It’s never been easier to smoke weed in America. You can legally buy cannabis in more than half of all U.S. states and smoke marijuana in public with little fear of repercussions, whether you’re standing in downtown San Francisco or on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
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But when it comes to Burning Man, the annual Nevada event world-famous for its shirking of societal conventions, openly doing drugs or smoking marijuana can land you in legal hot water. The festival is heavily patrolled by law enforcement, and people have been ticketed and even arrested for cannabis in previous years.
Jacob Smith, a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and a volunteer for the Burning Man Legal Observer Program, said that he knows people who have been ticketed and even removed from the festival for smoking pot.
“Although Burning Man can be a nurturing and safe space, there’s still real world dangers and potentially real world over-enforcement of marijuana laws,” Smith said.
In 2019, 58 people were arrested with most being drug-related arrests, including one San Francisco man who was charged with felony pot possession and kept on $500,000 bail.
However, arrests decreased in the following years. Last year, there were few arrests because rain created a weather emergency that left officers primarily helping people navigate a muddy desert, according to the Reno Gazette Journal.
The arrest numbers often don’t tell the entire story of drug enforcement at the event, according to Mitchell Gomez, the executive director of DanceSafe, a harm reduction organization that’s been active at Burning Man for 15 years. He said undercover police frequently approach people they suspect of doing drugs and hand out tickets for using substances like cannabis.
“For simple cannabis possession, they often let you plead down to non-drug offenses and just pay a fine, but you still have to get a lawyer and deal with that,” Gomez said.
The constant surveillance from police at the festival has led to widespread warnings to never smoke weed openly during the event, or risk having cops search your entire camp for other drugs.
“You should not walk around with a joint at the playa, it’s a bad idea,” Gomez said. “That provides probable cause for searching you. They can go through your pockets. They’ll often say you have to get your ID and take you back to your camp and then search your entire camp.”
Overlapping law enforcement
Burning Man draws more than 70,000 people every year to a temporary settlement called Black Rock City in a rural stretch of the northern Nevada desert. The weeklong party takes place on federal land and is patrolled by five different law enforcement agencies.
Pot remains illegal on the playa, the term used by Burners to describe the festival grounds, thanks to overlapping federal and state laws. Marijuana is completely illegal according to federal law. And while pot became legal in Nevada in 2017, state law still forbids smoking marijuana in public.
A spokesperson for Burning Man said in an emailed statement to SFGATE that the event organizers do not have data on drug arrests because law enforcement has not always shared that information, but confirmed that the agencies “still enforce cannabis laws, and we can confirm that arrests have been made for cannabis possession.”
Despite the prohibition on pot, law enforcement officials have broad discretion in deciding how they enforce laws, and marijuana is smoked widely, often with little repercussions, across Nevada, including on federal land at national parks and in the city of Las Vegas.
Lawyers for Burners, a group of volunteers who help coordinate resources for people arrested at the festival, blamed heavy-handed law enforcement on Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen, writing on their website that he’s increased enforcement and describing him as “Out of Control.”
Allen said in an email to SFGATE that his officers have reduced the amount of enforcement against marijuana at the event following state cannabis “decriminalization.” However, he confirmed that arrests do happen, primarily for people who use the drug in public or have more than an ounce of the drug.
“People must remember if you use marijuana in another product, brownies for example, it is not just the weight of the drug, it is the total weight of the product containing the drug, and brownies for example are heavy and would then exceed the 1 ounce maximum possession limit,” Allen said.
The Nevada State Police, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office and the Pyramid Lake Police Department, all of which patrol the playa, did not respond to a request for comment. John Asselin, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management, which also patrols the event, declined an SFGATE interview request but said in an emailed statement that the federal agency “enforces all applicable laws on Public Lands throughout the year.”
‘You’re not on Mars’
Burning Man is designed to make attendees feel like they’ve left American society. It has the look of a lawless place from the outside, with, outlandish performances, massive electronic music shows, sex parties and even a ban on exchanging money. But the heavy law enforcement begins as soon as people enter the festival.
Smith said his group stations legal observers 24 hours a day at the festival’s entrance, where law enforcement use drug dogs to sniff for contraband and are known to search entire RVs if attendees are caught driving even a couple miles over the speed limit.
“When you’re driving in you have to be extremely careful because any sort of stop could lead to not only being pulled over, but having everything you packed up being taken outside of your RV and searched through,” Smith said.
The surveillance continues throughout the week inside the festival, where police are on constant patrol, including undercover officers dressed in Burning Man costumes and even some law enforcement using night vision technology, Smith said.
“If you are out in the art area where it’s almost pitch black, a lot of times they will have thermal vision things … any kind of fire that looks like it’s about the size of a cigarette or a joint or anything, they will approach,” Smith said.
Gomez said that one of his friends was dancing at an electronic music camp one year and stopped to look into his backpack. Suddenly a cop was behind him with a flashlight and saw drugs inside the bag, leading to the friend’s arrest.
“The playa feels like another planet, but the reality is you’re in rural Nevada. You’re not on Mars. … You are subject to both federal and Nevada state law, those are the legal realities that exist on top of Burner culture,” Gomez said.
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