Last weekend’s Seattle Hempfest crowded Myrtle Edwards Park more successfully than the Fourth of Jul-Ivar’s did a month and a half previous, for a familiar mix of music, handicrafts, facial hair, and political speechifying.

What was new this year: A reinvigorated message.

Hempfest used to be about, or pretend to be about, promoting the non-THC-related uses of the marijuana/hemp plant. Speakers and flyers made all manner of inflated claims for hemp as the miracle substance that would save the planet, as the ideal basic material for everything from paper and fabrics to foods, plastics, and motor fuels.

As one who believes in the ingenuity of North American agribusiness, I believe such claims should be thoroughly investigated for possible practical use. But the ’90s Hemp Movement seemed comprised only of True Believers, with no interest in plant research beyond what they’d read in Hemp Movement books. (Placing True Belief above scientific impartiality is what doomed Soviet agricultural research back in the Lysenko era.)

In any event, it’s hard to sustain an ongoing political-cultural movement on the premise of a potential rival to flaxseed fiber. So the event’s organizers did the smart thing and admitted what everyone’s known all along–that Hempfest is really a public celebration of recreational pot smoking and a call for its rightful legitimacy. The event’s name officially became an acronym for “Help End Marijuana Prohibition.”

It was a two-afternoon-long statement of defiance against the brutal hypocrisy of the War on Drugs, which has arguably hurt more lives in recent years than drugs themselves have. It became a more vigorous and more important event.

I’ve long scoffed at pot, pot aesthetics, pot humor, and particularly pot-influenced politics. I don’t orgasm at the terms “420” or “chronic.” Arguing politics with pot smokers usually frustrates, with all the sanctimony and square-bashing involved.

But Hempfest 2001 showed a path out of that trap. It asked thousands of users and sympathizers to stop wallowing in their self-perceived superiority and to start working to change things. It asked the mainly-white victims of pot busts to join up with the mostly-black victims of coke busts.

I’m still indifferent to pot and the pot culture. But the only way this society’s ever gonna get sane about the issue is to get over the phony righteousness of both pot-lovers and pot-haters, fueled by its outlaw status.