Pubdate: Sat, 20 Apr 2002
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2002 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper.
Contact:  http://www.sunspot.net/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/37
Author:  Shawn Hubler
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?420 (Cannabis - Popular)

THE INSIDE DOPE ON '420' BUZZ

When, where and why did innocuous numbers become a sly reference to 
"pot smoker"? Its history is hazy but the smoke may finally be 
clearing on the real story.

Today is Saturday, April 20. Dude! Do you have any idea what that means?

Brad Olsen does. For three years the 36-year-old entrepreneur has 
been trying to get today's date into alignment with his annual How 
Weird Street Faire, a celebration of, among other things, peace, 
music, tech, the counterculture and space aliens. This year -- just 
as the energy drink Red Bull pulled out as festival sponsor, leaving 
him short of promotional funding -- Olsen finally scored the 
calendrical convergence that means so much to so many in his target 
demographic.

"I mean, that date, that number, four-twenty, just resonates with -- 
" he suddenly paused, considering whether to just blurt it out: dope 
smokers. Finally he laughed, "That date's just embedded now in stoner 
lingo. Which was why I wanted it."

In a phenomenon that has turned a snippet of street slang into an 
almost mainstream sales gimmick, the number 420 -- and its temporal 
counterparts, 4:20 and 4/20 -- have quietly risen from the lexicon of 
marijuana users to become countercultural marketing tools. Never mind 
that pot remains a controlled substance, that court battles rage over 
the legality of medical marijuana, that the Bush administration has 
linked drug use to the support of international terrorist networks.

"Four-twenty" -- once an obscure Bay Area term for pot -- is showing 
up nationally in the advertisements and business names of concert 
promoters, travel agencies, even high-tech companies.

Atlanta's Sweetwater Brewing Co., launched six years ago by a group 
of entrepreneurs in their 20s, sells its 420 Pale Ale in supermarkets 
and opens its doors to the public at 4:20 p.m Mondays through 
Thursdays. New York's 420 Tours sells low-cost travel packages to the 
Netherlands and Jamaica. Highway 420 Radio broadcasts "music for the 
chemically enhanced" online.

The founders of Sacramento-based 420net.com, meanwhile, chose their 
name not because their start-up, which specializes in Web servers, 
has a party angle, but because their target customers are online game 
players -- a group that tends to be male, single, young and hip to 
adolescent underground lingo. Kris Greenough, a 23-year-old 
co-founder, conceded that if the reference was intentionally 
misleading, it was also "catchy, shall we say."

The hook extends, as well, to the event business. Scores of 
countercultural-themed gatherings are scheduled nationally for today, 
from a Washington, D.C., rally against the war on terrorism to the 
national convention of the National Organization for the Reform of 
Marijuana Laws in San Francisco's Union Square. The Bay Area alone 
has slated at least half a dozen events, including the Cannabis 
Action Network's 6th Annual 420 Hemp Fest, an ad hoc smoke-in on Mt. 
Tamalpais in Marin County and a "420" night at a Mission District 
bar, featuring glass pipe vendors and a nurse who home-delivers 
organic pot brownies.

San Francisco Police Inspector Sherman Ackerson says the department 
won't be cracking down, due to the city's "laissez-faire" stance on 
pot possession. Drug abuse prevention groups, not surprisingly, are 
less nonchalant about it. Last year, the forReal.org Web site of the 
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Substance 
Abuse Prevention put out a public service document titled, "It's 4:20 
- -- Do You Know Where Your Teen Is?"

"The 420 icon is very well recognized in the subculture of marijuana 
users, and now it is being used very skillfully to brand," said 
Alvera Stern, who heads the center's federal division of prevention, 
application and education. The mainstreaming of terms like "420," she 
said, gives the false impression that pot smoking is socially 
acceptable and widespread.

"It gives credence to a marijuana user's perception that everyone is 
doing it, in spite of data from four major national surveys showing 
the majority of people have never used marijuana in their lives," 
Stern said.

But, at least in some cases, the "420" hook is less about getting 
high than about getting attention.

"I don't want my thing to be a big smoke-out," said Olsen, who has 
hired private security guards to make sure his expected crowd of 
3,000 revelers doesn't do anything too blatantly illegal. "But it's a 
memorable date: 'The How Weird Street Faire. 420.' Boom. That makes 
an impression. And I need an impression, because this thing costs 
$3,000 to $5,000 on the front end and I don't have much of a 
marketing budget this year."

How a random three-digit number became a pot euphemism is, in itself, 
a story. Either that, or something from the annals of Cheech & Chong.

Links between youth culture and the number surfaced after the April 
20, 1999, Columbine massacre, when some postulated that the shooters 
chose the date of their rampage to coincide either with Hitler's 
birthday or some date of unspecified importance to teenage youth 
culture. Well before that, however, pager-toting suburban adolescents 
throughout the country used the three digits as a code for smoking 
marijuana. And in 1991, High Times magazine, a staunch promoter of 
the 420 phenomenon, published an item on a flier that a staffer found 
circulating at a Grateful Dead concert in Oakland: "WAKE 'N' BAKE. 
Smoke Pot At 4:20," the flier reportedly said.

The term, however, appears to have been coined long before then, 
according to those who have tracked it. Stern, for example, says she 
heard it as long ago as the late 1980s, when she was working with 
young people in a Pennsylvania drug treatment facility. Ron Angier, 
field supervisor for the Marin District of California State Parks, 
has recollections that are older still, from his first days as a park 
ranger 22 years ago on Mt. Tamalpais.

"Crowds of teenagers just started showing up on the mountain at 4:20 
p.m. on April 20," Angier said. "Maybe a thousand kids went up one 
year to Bolinas Ridge, this open vista that overlooks the Pacific 
Ocean and Stinson Beach."

At first, he said, the authorities viewed it as a harmless 
spring-fever ditch day or, later, a perhaps-overly-enthusiastic Earth 
Day observation. But soon the annual al fresco smoke-in clogged the 
two-lane mountain roads with parked cars. "Occasionally we'd have 
injuries, either from accidents or overdoses," said Angier. "We 
started having to close down the mountain because it was becoming 
unsafe."

Finally, in the mid-1990s, the pilgrimage dissipated, to the point 
that Angier, who now supervises the Mt. Tamalpais ranger station, 
plans no increase in park enforcement this year. The reason?

"Well, I think this generation has more to do than to just run up to 
Mt. Tam and get loaded," Angier said. "Also 420 is a nationwide thing 
now. The events are all over, not just here."

That still doesn't explain what the number 420 has to do with 
marijuana. One theory holds that there are exactly 420 chemical 
components in marijuana. (Untrue, say the experts). Another is that 
when the Grateful Dead toured, they always stayed in Room 420. (Also 
untrue, says Grateful Dead Productions spokesman Dennis McNally.)

"My kids' little skateboard friends in Oregon used to tell me that 
420 was police code for a pot bust," laughed Carolyn "Mountain Girl" 
Adams, a former wife of the Dead's late guitarist Jerry Garcia, 
repeating yet another popular, but inaccurate, theory.

"But I never heard the term before the 1990s," she said, speaking by 
cell phone from a park bench in Colorado, where she had gone to catch 
the tour of String Cheese Incident, a Dead-inspired jam band.

"We always just said, you know, 'joints' or 'doobies,' or 'Js' or 
whatever. 'Four-twenty' was a '90s thing that traveled the way hula 
hoops and Frisbees traveled, along the youth net. Via the hackey-sack 
crowd."

In fact, the only documented story behind the 420 phenomenon is the 
most comically mundane one, starring a group of now-middle-aged 
former slackers at San Rafael High School in 1971. One -- now a 
commercial lender in San Francisco -- told the story on condition 
that he be referred to only by his first name, Steve.

"I have a lot of clients in L.A., I'm 47 years old, I don't smoke 
anymore and I run an $80-million-a-year business," the wiry father of 
one said, sitting in a small, cubicle-filled office on the 12th floor 
of a Financial District high-rise.

His desk was filled with snapshots of his 6-year-old daughter, his 
suit was pinstriped and his filing cabinet sported a plaque from the 
Better Business Bureau. The only evidence of his assertion that "I'm 
still an old hippie" was the pair of sneakers he wore around the 
office instead of the dress shoes he kept under his desk, for 
meetings.

Few of his old friends, he said, still smoke pot with much frequency. 
(One, now a Marin County father of two who is a sales representative 
for a Burbank-based notions company, said in a later phone interview 
that the last time he got the urge, he had to hide in the garage so 
his wife and kids wouldn't see him.)

The men said they didn't mind telling their story for posterity, but 
at this point in their lives, they have too much at stake to speak 
for attribution. "As my wife says, 'Where's the upside?' " laughed 
Steve.

In any case, Steve said, in 1971, a friend approached them one day at 
school with a map of Marin County. "He said his brother-in-law was in 
the Coast Guard and had planted a patch of weed out on the Point 
Reyes Peninsula, but believed his C.O. was onto him, and he didn't 
want to get busted. So he had offered it to our friend, who was 
offering it to us."

The group agreed to meet that afternoon after school at 4:20 p.m. by 
a campus statue of Louis Pasteur, he said, and head out to search for 
the marijuana patch. "But one thing led to another," he laughed, "and 
suffice it to say we never found it. Every day we'd meet at 4:20 by 
this statue, and every day we'd just end up getting high and driving 
around for hours." Over time, the mere phrase "four-twenty" -- 
exchanged in a hallway, or discreetly mentioned in the presence of 
teachers and parents -- became their personal code for "time to get 
high," he said.

Steve and his friends went off to college -- mostly at San Diego 
State and Cal State San Luis Obispo -- but their secret code lived on 
in Marin County, preserved by younger brothers and friends. "We have 
postmarked letters we wrote to each other from the early '70s with 
all kinds of references to '420,' " Steve said. Gradually, he said, 
the term was picked up by local teenagers, and then by Deadheads, who 
are legion in Marin County.

"By the mid-1990s," he said, "we started seeing it all over. We 
couldn't believe it -- it was on hats, T-shirts, record labels, 
cleaning solutions, all over the Internet."

Intrigued, he said, he logged onto a High Times magazine Web site, 
found the reference to the Grateful Dead flier, and contacted Steven 
Hager, the magazine's editor-in-chief. Though he did at one point do 
some research to find out whether the term was trademarked (it is, by 
various entities for various products), "We weren't looking for 
money," he said. "We never got a penny, and that wasn't my goal -- I 
already have a successful business. But I e-mailed him anyway and 
said, 'This is the story. It's not police code, it has nothing to do 
with Hitler's birthday or chemical compounds, and I have the 
postmarked letters to prove it. It was just a joke. Just a joke! And 
now stoners have turned it into some kind of holiday."

High Times eventually did an article in late 1998 on the friends, who 
stay in touch and still refer to themselves by their old high school 
gang name, "the Waldos." But by then, the term had taken on a life -- 
and a lore -- of its own.

Last year, when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana 
Laws took up the 420 banner -- announcing that April 20 was "Stoner's 
New Year," that its national conference would, from then on, be held 
on 4/20 and that 4:20 p.m. was to pot smokers "what Miller Time has 
become to beer drinkers -- some legalization advocates predicted the 
exposure would instantly kill the 420 phenomenon with uncoolness. 
Instead, according to those who have capitalized on it, it has merely 
followed the natural evolution of all that is trendy in a capitalist 
market.

"Eighty million Americans have smoked marijuana at some point in 
their lives, according to government figures. That's one out of three 
people," noted NORML executive director Keith Stroup, pointing to the 
same studies the government's Stern used to note that two out of 
three people haven't used it.

"This idea of 420 being a 'secret code' is kind of funny, when you 
think that a third of the population is in on the secret. We're going 
to be selling tickets to our 420 party at $50 a pop -- that's how 
mainstream we think it is."
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