• April 20th is National Pot Smokers Day. Well, it is now; but that wasn’t the origin.
Discover what certain four twenty wall graffiti means. Find out what hip hop artists are communicating. Every kid uses slang and nicknames so their parents don’t know what they’re saying or smoking. 420 has developed into a new slang, rap, culture covering a wide variety of social backgrounds.
• The date of the Columbine school shootings. This happened after the term was already in use.
KNOWN MYTHS • Police dispatch code for smoking pot is 420. The number 420 is not police radio code for anything, anywhere. Checks of criminal codes suggest that the origin is neither Californian nor federal. For instance, California Penal Code 420 defines as a misdemeanor the hindrance of use of public lands. • There are approximately 420 active chemicals in marijuana. Actually, there are approximately 315 active chemicals in marijuana. This number goes up and down depending on which plant is used.
• 4:20 is tea time for pot-smokers in Holland. Tea time in Holland is at 5:30 pm, or is it 2:30 pm? Seems no one is quite sure when the wonderful people of Holland drink their tea. ACCORDING TO STEVEN HAGER, (Editor of High Times) The term 420 originated at San Rafael High School, in 1971, among a group of about a dozen pot-smoking wiseacres who called themselves the Waldos, who are now pushing 50. The term was shorthand for the time of day the group would meet, at the campus statue of Louis Pasteur, to smoke pot. Intent on developing their own discreet language, they made 420 code for a time to get high, and its use spread among members of an entire generation. While our teens feel that they know something we don’t, you can let them in on the fact that it was your generation that came up with the numbers. A quote from one of the Waldos in the High Times article states, “We did discover we could talk about getting high in front of our parents without them knowing by using the phrase 420.” Fortunately, your teenagers will not have that same option.
THE ORIGINS OF 420 “Some of their parents were associated with the Grateful Dead,” says Skye, and the term became common among Deadheads. Around 1990, High Times published the term and later it bought the web domain 420.com.
4 2 0 s av e r . c o m
Years ago the term 420(pronounced four twenty, not four hundred and twenty), was police code for smoking marijuana in a feature on pager codes that teenagers use to “talk” to each other. I began researching the number again and it seems I was wrong. Read on to learn the myths, the truth about the origin and what this term means for parents.
• April 20th is Hitler’s birthday. Yes, it is his birthday. But, as 420 started out as a time, not a date, his birthday had nothing to do with it.
www.420saver.com |
O
nly the real hip hop partiers, rap artists, true herbal smoke lovers and four twenty pot heads will enjoy partaking in their favourite buzz at this time. Four hundred and twenty is fast becoming the secret code to anything to do with marijuana terminology, cannabis culture, and underground weed smokers.
The mystique of 420 grew when the clocks in Quentin Tarantino’s film “Pulp Fiction” were set at 4:20, a practice that Sophia Coppola paid homage to in her later movie “Lost in Translation.”
Not everyone sees it that way. At the University of Colorado Boulder, where 420 gatherings draw up to 10,000 participants in the main quad, officials see 420 as a downer. “It’s the biggest 420 celebration in the country, regrettably,” says spokesman Bronson Hilliard. “Facebook and Twitter certainly fuel it.” The university sent students an email this week “outlining the safety, security and reputational issues for the institution that are at stake for this event,” Hilliard said. “It doesn’t really represent what our student experience is. This is an elite American public university. It’s just a party in the sunshine.” Other big celebrations occur at college campuses around the country, in New York’s Central Park and in Minneapolis. Some of the events focus on the drive to legalize medical marijuana, but the festivities are overwhelmingly recreational, says Skye. At High Times, he says, everyone’s going to be working. “There’s no pot smoking in this office. It’s illegal!” he says.
| April 20th - May 1st, 2012 |
“It’s basically just a celebration of cannabis. It’s mushroomed into our unofficial national holiday,” says Skye.
09