Kelly Maddy had a message for the revelers at the Cannabis Revival on Saturday afternoon — reforming America’s marijuana laws must be a grass-roots effort.

“We need you to get up, put down the bong, and get active,” he told the throng gathered around the pavilion at Landreth Park. “No longer can we sit silent, because silence is consent. If we continue to give them silence, all they will do is continue to give us bad laws.”

Maddy is the president of the Joplin chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and head organizer of the revival.

Almost 1,000 people were already in Landreth Park by early Saturday afternoon when Maddy addressed the crowd. The revival serves as a rally and information resource for local advocates of reforming marijuana laws. The event has been staged for free by volunteers from local chapters of NORML since 1997. This year’s revival solicited donations to help support a medical marijuana initiative in Missouri.

Maddy said roughly 5,000 people had been in and out of the gates by 6 p.m. Saturday, and organizers expected more than 6,000 altogether.

“We’ve had a huge crowd; we’ve signed up a lot of new members from the Joplin area,” he said. “It’s great to get people excited, but (the revival) is more of a catalyst in hopefully converting interest into action.”

Saturday’s event mixed music with speeches from several prominent figures in the national marijuana reform campaign. Those speakers included Dr. Mark Pedersen, founder of the Cannabis Patient Network, and Mason Tvert, co-founder and executive director of SAFER — Safer Alternatives for Enjoyable Recreation — a Denver, Colo., group that asserts marijuana is a safer recreational drug than alcohol.

“It makes absolutely no sense to punish adults who make the safer choice to use marijuana instead of alcohol,” said Tvert, who recently co-authored a book on the subject with other reform advocates. “Right now we have laws and policies that steer people away from marijuana and toward a more harmful substance, and that’s irrational.”

Last year, Maddy led a group called Sensible Joplin, which collected signatures for a ballot initiative calling for decriminalizing personal possession of marijuana. In a final count held in August of 2008, City Clerk Barbara Hogelin said the effort fell short by about 531 signatures. She said a total of 4,125 signatures were deemed valid, but that 4,656 valid signatures were needed to place the issue on the ballot.