VSnow in San Francisco. The marijuana festival has been canceled. For years, the event has taken place in Golden Gate Park on April 20. At precisely 4:20 p.m. (4/20, four-twenty, the symbolic number of cannabis culture), smokers lit huge joints on Hippie Hill, the flagship hill of protest in the 1970s. Since 2018 and legalization in California, the town hall had provided its official guarantee and worthy infrastructure of a gathering of several tens of thousands of people. In a park where smoking tobacco is not even allowed, the cloud of marijuana fogged the sky – and minds – well beyond sunset.
Nothing like this on April 20. The municipality was sad to announce that it was not able to finance the official fiesta this year. Budgetary restrictions require. In 2023, the festival has cost nearly $500,000 in equipment, security measures and the removal of some 15 tons of trash. Sound Bazaar, the organizing group, for its part declared itself unable to compensate for the deficit, due to a lack of sponsors. The cannabis industry is in crisis, its turnover has declined in California for the second year in a row ($5.1 billion in 2023, − 11% compared to 2021). Not that residents consume less, but taxes are so high that the illegal market continues to thrive.
The time for lean budgets has come in California. State resources had exploded during the pandemic. The bubble has deflated. On January 10, Governor Gavin Newsom estimated the size of the hole in public finances at $30 billion for the 2024-2025 fiscal year. On April 3, he confirmed his estimates during the traditional snow-measurement press conference at Phillips Station, 2,073 meters above sea level in the Sierra Nevada.
In 2015, his predecessor, Jerry Brown, with his feet in the grass, announced water rationing measures at Phillips Station to deal with the drought. Planted in the same place but wearing snowshoes, Gavin Newsom was pleased with above-average snowfall for the second year in a row. The budget is now like the climate, he characterized, ” serrated “.
“Reflection of the climate issue”
According to the governor, it will take time to correct the “abnormalities” budgets of recent years. Between 2021 and 2023, the world’s fifth largest economy experienced massive surpluses, as “no other sub-state entity has ever seen one, to my knowledge, on the planet”he said – “177.7 billion dollars in surplus over a period of twenty-four months! » Now she is ordered to ” to tighten one’s belt “.
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