DEATH TO '4-20'

The term '4-20' is most popularly known as code for marijuana. Not
hemp clothing, not hemp oil or hemp seeds, no, we're talking about
recreational, spiritual or medicinal usage of cannabis sativa.
Internet lore will tell you six-ways-to-Sunday about how this code
came to be. Ask yourself, where did you learn it? Did you overhear
it from friends or pop culture? Did you immediately understand it
meant cannabis? Where you consuming cannabis at the time you learned
it? Now remember this. The time has come to kill the code. Cannabis
is a legitimate part of our world and acceptance of this starts with
using the proper name.

Regardless of current prohibition, using cannabis is a freedom that
millions of Americans regularly feel they have. Using code for a
freedom devalues it. A benign freedom such as smoking marijuana is
no less worthy than the freedom to drink beer, which has no code.
The current era of prohibition is nothing more than a momentary
lapse of reason.

Back when my grandfather was a boy, his family lived in a small town
near Des Moines, Iowa. He once told me a story about how his father
used to brew alcoholic ale and such out of his own home.

"Now the time must have been between 1919 and 1933," my grandfather
clued me in. One night at their home, his father and a neighbor
elevated an argument to a point where the neighbor and his wife
became disgruntled and left. Afterwards, my grandfather recalls
watching his mother make her husband pour his homemade brew down the
drain because she was afraid for her family's well-being. Apparently
during the argument, their angry neighbor said out loud, "James, I'm
going to tell everyone in town what you've been brewing here."

My grandfather told me he never saw his father so upset as he was
when pouring his own expensive work down the drain. No doubt he was
sorry, too, for upsetting his wife. All of this stress and
embarrassment because he broke a law that would soon be repealed and
would be legal for at least seven times longer than it ever lasted
on the books.

It will take less than 420 seconds for the copyright application for
'4-20' to be filed once cannabis is legalized in the United States of
America (if it is not already owned by R. J. Reynolds). There is a
lot of money to be made in a virgin urban term like that. For the
record, I am no more or less a fan of R. J. Reynolds versus the
gun-dealin', smack-selling, alley-way dealer. Both of them are
leaches on society, and both are threatened by a legal cannabis market.

A legal market is a taxable one. Given these recession blues, there
has never been a better time to revise the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act. We
can even keep the title (but fix the spelling - it needs a 'j'). From
farming to rolling, cannabis has great potential to generate new
local, state and federal tax revenues - $31 billion per year,
according to a 2007 Jon Gettman article called "Lost Taxes and Other
Costs of Marijuana Laws." And this consumer cash crop need not be
imported from China. American farmers are standing by like giant
Grant Wood paintings. (Add its "Clark Kent" cousin - hemp - to the
market, and the financial numbers look even better. Hemp is cheaper
than lumber or cotton because it grows faster, without fertilizers,
and naturally in all 50 states.)

There are risks involved with taking drugs - all drugs - even when
taking them in moderate dosage. I own a book called "From Chocolate
to Morphine: Everything You Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs,"
written by Dr. Andrew Weil and Winifred Rosen. You can find it in
your library or for less than $5 on www.betterworldbooks.com .
Published in 1998, the book explains drugs (legal and not) through
the naked lens of science and medicine.

You don't have to look far to find hypocrisies in American drug
policy (or lack thereof). Recall the Reagan-era "this is your brain
on drugs" prime-time T.V. commercials. It's too bad they didn't make
a commercial for the alcoholics living in the household. Life and
drugs are not so simple; we all mix them to varying degrees of success.

A friend of mine has a plan to host an exposition in the name of
legalizing and de-stigmatizing cannabis use. He wants to call it "The
Marijuanalogues." The expo would present short monologues from
cannabis users within the community - not unlike the format of the
popular Eve Ensler play. My friend had originally considered opening
night would be on 4-20, but he's come to realize the need to move
beyond culture references seeded in an era of pot prohibition.

So on this Apr. 20, whether you take cannabis or not, don't call it
'4-20.' Just call it my friend Larry's birthday.