POT SMOKERS CELEBRATE HIGH HOLIDAY

Like an underground religious sect, they gathered yesterday at 4:20 p.m.
sharp in living rooms and college dormitories, city parks and street
corners, set fire to their sacred plant, and inhaled its mind-altering smoke.

The ritual's guidelines fell apart there, but in many cases, what followed
went something like this: giggling, debating the existence of God, applying
eye drops, and devouring multiple slices of pizza.

So went another "420," the so-called stoner New Year's, a counterculture
celebration of marijuana every year on April 20, or 4/20, to increasing
fanfare.

From Vermont to California, Florida to Oregon, legions of pot smokers
convened in groups large and small, in public and private, to light up a
joint and protest the illegality of their beloved weed, which they claim
has many medical benefits and manufacturing applications as hemp.

Antidrug advocates maintain that those are thinly veiled rationales to
legalize a substance most use recreationally. And police officials aware of
the tradition view it solely as a way for smokers to thumb their nose at
the law.

The ultimate grass-roots holiday, 420 is still an indecipherable code term
to most people. For example, Massachusetts Institute of Technology junior
Jasper Vicenti advertised his 420 celebration by creating a Web site on the
university server called "fourtwenty.mit.edu." On it was a small note that
read "4/20 at bexley," a reference to the campus building where the
gathering was to take place.

When asked about 420 yesterday, Boston Police Department spokesman Kevin
Jones said, "I haven't heard anything about it."

Still, he cautioned, giggling 420 celebrants were well-advised to steer
clear of police officers: They may not know 420, but they are acquainted
with state and federal drug laws.

"Arrests would be made," Jones said curtly.

Even among marijuana's staunchest advocates, 420, which originated in
California about 30 years ago among teenagers who would smoke pot every day
at 4:20 p.m., has a ways to go. For one thing, many marijuana smokers are
not exactly famous for their motivation and their memorization of key
dates, and the idea of smoking in public doesn't thrill the slightly paranoid.

"We were possibly thinking of setting up something kind of like for fun on
the lawn, but we didn't have enough time," said Jason Burk, vice president
of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's Cannabis Reform Coalition.

"I knew it was 420 because I had to write the date four or five times
today, but it didn't really strike me," said Bill Downing, head of the
Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, who said he ended up doing nothing
special yesterday.

Still, across the country, large-scale 420 events took place yesterday in
San Francisco, New York City, Washington, Cincinnati, Tampa, and
Pittsburgh, according to High Times magazine, which has feverishly promoted
the holiday for years.

Locally, aside from Vicenti's event - which involved no marijuana for fear
of legal repercussions - public events were tough to spot.

The exception was at the University of Vermont in Burlington, where several
hundred pot smokers came together on a small quadrangle to bang drums and
puff on pipes in a gathering that has occurred for years, university
officials said.

"We treat it essentially as a form of civil disobedience and free speech,"
said Enrique Corredera, a university spokesman. He said police have not
made any arrests at the event, acting instead as visual reminders to
ralliers that their 420 festivities must remain peaceful and orderly.

"Interestingly, the police have found that an awful lot of people who
attend are smoking cigarettes," he said.

Tom Fucarile, a University of Vermont sophomore who went to last year's 420
festivities and planned on doing so again yesterday, said he didn't know
who organized the event and doubted that any one person was behind it.
"It's such a symbol in the subculture that everyone comes out for it," he said.

According to Steven Hager, editor of High Times, the holiday began in the
California city of San Rafael in the early 1970s, when a small group of
high school students called the Waldos began gathering every day at 4:20
p.m. to toke up at the foot of a statue of Louis Pasteur.

Soon, said Hager, the idea of taking a "420 Louie" spread, receiving wide
publicity from the Grateful Dead, who were based in San Rafael then. Within
a few years, people began referring to getting high as a 420, a code that
would easily be missed by parents, teachers, police officers, and bosses,
Hager said.

Around 1990, with so many people speaking of a 420, April 20 came to be
viewed as "the ultimate 420."

"It's definitely a religious holiday," Hager said yesterday. "It's a
ceremony that's being ritualized and passed down as a day to protest the
oppression of a way of life."

In general, though, most observers of 420 tend to view the event as a good
excuse to get high, often in public, a place normally off limits to pot
smoking.

"It's just a lot of fun, the stoner's `Miller time,"' said Keith Stroup,
executive director of the Washington-based National Organization for the
Reform of Marijuana Laws, or NORML. "But I would say that as long as the
government continues to arrest marijuana smokers, 420 will become a bigger
and bigger event each year. It will become a national protest on
prohibition eventually."

But some advocates of legalized marijuana look down on 420 as a black eye
on an otherwise serious political movement. Denny Lane of the Vermont
Grassroots Party, which supports marijuana's legalization, said yesterday,
"I really don't believe in 420 because the press usually portrays it as a
kid with a a purple mohawk and a gold nose ring smoking a joint, when the
issues are way more serious than that."

Vicenti, who heads the MIT Hemp Coalition, said his group's gathering did
not include public marijuana smoking because "we don't want to condone that
sort of behavior as an organization." At last year's 420, he said, people
tended to smoke cigarettes and enjoy the barbecue, preferring to light up
in the privacy of their dorm rooms.

Of course, necessity is the mother of invention when it comes to such events.

"I don't have any right now, so I can't partake anyway," said Vicenti, of
Newburyport. "That's the problem with the black market."