Ten Years of High Times With III Joints

For an event that, in Caterina Haddad’s words, began as “just, you know, like, a stoned thought,” III Joints has grown into one of the clearest reflections of what the III Points universe does best: building culture out of instinct, community, and a willingness to get a little weird. On April 18, the hazy celebration marks its ten-year anniversary with a local-fueled takeover at Factory Town, featuring over 100 Miami acts, including Cumbiamba, Richie Hell, Pressure Point, and more

What started in 2016 as a modest 4/20 gathering at the Anderson has since evolved into a sprawling annual celebration at Factory Town, one that now features multiple stages, food activations, immersive art, and a lineup built almost entirely around Miami talent. But the real story of III Joints is not simply that it got bigger, but that it managed to scale without losing the local spirit that made it matter in the first place.

That is what makes III Joints worth revisiting as III Points moves deeper into its second decade. On the surface, III Joints is the festival’s weed-friendly offshoot, an April gathering that lives in a looser, hazier lane than the main event’s music-art-tech mission. 

In practice, it has become something far more revealing: a yearly snapshot of how the III Points ecosystem has grown. It shows how a scrappy homegrown idea can become a city ritual, and how Miami’s creative community can still anchor an event even as it balloons in size.

How III Joints Started in Miami

We rang up Haddad on Zoom, the senior marketing manager for Space, and one of the key figures behind III Joints’ visual identity and local programming, who traces the event’s origins back to 2016. The concept, she says, came to III Points cofounder David Sinopoli while he was sparking up and thinking about the gap in Miami’s cultural calendar. 

“No one does this,” she recalls him realizing. “There is no, like, premiere 420 party.” It was also, she says, part of a bigger idea: creating “a completely separate party on the other end of the year from III Points” that still felt “tied to the culture of III Points.”

From the beginning, III Joints was imagined as more than a gimmick. Sinopoli, according to Haddad, saw a natural overlap between festival culture and stoner culture, and wanted to build something around that shared sensibility. 

The first edition, held at the Anderson, was tiny by today’s standards. “It was, like, maybe 300 people the entire time, like, the whole day,” Haddad says, laughing. “300 stoners.” The setup was simple: vendors, local DJs, food, cocktails, and a daytime hang built around community more than spectacle. Even then, the essentials were already in place. “That part hasn’t changed,” she says of the local DJs and vendor focus.

From the Anderson to Factory Town

Those early years at the Anderson, from 2016 through 2018, were formative. The event was still small, but the team was already trying to give it a sense of occasion. Haddad says they wanted to create “these traditions, these moments,” the kind of details that would make people feel like showing up meant being in on something. Sometimes that meant using III Joints as a place to tease news connected to III Points. “They were trying to make this party be, like, a moment for the festival,” she says.

In 2019, III Joints moved to the Freehand Hotel in Miami Beach, where the hospitality side leveled up. Bar Lab’s presence sharpened the cocktails and culinary programming, while the venue itself made room for stranger, more immersive ideas. 

Haddad remembers that “they activated some of the hostel rooms to be stages,” including a “thought box” hosted by Poorgrrrl and an ambient room curated by Nick León. That ambient concept, she notes, would become one of the traditions that kept resurfacing as the event evolved.

Then came COVID, and with it the total collapse of live events. Haddad recalls a pandemic-era digital activation called “Puff Puff Pass,” in which participants filmed themselves taking a hit and passing a joint off-screen, with the clips edited into a single long chain.

“That was our 420 celebration during 2020,” she says. “It was really cute. It was, like, a way to stay together and keep the whole thing alive.”

When III Joints returned in person at Space Park in 2021 and 2022, it came back much bigger. Haddad describes those years as the point where the team realized the event had entered a new phase. “That’s kind of where everything really, really shifted,” she says, “where we went from having, like, 400, 500 people at III Joints to, like, 2,000, 3,000, and we were like, ‘Oh… this is interesting.’” 

With that jump came an expanded structure: three stages named Sativa, Indica, and Hybrid, along with more ambitious food programming and a growing sense that III Joints was no longer just a side party. There was now a real audience waiting for it every year.

Food, in particular, became central to the experience. Haddad lights up, remembering the Space Park years and the “Infinite Eats” concept, which pulled together local vendors to create what she calls “420-friendly menus” for the crowd. 

Her favorite memory is almost comically specific: “The Crunchwrap Supreme, the first time I had the Crunchwrap Supreme, I’m not even joking, like, I still remember.” It is a small detail, but an important one. III Joints has always understood that culture is not just music. It is what you eat, how you linger, who you run into, and what corners you drift toward when you are not on a dance floor.

By the time III Joints reached Factory Town, the scale changed again. More stages. More hours of programming. More room to build out the event as a world rather than a party. Haddad says the first year there brought roughly 7,000 people, another major leap from its origins. 

Why III Joints Stays Rooted in Local Miami Talent

Still, the thing she sounds proudest of is not the crowd count. It is the local focus. “It really is all local talent,” she says. “When you have an event that, like, knocks it out of the park every single time, and it’s just 100 percent Miami people, it’s something to be super proud of.”

That may be the most important line in the whole story. Miami has never lacked for events that import relevance from somewhere else. What III Joints has done, especially as it has grown, is insist that local DJs, artists, vendors, and collaborators are enough to build something people care about. 

Haddad says one of the greatest joys of working on the event is “programming all your friends,” while also building “space that people want to be a part of, or people are proud to join.” That idea, making participation feel meaningful, not transactional, is part of what has allowed iii Joints to become more than novelty.

Haddad’s own contributions helped shape that feeling. From 2021 through last year, she produced the artwork and helped develop the event’s yearly themes, from video game-inspired visuals to Easter motifs to this year’s Dade County Youth Fair-inspired concept. “We’ve made, like, themes each year,” she says. 

Those choices matter because they give III Joints its own identity within the broader III Points world: playful, immersive, a little ridiculous, but still thoughtfully made. “We’re just literally a bunch of stoned people who, like, throw shows and events for a living who took their passions for weed and actually made it work,” she says. It is a funny line, but it also gets at the heart of why the event feels so distinctly Miami. It is self-aware without being cynical.

These days, III Joints also functions as an unofficial marker for the beginning of III Points season, the moment when the larger festival cycle starts to come back into view. That feels fitting. Rituals matter because they tell a city when it is time to return. And in a place that often chases whatever is newest, flashiest, or most imported, III Joints has quietly become a homegrown ritual of its own. 

Smoke-filled, funny, sprawling, and proudly local, it has grown into one of the best indicators of what III Points has actually built over the last decade: not just a festival, but a culture durable enough to keep making new traditions.

III Joints. 4 p.m. Saturday, April 18, at Factory Town, 4800 NW 37th Ave., Miami; factorytown.com. Tickets cost $15 to $55 via dice.fm.