of the event’s manager Sounds Bazaar, who’ve tightened enough screws to keep large-scale volumes of alcohol outside the festival grounds. And that kept California’s biggest free cannabis event primarily just a cannabis event.  

Related: How 4:20 Came to Mean 'Smoke Weed' and Inspire SF's 4/20 Celebration [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura

Photo: Rich Hay

It was never California police code for marijuana, and it had nothing to do with the date of April 20th. But the origins of "420" as the codeword of stoner culture lie here in the Bay Area, with a group of five teenagers — now men in their 60s — living in Marin.

We've told the tale on this site before, but every year it comes up and a new generation may not have heard it all the way through. And, the originators of 420, the codeword, have only started talking to the press and discussing the proof they have of being the originators in the last decade.

Their names are Steve Capper, David Reddix, Larry Schwartz, Jeff Noel, and Mark Gravich. And once upon a time at San Rafael High School, in 1971, they were just some stoner teens who dubbed themselves The Waldos, in part because they hung around next to a wall outside the school, and because — as the Associated Press adds today — the term "Waldo" had been used by comedian Buddy Hackett "to describe odd people."

One day, another friend of theirs gifted them a hand-drawn map, telling them he had a brother-in-law in the Coast Guard, stationed at Point Reyes Station, who had planted a clandestine marijuana patch somewhere in the woods out there. Scared of getting caught, he was renouncing his claim to the patch, and the friend said the Waldos were welcome to have at it, if they could find it.

The five boys made a plan to meet at the school's statue of Louis Pasteur at 4:20 that day, after school and after two of them got out of football practice.

Capper and Reddix told the Criminal podcast a few years back that they then "fired up a doobie, got high, hopped in Steve's '66 Impala with a killer Craig 8-track stereo, and we smoked all the way out there and started our search."  

"It looked like a scene from Cheech & Chong," Reddix said. "We'd get the whole car clouded up with smoke and we'd be listening to the 8-track tapes and talking and grooving and having a great time and we were excited to find this patch."

They never found it, not that day, or on subsequent adventures, which kicked off with them passing each other in the halls of their school and whispering "4:20 Louis," which was their code. Later, they say, they dropped the "Louis" part and stopped looking for the Point Reyes patch, and "4:20" was just code for "let's get high somewhere at 4:20."

The story of how their jokey code made it into popular usage is a funny and pretty plausible one, and it all has to do with Grateful Dead shows. Reddix's brother was friends with Dead guitarist Phil Lesh, and the boys were soon getting backstage passes to shows and hanging with roadies. Their private joke eventually made it onto flyers passed around at Dead shows in the 80s, proclaiming "420" to be the password for marijuana.

"There were myriad reasons for the teens to speak in code about smoking marijuana in 1971," the AP writes. "Marijuana's growing social tolerance was still decades away and people were receiving stiff prison sentences after being caught with even small amounts."

Noel's dad was also a narcotics agent for the California Department of Justice, so they had reason to be a little paranoid.

"He had an inkling we smoked," Noel tells the AP. "But I don't think he ever caught on to 420."

Also, another interesting tidbit that the AP learned this year, one of the Waldos, Mark Gravich, has had two daughters attend San Rafael High School. The youngest, Julia Gravich, is currently a sophomore, and tells the AP of her dad's, and the school's, stoner notoriety, "The kids here think it's pretty cool."

Over the decades, the hour of 4:20 was embraced in stoner culture as the time of day to toke up, but then this morphed into the date 4/20 becoming symbolic as well. The magazine High Times in 1991 declared April 20th the "grandmaster of all holidays." (High Times was also responsible for spreading the misinformation, which had made it onto one of those Dead show flyers, that 420 was California penal code for marijuana possession, which it never was.)

Stoners love to point out that both Quentin Tarantino and his onetime girlfriend and fellow director Sofia Coppola, both included clocks in shots in their films Pulp Fiction (1994) and Lost In Translation (2003) that were set to 4:20.

What we now know as the annual Golden Gate Park 4/20 fest at Hippie Hill seems to have started around the early aughts, though it may have been in the 90s — no one seems to have a definitive date. SFist’s earliest coverage of the event in 2011 called it an “annual ode of marijuana,” and picked up on a local media report that “A 47-year-old woman was bashed over the head with a portable radio" and threatened with death apparently over a picnic spot during the 4/20 fest that year. Our 2012 coverage noted the trend of enormous volumes of trash accumulating in the park, and cleaning after the free event was reportedly costing the city $15,000. Local reporter Stanley Roberts would make it one of his signatures day for catching "people behaving badly" on KRON4, and a then-District 5 supervisor named London Breed declared, “I am not comfortable with an event that encourages such rampant drug use by adults and minors alike.”

And Breed would become even less comfortable with it, as by 2016, the event was drawing around 8,000 people, and creating 17,000 pounds of litter and trash. Our own experience that year was seeing rampant unauthorized alcohol and pot sales, plus someone flashed a gun and created a crowd stampede.

By 2017, the city decided to legalize it with permits, fences, and porta-potties to rein in the chaos. It was still an open-air drug and alcohol sales free-for-all, but at least they kept the minors out. And these efforts finally started paying dividends by 2019, with the park being left in very clean condition, and most significantly, the elimination of alcohol vending. And while last year's back-to-normal-style event was peaceful, they made the unfortunate choice of Mike Tyson as the event host. We have high hopes that Erykah Badu will handle that role more capably this year.

The five Waldos, meanwhile, won't have a booth there and have never profited off their coinage of the term 420, but they may be starting to now — they're officially backing a vape pen being made in Oakland that launches this week. Reddix and the gang "came out," as it were, as the Waldos around 2013, when Reddix — a former CNN camera operator — wrote a Huffington Post article trying to debunk another claim to the origination. That came from a prankster group called the Bebes out of San Jose, who told 420 Magazine an apparently apocryphal story about how they coined "420" two years earlier than the Waldos, however they have no documentation.

The Waldos have their documentation, including postmarked letters from the 70s and a copy of their school newspaper that included a student reference to "420," in a safe deposit box. It's kept at a Wells Fargo bank in San Francisco whose address happens to be 420 Montgomery Street.

Photo: Jeff W/Unsplash

Joe Kukura contributed to this story.

Top image: 4/20 in '22. Photo by Joe Kukura/SFist

The biggest free cannabis event in California gets its biggest star yet, and this year’s 4/20 Hippie Hill celebration will feature four-time Grammy winner Erykah Badu, plus D’wayne Wiggins from Tony! Toni! Toné!, though legal cannabis sales are not yet confirmed.

Last year’s 4/20 at Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park was not only the first 4/20 with legal cannabis sales in the park, but also marked the event’s evolution from an outlaw, unpermitted event to a legitimate and well-organized music festival. The pied piper of stoners, Berner, headlined the event, and the crowd was dazzled with surprise closing sets from Oakland R&B star Goapele and hyphy legend Nump.  

The official 4/20 Hippie Hill website currently just says “Join us at Robin Williams Meadow, Golden Gate Park on Thursday, April 20th, 2023 10am - 5pm PST.” But Alex Aquino, founder and owner of 4/20 Hippie Hill’s official event producer and community partner Sounds Bazaar, confirmed to SFist on Friday afternoon that this year's event is on, with its biggest star yet on stage.

“We will have miss Erykah Badu hosting Hippie Hill and helping us with the countdown,” Aquino tells SFist. And that’s great news, because last year Berner seemed to not realize that the clock had struck 4:20, and needed to be reminded.

But on-site legal cannabis sales for this year have still not been approved by the California Department of Cannabis Control or the SF Office of Cannabis. (These permits weren’t granted until the last minute for Outside Lands 2019 and Carnaval 2022, so the delay is not unusual.)

“A permit hasn't been issued yet,” the SF Office of Cannabis said in an email to SFist. “The prospective event organizer is navigating through the temporary event processes at both the state and local levels. The local permit application is pending."

But while the dope permit is still on hold, the musical lineup definitely sounds dope.

“D’wayne Wiggins from Tony! Toni! Toné! is going to be dropping his new Pillows cannabis line, and he’s going to be doing a couple of songs for us,” Aquino tells us. “And then we have some great DJs; DJ Mind Motion, Shortkut, Jah Yzer, Mike White, and Erykah Badu’s DJ A1. Good music all the way around.”

This year also adds a “health and wellness area” that will get going before the music stage kicks up, and will continue with DJs into the day. “We’re going to be doing ‘morning yoga and a joint’ over at the side of Hippie Hill, and we’re going to have a health and wellness area where you can get a massage, you can do sound bath or meditation, all that stuff before amplified music starts at noon,” he says.

The Erykah Badu announcement may not be a surprise to those who have been following 4/20 Hippie Hill’s Social Club account, as that account announced weeks ago she was playing the afterparty at the Midway.  “We do have DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown a.k.a. Erykah Badu who is going to be DJing our afterparty, with DJ Shortkut from the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, and DJ Talib Kweli, so we’re going to have a cool nice dance party after hours at the Midway,” Aquino explains. “That starts at 8 p.m.”

Last year’s event drew an estimated nearly 20,000 attendees, having Erykah Bado on the bill may draw even more this year. “All the patrons out there, please support our brands at this free community cultural event,” Aquino says. “Please purchase your legal, tested, clean product on-site at Hippie Hill. We encourage people not to intake or digest any non-licensed, non-tested product.” (That is, should they get their sales permit as they did last year.)

Related: Watch: Hippie Hill Blazes Up in Smoke as Nearly 20,000 Stoners Celebrate First 4/20 With Legal Weed Sales in Park [SFist]

Image: DALLAS, TX - FEBRUARY 24: American singer-songwriter Erykah Badu performs on stage during Another Badu Birthday Bash concert at The Factory in Deep Ellum on February 24, 2023 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Omar Vega/Getty Images)

The first-ever 4/20 with dispensaries legally selling pot in Golden Gate Park was the bomb, and Goapele wowed the crowd with a surprise set, though Berner seemingly did not realize it was 4:20 when the clock struck 4:20.  

There had been previously only ever been two events in SF history where cannabis was legally sold outdoors by licensed, permitted dispensaries. Both of them were Outside Lands (2019 and 2021). But the most logical legal cannabis sales event is 4/20 at Hippie Hill, which returned Wednesday after a  two-year COVID hiatus.

And while co-emcee Mike Tyson punching a guy on his flight from SFO Wednesday night will probably be the most enduring pop culture footnote to yesterday’s pot-smoking proceedings, the whole event went shockingly smoothly compared to previous iterations, and this 4/20 Hippie Hill really is coming of age as a respectable music festival.

But did headliner Berner not realize it was 4:20 when it was 4:20? Draw your own conclusions from the video above, taken at 4:20 p.m. He certainly didn’t do the customary 10, 9, 8…. countdown that has been done on that stage every year since they’ve had a proper stage.  As you see in the video, the rapper, Cookies brand CEO, and general pied piper of the contemporary weed scene has to be told “Hey Berner, it’s 4:20,” some 20 seconds after 4:20 striking. Maybe it was scripted, maybe he got lost in performing. But did Berner not realize that the all-important hour had arrived?  

Certainly no one was disappointed, as that was followed by a surprise, unannounced performance by Oakland R&B and trip-hop star Goapele, who did a three-song set with DJ Shortkut, much to the crowd’s unexpected delight.

And local hyphy legend Nump closed out the show with his cult-hit track “I Gott Grapes,” eliciting a delirious call-and-response.

Bay City News described the crowd size by saying “Roughly 20,000 people were expected to attend,” and having walked the place a few hours, that seemed correct. Hippie Hill itself was not as crowded as 2019, when attendance was estimated at 19,000, but this year’s event took up far more official space and had a larger footprint, spreading food trucks and dispensary booths throughout the soccer fields area opposite Robin Williams Meadow.

Yes, dispensary booths, baby! Ring me up! The “dispensary row” was referred to as a “farmers market” (heh), though otherwise, you had no problem finding a street dealer selling weed illegally elsewhere in the park, and bellowing out their discount prices.

Lines and wait times were inconsistent at each dispensary booth (delivery services were represented too), with some booths absolutely mobbed, and others you could just walk right up and buy cannabis with no wait at all.

But logistically, there were no hiccups.

"We made history with the first legal sales at Hippie Hill in Robin Williams Meadow at Golden Gate Park," says David Hua, founder and CEO of Meadow, the point-of-sale system used Wednesday. "It's a huge accomplishment that required a superhero level of ability, planning, and execution from the entire spectrum of stakeholders."

"Overall, we saw an incredible display of how legal sales can - and should - run at events of this scale," Hua tells SFist. "Transactions ran smoothly all day, with steady streams of customers and short wait times in line. No curveballs. No last-minute fire drills. Retailers followed state, local, park, and event regulations to ensure compliance throughout the event, from load-in to load-out. Overall sales were very strong."

And ironically, the cannabis “farmers' market” was the only place you were not allowed to smoke your weed! (Believe me, I tried.) They essentially allowed the whole park to be a legal consumption area, and only prohibited smoking in the gated cannabis sales area.

Yes, former pro boxer, convicted rapist, aspiring comic actor, and guy who allegedly beat the shit out of someone on the flight home Wednesday night Mike Tyson did have a brand booth there. Tyson has lately put his name on a line of buds and edibles — including the ear-shaped Mike Bites gummies, commemorating the time in 1997 when Tyson bit a chunk of Evander Holyfield's ear off during a fight.

Indeed, he was blazing up an enormous fattie to entertain the gathered picture-snapping onlookers. Tyson was listed as a co-emcee, though did very little onstage in that regard. And it is, shall we say, uncertain that he will be asked back next year.

The 4/20 Golden Gate Park festival is now far more branded than even Outside Lands, there were cannabis logos everywhere you looked. That’s out of necessity. This remains a free festival, and they’ve got to pay for all of the security, permitting, fencing and the rest somehow, so they’re doing whatever it takes to make this thing financially feasible.

And yes, this lovely area is a “brand activation” for some fucking weed company, but that’s a sweet little chill area they built, and anyone could sit on the grassy chairs for free.

And some of this schwag was pretty fucking sweet! Those Mac Dre thingies were being handed out for free.

They did check IDs to get into the gated area and allowed only 21 and over, though security did not check proof of vaccination, which Mayor Breed had said earlier this week that they were going to do.

We saw zero SFPD officers inside the gated area, and a few park rangers here and there. The vast majority of security were private, hired security guards. As such, we have not seen any arrest reports yet.

As usual, traffic was supremely snarled on Haight Street and Stanyan Street after the event, though it seemed contained to the areas adjacent to the park. The unpermitted vending was pretty rampant on Haight Street between Shrader and Stanyan, where bongs, booze, and Jell-O shots were being sold in the open. But many real Haight Street businesses were doing gangbusters business with the crowds in the neighborhood, and you better believe the pizza slice shops had lines around the block.

Still, this was a superbly managed event. There was very little alcohol to be seen, and they nailed the happy, peaceful stoner vibe. This thing is now run by an event company called Sounds Bazaar, who do a million thankless tasks behind the scenes so the event runs smoothly. And it did.

Sure, people will be talking about Mike Tyson punching a guy. They may be talking about whether Berner didn’t realize it was 4:20, they may be talking about Goapele’s dazzling surprise set. But people are not talking about chronic bad behavior by 4/20 attendees, they’re talking about what the famous people and the talent did. So in that sense, 4/20 at Hippie Hill is truly budding into something like a mature music festival. An extra-stoned, extra-dank music festival.

This post has been updated with comment from point-of-sales platform Meadow.

Related: World Turned Upside-Down: SF Chamber of Commerce to Ring In 4/20 With a Week-Long Weed Festival [SFist]

Images: Joe Kukura, SFist