420 // Current TV

Death to '4:20'

The term '4-20' is most popularly known as code for marijuana. Not hemp clothing, not hemp oil or hemp seeds, no, we're talking about recreational, spiritual or medicinal usage of cannabis sativa. Internet lore will tell you six-ways-to-Sunday about how this code came to be. Ask yourself, where did you learn it? Did you overhear it from friends or pop culture? Did you immediately understand it meant cannabis? Where you consuming cannabis at the time you learned it? Now remember this. The time has come to kill the code. Cannabis is a legitimate part of our world and acceptance of this starts with using the proper name.

Regardless of current prohibition, using cannabis is a freedom that millions of Americans regularly feel they have. Using code for a freedom devalues it. A benign freedom such as smoking marijuana is no less worthy than the freedom to drink beer, which has no code. The current era of prohibition is nothing more than a momentary lapse of reason.

Back when my grandfather was a boy, his family lived in a small town near Des Moines, Iowa. He once told me a story about how his father used to brew alcoholic ale and such out of his own home.

"Now the time must have been between 1919 and 1933," my grandfather clued me in. One night at their home, his father and a neighbor elevated an argument to a point where the neighbor and his wife became disgruntled and left. Afterwards, my grandfather recalls watching his mother make her husband pour his homemade brew down the drain because she was afraid for her family's well-being. Apparently during the argument, their angry neighbor said out loud, "James, I'm going to tell everyone in town what you've been brewing here."

My grandfather told me he never saw his father so upset as he was when pouring his own expensive work down the drain. No doubt he was sorry, too, for upsetting his wife. All of this stress and embarrassment because he broke a law that would soon be repealed and would be legal for at least seven times longer than it ever lasted on the books.

It will take less than 420 seconds for the copyright application for '4-20' to be filed once cannabis is legalized in the United States of America (if it is not already owned by R. J. Reynolds). There is a lot of money to be made in a virgin urban term like that. For the record, I am no more or less a fan of R. J. Reynolds versus the gun-dealin', smack-selling, alley-way dealer. Both of them are leaches on society, and both are threatened by a legal cannabis market.

A legal market is a taxable one. Given these recession blues, there has never been a better time to revise the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act. We can even keep the title (but fix the spelling - it needs a 'j'). From farming to rolling, cannabis has great potential to generate new local, state and federal tax revenues - $31 billion per year, according to a 2007 Jon Gettman article called "Lost Taxes and Other Costs of Marijuana Laws." And this consumer cash crop need not be imported from China. American farmers are standing by like giant Grant Wood paintings. (Add its "Clark Kent" cousin - hemp - to the market, and the financial numbers look even better. Hemp is cheaper than lumber or cotton because it grows faster, without fertilizers, and naturally in all 50 states.)The term '4-20' is most popularly known as code for marijuana. Not hemp... more

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