In the early 90s, Caren Thomas started volunteering at the free festivals held every summer on Cricket Hill in Lincoln Park. “It was kind of my return to politics,” says Thomas, who’d been active in protests against the Vietnam war. The Glencoe resident joined the Illinois Marijuana Initiative, a nonprofit set up in the early 80s by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “I think the drug war is very unjust, especially the laws against marijuana, which hurt so many people,” she says. “We’ve lost a lot of our civil rights to this so-called war on drugs.”
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Now Thomas and Patton are the organizers of May’s Hemp Fest (which replaced the Windy City Weed Festival), and after a six-year hiatus Peace Fest was resurrected by Patton last summer. This weekend the pair will stage the Lost Harvest Festival, named for the hemp Americans could be growing but aren’t. They lose money on all three events, they say, because times have changed dramatically since 1995, when each festival drew crowds in the tens of thousands. “After that, the Park District started telling us with a straight face that they needed Cricket Hill to play soccer on and we could have a field behind the hill,” says Thomas. “I think it’s because we were too visible from Lake Shore Drive. We had 50,000 people at Weed Fest and a huge leaf on top of the hill. It was pretty hard to miss.”
In 1996, the Park District claimed the crowds had grown too large, and the Illinois Marijuana Initiative moved Weed Fest to the Soldier Field parking lot. At the higher-profile location the group was able to charge $5 admission, which was earmarked to publicize its cause and lobby legislators in Springfield. The IMI reportedly raised about $50,000, the first time it had ever made money on an event. “It was quite a commercial venture, and the city sold beer at it,” Thomas says. “Even Mancow advertised it.”
MacDonald subsequently had a hard time getting permits. When the WCHDB decided to stage another festival in the summer of ’97, he went straight to a federal judge. U.S. District Court magistrate Arlander Keys granted him an injunction, calling the Park District’s policy “riddled with opportunities for subjectivity and abuse…. Such subjective stifling of any person’s speech cannot be permitted under the First Amendment, for any reason, least of all because the permit seeker has in the past caused minor civil unrest. In fact, that is exactly what the First Amendment seeks to prevent.”
This weekend’s Lost Harvest Festival will be visible from Lake Shore Drive. The free event takes place from noon to 9 this Saturday and Sunday in Lincoln Park, north of North Avenue, west of Lake Shore Drive. Speakers include Thomas, Hemp activist and cook Chef Ra, and representatives from the Greens and NORML. Bands include Old No. 8, Wolcott, and Los Marijuanos. Genral Patton and His Privates play Sunday at 6. Call 708-795-1146.
