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What
does the term 420 mean?
If
you don't know that it is an international code word for smoking
marijuana -- especially at 4:20 and on 4/20 -- you are not as
with it as you think you are.
The
term floats just below the radar of many baby boomer parents who
are totally clueless about the vast underground that celebrates
the term.
Parents
will hear about it by spring. The National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) intends to drag the code word
into the mainstream. For the first time, it will hold its annual
conference on 4/20 --April 20, a day known as Stoners' New Year.
"We
have scheduled the conference to coincide with 4/20, the date
that has become associated in the popular culture as a special
day for marijuana smokers -- sort of what 'Miller time' has become
to beer drinkers," says its Web site, norml.org. "We hope to build
on that tradition."
NORML's
Allen St. Pierre notes that, unfortunately, 4/20/99 was the day
of the Columbine school shootings, but says he believes the two
were not connected.
The
origin of the term is a bit hazy. Some say it has been a police
radio code for "pot smoking in progress." But Steven Hager, editor
of High Times, has traced it back to 1971, to some pot-smoking
wiseacres at a California high school who met frequently at 4:20
to light up. The term caught on and was popularized in the counterculture
by the Grateful Dead, Hager says.
It
is now "known universally around the world by people in the (drug)
culture," Hager says. "And for 20 years, there have been important
rituals and ceremonies that happen on April 20," including those
on college campuses.
Those
observations now include some teens staying home from school.
"At most public schools, April 20 is an (unofficial) holiday,"
says John Heydinger, 16, of St. Paul, Minn. "Kids hang out and
party."
Those
who party too hearty might say they are "420-ed," he says, or
really stoned.
St.
Pierre is amazed "by the mass commercialization that has grown
up around 420. Kids can buy all kinds of stuff with 420 on it,"
including clothing through the Net and "skateboards, surfboards,
snowboards."
Some
teens say they use the term almost as a joke. "It's like you see
someone in the hall at 4:20 and say, '420, dude, ha, ha,' " says
Brady Welch, 17, of Mt. Pleasant, S.C.
Teens
don't make much of it at his school, says Jared Holst, 15, of
Englewood, Colo. "Kids just happen to know what it means. Someone
will say when it is 4:20."
Parents
are usually oblivious to the reference, says Beth Kane Davidson,
director of the addiction treatment center at Suburban Hospital
in Bethesda, MD. "This is a whole culture with kids." The message
is, she says, "even if your adolescent is at home alone at 4:20,
and he smokes up, he is not alone. He knows somebody somewhere
else is smoking also."
St.
Pierre has some qualms about going public with the term for the
NORML conference. "As soon as it gets bandied about on the Today
show, 420 will fizzle as a cultural phenomenon." |
