THE INSIDE DOPE ON '420' BUZZ

When, where and why did innocuous numbers become a sly reference to
"pot smoker"? Its history is hazy but the smoke may finally be
clearing on the real story.

Today is Saturday, April 20. Dude! Do you have any idea what that means?

Brad Olsen does. For three years the 36-year-old entrepreneur has
been trying to get today's date into alignment with his annual How
Weird Street Faire, a celebration of, among other things, peace,
music, tech, the counterculture and space aliens. This year -- just
as the energy drink Red Bull pulled out as festival sponsor, leaving
him short of promotional funding -- Olsen finally scored the
calendrical convergence that means so much to so many in his target
demographic.

"I mean, that date, that number, four-twenty, just resonates with --
" he suddenly paused, considering whether to just blurt it out: dope
smokers. Finally he laughed, "That date's just embedded now in stoner
lingo. Which was why I wanted it."

In a phenomenon that has turned a snippet of street slang into an
almost mainstream sales gimmick, the number 420 -- and its temporal
counterparts, 4:20 and 4/20 -- have quietly risen from the lexicon of
marijuana users to become countercultural marketing tools. Never mind
that pot remains a controlled substance, that court battles rage over
the legality of medical marijuana, that the Bush administration has
linked drug use to the support of international terrorist networks.

"Four-twenty" -- once an obscure Bay Area term for pot -- is showing
up nationally in the advertisements and business names of concert
promoters, travel agencies, even high-tech companies.

Atlanta's Sweetwater Brewing Co., launched six years ago by a group
of entrepreneurs in their 20s, sells its 420 Pale Ale in supermarkets
and opens its doors to the public at 4:20 p.m Mondays through
Thursdays. New York's 420 Tours sells low-cost travel packages to the
Netherlands and Jamaica. Highway 420 Radio broadcasts "music for the
chemically enhanced" online.

The founders of Sacramento-based 420net.com, meanwhile, chose their
name not because their start-up, which specializes in Web servers,
has a party angle, but because their target customers are online game
players -- a group that tends to be male, single, young and hip to
adolescent underground lingo. Kris Greenough, a 23-year-old
co-founder, conceded that if the reference was intentionally
misleading, it was also "catchy, shall we say."

The hook extends, as well, to the event business. Scores of
countercultural-themed gatherings are scheduled nationally for today,
from a Washington, D.C., rally against the war on terrorism to the
national convention of the National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws in San Francisco's Union Square. The Bay Area alone
has slated at least half a dozen events, including the Cannabis
Action Network's 6th Annual 420 Hemp Fest, an ad hoc smoke-in on Mt.
Tamalpais in Marin County and a "420" night at a Mission District
bar, featuring glass pipe vendors and a nurse who home-delivers
organic pot brownies.

San Francisco Police Inspector Sherman Ackerson says the department
won't be cracking down, due to the city's "laissez-faire" stance on
pot possession. Drug abuse prevention groups, not surprisingly, are
less nonchalant about it. Last year, the forReal.org Web site of the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Substance
Abuse Prevention put out a public service document titled, "It's 4:20
- -- Do You Know Where Your Teen Is?"

"The 420 icon is very well recognized in the subculture of marijuana
users, and now it is being used very skillfully to brand," said
Alvera Stern, who heads the center's federal division of prevention,
application and education. The mainstreaming of terms like "420," she
said, gives the false impression that pot smoking is socially
acceptable and widespread.

"It gives credence to a marijuana user's perception that everyone is
doing it, in spite of data from four major national surveys showing
the majority of people have never used marijuana in their lives,"
Stern said.

But, at least in some cases, the "420" hook is less about getting
high than about getting attention.

"I don't want my thing to be a big smoke-out," said Olsen, who has
hired private security guards to make sure his expected crowd of
3,000 revelers doesn't do anything too blatantly illegal. "But it's a
memorable date: 'The How Weird Street Faire. 420.' Boom. That makes
an impression. And I need an impression, because this thing costs
$3,000 to $5,000 on the front end and I don't have much of a
marketing budget this year."

How a random three-digit number became a pot euphemism is, in itself,
a story. Either that, or something from the annals of Cheech & Chong.

Links between youth culture and the number surfaced after the April
20, 1999, Columbine massacre, when some postulated that the shooters
chose the date of their rampage to coincide either with Hitler's
birthday or some date of unspecified importance to teenage youth
culture. Well before that, however, pager-toting suburban adolescents
throughout the country used the three digits as a code for smoking
marijuana. And in 1991, High Times magazine, a staunch promoter of
the 420 phenomenon, published an item on a flier that a staffer found
circulating at a Grateful Dead concert in Oakland: "WAKE 'N' BAKE.
Smoke Pot At 4:20," the flier reportedly said.

The term, however, appears to have been coined long before then,
according to those who have tracked it. Stern, for example, says she
heard it as long ago as the late 1980s, when she was working with
young people in a Pennsylvania drug treatment facility. Ron Angier,
field supervisor for the Marin District of California State Parks,
has recollections that are older still, from his first days as a park
ranger 22 years ago on Mt. Tamalpais.

"Crowds of teenagers just started showing up on the mountain at 4:20
p.m. on April 20," Angier said. "Maybe a thousand kids went up one
year to Bolinas Ridge, this open vista that overlooks the Pacific
Ocean and Stinson Beach."

At first, he said, the authorities viewed it as a harmless
spring-fever ditch day or, later, a perhaps-overly-enthusiastic Earth
Day observation. But soon the annual al fresco smoke-in clogged the
two-lane mountain roads with parked cars. "Occasionally we'd have
injuries, either from accidents or overdoses," said Angier. "We
started having to close down the mountain because it was becoming
unsafe."

Finally, in the mid-1990s, the pilgrimage dissipated, to the point
that Angier, who now supervises the Mt. Tamalpais ranger station,
plans no increase in park enforcement this year. The reason?

"Well, I think this generation has more to do than to just run up to
Mt. Tam and get loaded," Angier said. "Also 420 is a nationwide thing
now. The events are all over, not just here."

That still doesn't explain what the number 420 has to do with
marijuana. One theory holds that there are exactly 420 chemical
components in marijuana. (Untrue, say the experts). Another is that
when the Grateful Dead toured, they always stayed in Room 420. (Also
untrue, says Grateful Dead Productions spokesman Dennis McNally.)

"My kids' little skateboard friends in Oregon used to tell me that
420 was police code for a pot bust," laughed Carolyn "Mountain Girl"
Adams, a former wife of the Dead's late guitarist Jerry Garcia,
repeating yet another popular, but inaccurate, theory.

"But I never heard the term before the 1990s," she said, speaking by
cell phone from a park bench in Colorado, where she had gone to catch
the tour of String Cheese Incident, a Dead-inspired jam band.

"We always just said, you know, 'joints' or 'doobies,' or 'Js' or
whatever. 'Four-twenty' was a '90s thing that traveled the way hula
hoops and Frisbees traveled, along the youth net. Via the hackey-sack
crowd."

In fact, the only documented story behind the 420 phenomenon is the
most comically mundane one, starring a group of now-middle-aged
former slackers at San Rafael High School in 1971. One -- now a
commercial lender in San Francisco -- told the story on condition
that he be referred to only by his first name, Steve.

"I have a lot of clients in L.A., I'm 47 years old, I don't smoke
anymore and I run an $80-million-a-year business," the wiry father of
one said, sitting in a small, cubicle-filled office on the 12th floor
of a Financial District high-rise.

His desk was filled with snapshots of his 6-year-old daughter, his
suit was pinstriped and his filing cabinet sported a plaque from the
Better Business Bureau. The only evidence of his assertion that "I'm
still an old hippie" was the pair of sneakers he wore around the
office instead of the dress shoes he kept under his desk, for
meetings.

Few of his old friends, he said, still smoke pot with much frequency.
(One, now a Marin County father of two who is a sales representative
for a Burbank-based notions company, said in a later phone interview
that the last time he got the urge, he had to hide in the garage so
his wife and kids wouldn't see him.)

The men said they didn't mind telling their story for posterity, but
at this point in their lives, they have too much at stake to speak
for attribution. "As my wife says, 'Where's the upside?' " laughed
Steve.

In any case, Steve said, in 1971, a friend approached them one day at
school with a map of Marin County. "He said his brother-in-law was in
the Coast Guard and had planted a patch of weed out on the Point
Reyes Peninsula, but believed his C.O. was onto him, and he didn't
want to get busted. So he had offered it to our friend, who was
offering it to us."

The group agreed to meet that afternoon after school at 4:20 p.m. by
a campus statue of Louis Pasteur, he said, and head out to search for
the marijuana patch. "But one thing led to another," he laughed, "and
suffice it to say we never found it. Every day we'd meet at 4:20 by
this statue, and every day we'd just end up getting high and driving
around for hours." Over time, the mere phrase "four-twenty" --
exchanged in a hallway, or discreetly mentioned in the presence of
teachers and parents -- became their personal code for "time to get
high," he said.

Steve and his friends went off to college -- mostly at San Diego
State and Cal State San Luis Obispo -- but their secret code lived on
in Marin County, preserved by younger brothers and friends. "We have
postmarked letters we wrote to each other from the early '70s with
all kinds of references to '420,' " Steve said. Gradually, he said,
the term was picked up by local teenagers, and then by Deadheads, who
are legion in Marin County.

"By the mid-1990s," he said, "we started seeing it all over. We
couldn't believe it -- it was on hats, T-shirts, record labels,
cleaning solutions, all over the Internet."

Intrigued, he said, he logged onto a High Times magazine Web site,
found the reference to the Grateful Dead flier, and contacted Steven
Hager, the magazine's editor-in-chief. Though he did at one point do
some research to find out whether the term was trademarked (it is, by
various entities for various products), "We weren't looking for
money," he said. "We never got a penny, and that wasn't my goal -- I
already have a successful business. But I e-mailed him anyway and
said, 'This is the story. It's not police code, it has nothing to do
with Hitler's birthday or chemical compounds, and I have the
postmarked letters to prove it. It was just a joke. Just a joke! And
now stoners have turned it into some kind of holiday."

High Times eventually did an article in late 1998 on the friends, who
stay in touch and still refer to themselves by their old high school
gang name, "the Waldos." But by then, the term had taken on a life --
and a lore -- of its own.

Last year, when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws took up the 420 banner -- announcing that April 20 was "Stoner's
New Year," that its national conference would, from then on, be held
on 4/20 and that 4:20 p.m. was to pot smokers "what Miller Time has
become to beer drinkers -- some legalization advocates predicted the
exposure would instantly kill the 420 phenomenon with uncoolness.
Instead, according to those who have capitalized on it, it has merely
followed the natural evolution of all that is trendy in a capitalist
market.

"Eighty million Americans have smoked marijuana at some point in
their lives, according to government figures. That's one out of three
people," noted NORML executive director Keith Stroup, pointing to the
same studies the government's Stern used to note that two out of
three people haven't used it.

"This idea of 420 being a 'secret code' is kind of funny, when you
think that a third of the population is in on the secret. We're going
to be selling tickets to our 420 party at $50 a pop -- that's how
mainstream we think it is."