420

[Joan Houston Hall]

When I was a student at San Rafael High School in the early sixties, there
was the "12:15 track team."  This was composed of all the smokers, who were
allowed to race across the parking lot to a sidewalk just off campus to
smoke at 12:15, for the last 15 minutes of the lunch hour.  So the 4:20
suggestion indeed sounds plausible.


At 09:18 AM 5/10/2001 -0400, you wrote:
>        The May 2001 issue of High Times magazine has an article on page 16
>on the origin of the term "420," which refers to getting high on marijuana.
>(I am so non au courant that I did not know this.)  The article claims that
>it originated at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, CA, in the early
>1970s as a code for smoking marijuana at 4:20 pm (70 minutes after school
>dismissal).  The Grateful Dead were long based out of San Rafael, and the
>phrase was used on a flyer at Grateful Dead shows in 1990, leading to its
>wider use.  The article debunks the claim that 420 is a police code for
>marijuana use in progress.
>
>        If anyone is interested in the actual article, let me know by
>private email and I'll forward it to you.
>
>John Baker
>jbaker at stradley.com
>