POT'S PRIME NUMBER EXPLAINED

Facts And Fabrications About The Legendary 420

Thats trippy, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

If you smoke herb, tree, sherm, floyd, grass, cheeba, the chronic, wet,
weed or plain old marijuana or you know someone who owns at least one
piss-poor quality Phish bootleg or an Orange Goblin record, you know about
the magical number 420. It's the hopheads' pseudo underground--"dude, you
know what the deal is,"--numerical code for getting high. Whether you're in
a perpetual 420 time zone, or look forward to April 20th like it was your
birthday, or you make it a verb and go get 420'd, you are propagating a
decade-long cultural phenomenon. And it has many mythical and legendary
points of origin.

Until now, that is.

Myth #1 : 420 is the police call-in code for "Possession of Marijuana" or
"Drug Bust in Progress" or "Hippie Smoking Herb" or whatever.

Bust : It's not. Check cobras.org for all your cop related call-in number
codes. The call codes are pretty universal and 420 ain't even on there.

Myth #2 : "Come Together" by the Beatles is 4 minutes and 20 seconds long.
And if you know the lyrics, you know they were reeeeeeally fuckin' high
when they wrote it.

Bust : Granted, the words to the tune are pretty "wow, man, dude, whoa!"
and the Fab Four might have smoked a bit of shake back in the day. But the
song is 4 minutes and 16 seconds long.

Myth #3 : April 20th is Earth Day. And you gotta perpetuate the celebration
of smoking a bit of the Mother Earth, maaaaaaan.

Bust : Um, check that calendar, Sunshine. Earth Day has been on April 22
since 1970.

Myth #4 : THC (Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol), the element in weed that
makes you high, has 420 chemicals in it.

Bust: The number of active chemicals in THC hovers around the 300-315 mark,
depending on the strain of bud you're puffin'.

Myth #5 : Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer and synthesizer of LSD first
dropped acid at 4:20 p.m., April 19, 1943.

Bust : Well, yes, he did. His notebooks can verify that. And if you wanna
get all technical and shit, he first tripped three days prior--by accident.
But acid and weed are two separate drugs. This is just some odd, hippie
coincidence.

Myth #6 : When the Grateful Dead toured they always stayed in room #420 of
whatever hotel they were at.

Bust : Dead biographer and historian for 20 some-odd years (and author of A
Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead) Dennis McNally
has gone on record as saying this is ridiculous.

Myth #7 : April 20 is National Pot Smokers Day.

Bust : That's true--but it's only on April 20th because of all this 4:20
horseshit.

Myth #8 : April 20 is the last day you should plant your seeds.

Bust: This makes no sense. You can grow virtually anytime, virtually anywhere.

Myth #9: The number comes from the children's nursery rhyme "Sing A Song of
Sixpence," which is all about drugs. It says, "Sing a song of sixpence, a
pocket full of rye. Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie." Get it?

Bust : There is no tie-in except for the number and the word "baked." Go to
writingresources.com/nursery_rhymes/sing_a_song_of_sixpence.html for the
real story on the bird-pie thing.

Myth #10 : In the H.P. Lovercaft short story "In the Walls Of Eryx," the
protagonist talks of a hallucinatory plant with "shaggy stalk, spikey
leaves" and the ability to seemingly stop time. When the slowed-down time
in the story is checked, it's 4:20.

Bust: This is the coolest-sounding, coincidental myth, but the story has
time checks throughout.

Truth : According to a very trustworthy source, High Times editor Steve
Hager, the pot periodical wrote a history in 1998, which found that the 420
phenomenon started in San Rafael High School in California, in 1971. A
dozen stoners who hung and smoked together heard of a secret patch of
homegrown growing nearby. They decided to meet at 4:20 at the campus statue
of scientist Louis Pasteur to begin their search for the secret field o'
weed. They never found it. But they started incorporating the time and
number 420 into their language to slyly talk about smoking in front of
teachers and parents. They then told two friends who in turn told two
friends and so on and so on....Further documentation is at 420.com.