420: A MARIJUANA MYSTERY LIGHTS UP SPECULATION

Hippie new year. Pot smoker's holiday. A counterculture kind of coffee break.

That's 420. Four twenty. To marijuana users, this insider term means it's
time to chill, pull out the papers, and roll a joint.

And on this April 20, as the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws (NORML) holds its annual conference in Washington, marijuana
smokers around the country remain as clueless as ever about how this
national day of weed worship began nearly 30 years ago.

Nonusers are even more clueless. Most have never heard of 420.

That's part of the 420 mystique, said Karen Bettez Halnon, an assistant
professor of sociology at Penn State-Abington. "Research shows it's the
vague quality that sustains marijuana-smoker identity," she said.

Halnon recently presented research findings to the Pacific Sociology
Association on the purported meanings of 420, the numerical code word that
can be found on T-shirts, patches, marijuana pipes and other paraphernalia.
Her study grew out of an extra-credit assignment she gave students when she
taught at a large university in the Northeast.

As she checked out the students' claims, Halnon said, she discovered the
theories "were either wrong or unprovable."

For instance, 420 is not the Los Angeles Police Department's crime code for
a marijuana arrest, she said. Neither is it the number of chemical
compounds found in THC - tetrahydrocannabinol, the psychoactive ingredient
in marijuana - or the address that members of the Grateful Dead lived at in
San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury section, or the time of guitarist Jerry
Garcia's death, or a biblical reference from the book of Mark, or teatime
in Amsterdam, where pot is legal.

The theory that 420 represents the clock-hands angle at 4:20, like a
Jamaican Rastafarian's "dangling doobie," is dubious, Halnon said, but
creative.

A Web site -- http://www.420.com/ -- offers the commonly held belief that
the 420 terminology was started in the early 1970s by a group of California
high school students who called themselves the Waldos.

But clarity does not matter in the sometimes smoky world of 420 insiders,
Halnon said. A collective consciousness does.

This year, 420 may be moving toward the mainstream with NORML's three-day
conference, which is featuring the likes of New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson,
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), San Francisco District Attorney Terence
Hallinan, and American Civil Liberties Union executive director Ira Glasser.

The conference is looking at drug laws, the treatment of marijuana in the
media, and international movements to decriminalize pot.

"This is one of the issues where the voters are way out in front of the
politicians," said NORML publications director Paul Armantano.

NORML does not usually time its conference to fall on April 20, Armantano
said, but "this year, we wanted it to coincide with that date."

While 420 is often celebrated with public gatherings that may feature
public pot smoking, a spokesman at the University of Pennsylvania's Student
Life office said today's annual Spring Fling is a coincidence and is not
associated with 420.

Halnon acknowledged that April 20 is also Adolf Hitler's birthday and the
day in 1999 that students and a teacher were shot and killed at Columbine
High School in Littleton, Colo., but she discounts any link with the 420
marijuana observations.

Both events, she said, "go against everything the 420 culture represents."

At Strath Haven High School in Wallingford, students were abuzz this week
about possible incidents planned for the anniversary of the Columbine
attack, assistant principal Keith Hammitt said yesterday. But none of the
rumors he heard had any association to 420, and none could be
substantiated. He would not elaborate.

Law-enforcement authorities around the region said last night they had
heard of no problems anticipated at any schools to mark the 420 observance.

Ridley Township Police Capt. Richard Herron was surprised by the 420
terminology itself.

"This is the first time I've heard about it," he said. "When you first said
it, I was wondering if they were going to demonstrate down on Route 420 or
something."