Music legend rings in 420 at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park

Like a maestro, Badu had the audience obeying his every gesture; heady smoke billowed in all directions.

Badu graced the stage in futuristic sunglasses and a plaid trench coat. “For a lot of us, this is our medicine,” he said to the audience, as he raised a joint into the water. “This s—t is here to take you to a higher place.”

The term 420 is used around the world as a euphemism for marijuana, and April 20, as well as 4:20 pm, has become designated times for consuming the ancient herb. However, this global phenomenon has local roots — a group of high schoolers in Marin County started using the term in the early 1970s.

Golden Gate Park has long hosted the Bay Area’s biggest 420 celebration, bringing pot lovers to a grassy knoll in the park unofficially dubbed “Hippie Hill.” The event has the magical ability to gather aging bikers, goth girls and “Rick and Morty” fans all together on one lawn. It had all the music, food vendors and crowds that you’d typically expect at a music festival, except that the main act here was, well, weed.

A major moment at this year’s festival was an official “King of Z Hill” cannabis competition, where growers competed to prove they had the best weed and concentrates. Brandon Parker, an organizer of the event, described the contest as the “World Series of buds.” Competitors flew in from around the world and the far corners of California to sling their best product in hopes of winning a cash prize of $40,000. Despite the impressive competition, Parker still felt confident that San Francisco had some of the best cultivators around. “Some of the most exotic flavors in the world come out of the West Coast right here in San Francisco,” he said.

The festival’s competitors, wearing tie-dye and clothing emblazoned with the Louis Vuitton logo, used blowtorches to heat dab rigs, a type of water pipe for smoking cannabis hash, with near mathematical precision. As Joe Evans of SoCal Dank, a California cannabis company, cleaned out a rig shaped like a green peyote cactus, he explained that the competition was about more than just money. “It’s not always about winning,” he said. “It’s about really networking and seeing what other people have. We all want to be winners. We all want to be super successful in this industry.”

When SFGATE asked Aaron Salles, vice president of marketing and sales at MOCA Humboldt, what he hoped to take away from the experience, he laughed and simply said, “$40,000.”

“Honestly, the money would be nice. There’s a lot of really good competitors here today that grow a lot of good weed,” he continued. “We’ve come a long way from when we used to hang out here as teenagers,” he said, referring to himself and his business partner.

A panel of judges sampled the products and selected the winners: Royal Budline won the contest’s flower category; Have Hash won the rosin category; and Hash Muppets won the hash and dry shift category.

While weed is typically the star of the show on this mid-April day, this year’s 420 festival had more than just marijuana.

A booth tucked away in the back simply said “Lucid Psychedelics,” while another advertised Lotus Entheogenic Church, a “nondenominational religious nonprofit” that subscribes to the belief that magic mushrooms are a religious sacrament. Tracy Stansbury, one of the church’s founders, said they plan to open a location in Oakland in July or August, though it’s unclear where. In the meantime, attendees can sign up to become a member or shell out an $80 “donation” for a psilocybin-infused chocolate bar.

At the booth next door, Brian Hilliard, Lucid Psychedelics’ chief operations officer, cheerfully handed over a bag of vegan mushroom gummies, explaining that he’s been in the “psychedelics realm” for two decades now. Each package contained five “functional” mushrooms in a variety of candy flavors — though Hilliard later confirmed that they weren’t psychedelic at all.

Back at the main stage, the spring sunshine and free spirit of Golden Gate Park seemed to put attendees in good spirits. And the massive amount of pot certainly didn’t hurt. As Badu joked while she was onstage: “Y’all some high motherf—kers.”