420
(1971 - California - San Rafael High School - n.)

1 - Marijuana
2 - Pot smoker
3 - Smoking marjuana

The term 420 originated at San Rafael High School, in 1971, among a group of about a dozen pot-smoking wiseacres who called themselves the Waldos. 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.

"Waldo Steve", a member of the group who now owns a business in San Francisco, says the Waldos would salute each other in the school hallway and say "420 Louis!" The term was one of many invented by the group, but it was the one that caught on. "It was just a joke, but it came to mean all kinds of things, like 'Do you have any?' or 'Do I look stoned?' " he said. "Parents and teachers wouldn't know what we were talking about." The term took root, and flourished, and spread beyond San Rafael with the assistance of the Grateful Dead and their dedicated cohort of pot-smoking fans.

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.

"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 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.

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."