420: 'MILLER TIME' FOR POT SMOKERS

Here's a quick pop-culture quiz to separate the hip from the formerly hip:
What does the term 420 (pronounced four-twenty) mean?

If you don't know that it is an international code word for smoking
marijuana - especially at 4:20 on 4/20 - you are not as with it as you
think you are.

The term floats just below the radar of many baby boomer parents who are
totally clueless about the vast underground that celebrates the term.

But parents will hear about it soon.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) intends
to drag the code word into the mainstream. For the first time, it will
hold its annual conference on 4/20 - April 20, a day known as Stoner's New
Year.

"We have scheduled the conference to coincide with 4/20, the date that has
become associated in the popular culture as a special day for marijuana
smokers - sort of what 'Miller time' has become to beer drinkers," says its
website norml.org "We hope to build on that tradition."

The origin of the term is a bit hazy. Some say it has been a police radio
code for "pot smoking in progress."

But Steven Hager, editor of High Times, has traced it back to 1971, to some
pot-smoking wiseacres at a California high school who met frequently at
4:20 to light up.

The term caught on and was popularized in the counterculture by the
Grateful Dead, said Hager.

It is now known "universally around the world by people in the (drug)
culture. And for 20 years, there have been important rituals and
ceremonies that happen on April 20."

NORML's Allen St. Pierre is amazed "by the mass comercialization that has
grown up around 420. Kids can buy all kinds of stuff with 420 on it,"
including clothing, (through the Net) and "skateboards, surfboards, and
snowboards."

Parents are usually oblivious to the reference, said Kane Davidson,
director of the addiction treatment centre at Suburban Hospital in
Bethesda, Maryland. "This is a whole culture with kids." The message is
"even if your adolescent kid is at home alone at 4:20 and he smokes up,
he's not alone. He knows somebody, somewhere else, is smoking also."