April 20, 2020, may not be remembered as the day when marijuana briefly became a more valuable commodity than petroleum. It happened, though, right smack dab in the middle of the country’s unofficial 4/20 weed holiday. Some ironies require no enhancement, and a Hollywood script with this plot twist would get laughed out of the room, but it happened all the same.

On Monday afternoon, as the COVID pandemic ran roughshod over governments and hospitals and the daily lives of billions, almighty oil was abruptly worth less than zero. In other words, if you had oil, you had to theoretically pay to get rid of it, instead of getting paid for delivering it. It’s the equivalent of gassing up at your local station and having the attendant run you out a fiver for the privilege of depleting his stock.

The price of a barrel of oil on Monday stood at -$37.63. Note the minus sign. Prior to yesterday, the lowest price a barrel of oil ever fetched on the market was $10 back in 1986. Note the absence of the minus sign. This is beyond unprecedented territory. We have run headlong through the looking glass into a surreal and disintegrating economic landscape that, again, lays bare the inherent weaknesses and inequities of the current hypercapitalist system.

What happened is a perfect example of the supply-and-demand principle that undergirds the system. The pandemic hit, the world was told to stay home, and the demand for petroleum plummeted. The juggernaut that is global oil production, however, cannot stop on a dime and give you nine cents change. It kept producing and producing and producing, and a month later, nobody has room to store what was produced. “Black Gold” abruptly became an enormous burden, and the market reacted.