Yesterday, unsuspecting pedestrians in Tel Aviv were hit by a unique kind of storm: bags of weed falling from the sky.
Green Drone – an activist group that campaigns for the legalisation of cannabis – had promised to distribute free weed on social media, and on Thursday followed through on their pledge.
Videos by VICE
“The time has come,” the group said via its Telegram channel. “Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s the Green Drone sending you free cannabis from the skies.”
According to The Times of Israel, the weed shower doubled as an advertising stunt for Green Drone’s drone delivery service.
Dropped from high above Rabin Square, a busy park in the centre of Tel Aviv, a number of bags were snatched up before local police officers arrived. In a statement, police said they had seized a large quantity of the bags filled with the “dangerous drug”, and that two men had been arrested on suspicion of controlling the drone.
Medicinal cannabis is legal in Israel – with around 60,000 users consuming an estimated 25 tons per year – but smoking weed recreationally is not. In May, the country approved exports of medicinal cannabis, which the government expects to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
In early April, a few weeks into the coronavirus lockdown, a man in Manchester, England calling himself “Outlaw” started delivering packages of “essentials” to people in quarantine. Many of those packages contained free bags of weed.
“I said on Instagram, ‘Does anyone need anything?’ and got fucking loads of requests suggesting vulnerable people,” he told VICE at the time. “So we had all their postcodes in a map, and we went around seeing all them. On the way, people spot me and know that we give out weed – so I had some bud there if anyone wanted any.”
Outlaw then followed up by posting “4/20 packs” to people around the UK.
