 |
| On April 20, at 4:20 P.M., the nation's chronic
potheads will fire up in honor of a growing obsession with the number 420.
The phenomenon started in the early '90s in San Rafael, California, where
420 was allegedly the police code for "marijuana smoking in progress."
"The intent," says High Times executive editor Steve Bloom, who
first spotted the numbers on a Grateful Dead flyer in 1990, "was to create
a community of smokers at that time of day to rebel against the police
arrest code." Although a spokesman for the Marin County Sheriff's
department denied the code's existence, the number has nonetheless achieved
a kind of cult status: Burners light up daily at 4:20 (P.M.
is preferred), and they've designated the date 4/20 as their own high holiday.
It sounds more like urban myth, but 420's true believers swear that the truth is out there. In Pulp Fiction, for instance, when Bruce Willis is about to take on his hick captors, a prominently displayed clock reads 4:20; in a "Got Milk?" TV spot, a milkless young man on a bus trip digs into a bag of salty snacks, then sees a sign that reads: NEXT FOOD, 420 MILES; and a public clock at the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco has been stopped at 4:20 for years. Like, totally Pynchon. One story that's sure to make the rounds at this month's 420 festivals in San Francisco and College Park, Maryland, features the patron saint of kind bud, Jerry Garcia. He was found dead on August 9, 1995 at a mighty suspicious 4:23 A.M. Guess what he was doing three minutes before he expired. * |