With weed’s legal status still in limbo, Pittsburgh Cannabis Fest preps for sixth annual celebration – Pittsburgh City Paper

The Pittsburgh Cannabis Fest is set to return to its Allegheny Commons site this Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The free-to-attend event invites fans of all things cannabis to spend a lazy afternoon with local dispensaries and musical acts under the shade of the Commons’ canopy.

Co-organizer Jack Weber said the festival was first created to unify the wide range of those who partake in consumption of the plant. 

A 2023 study from the National Institute of Drug Abuse reported 42% of adults aged 19-30 had used cannabis in the past year; 29% of adults aged 35 to 50 said the same thing.

“Events are really a great way for people to come together,” Weber tells Pittsburgh City Paper, “and cannabis provides a really good opportunity to do that in a specific way.”

Weber has been helping to throw the festival, founded by sustainable event energy provider ZeroFossil, for three years.

The festival is partly focused on educational programming. Attendees will be invited to learn about their favorite dispensary-provided products — how they’re grown, cultivated, and which strains could be best for them.

Attendees won’t need a legal medical license to get in, and, if eligible, can even begin the process of acquiring an ID card to purchase medical marijuana with certain vendors at the event.

Some vendors will teach their own growing techniques. One will blow glass handpipes, along with other trinkets like pendants and marbles. And an assortment of local music acts are slated to perform throughout the day on two separate stages.

But with adult-use recreational marijuana still not legal in Pennsylvania — and Congress split on an intoxicating hemp ban — the festival won’t have any of its own THC-based products for sale beyond low-percentage drinks, Weber says.

“It’s more of a BYO situation,” he adds.

Pittsburgh has largely decriminalized public marijuana use, and the city first diminished fines for smoking around the same time medical marijuana was legalized in the Keystone State. Weber said attendees of past festivals have never had problems with the law.

While still-banned adult-use cannabis won’t hold any of the event’s planned festivities back, Peter Marcus, a spokesperson for headline sponsor Terrapin, tells City Paper he’d one day, law permitting, like the Cannabis Fest to not shy from distributing cannabis.

Terrapin first opened its doors in late-2000’s Boulder, Co., a time period Marcus calls “the Wild West days of the marijuana industry.” Still based in Colorado, the brand has a presence in every Pennsylvania dispensary, Marcus adds.

He and Weber both are frustrated with the plant’s current legal predicament in Pennsylvania. Marcus, in particular, noted that weed is now recreationally legal in Ohio, New York, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey — states just across almost all of Pa.’s borders.

“Pennsylvania is now an island literally surrounded by legalization,” Marcus tells CP. Weber added that the current legal status of weed in PA is a pointless partisan squabble, and that he “100%” thought cannabis would be recreationally legal by now.

Regardless of its legal situation, attendees are sure to find solace getting zooted somewhere among the North Side’s oaks and maples this Sunday.

6th annual Pittsburgh Cannabis Fest. Aug. 16, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Allegheny Commons Park, North Side. Free. Register at pittsburghcannabisfest.com.