Happy Stoner's New Year to all my pothead friends out there

I dug up the real 420 story for a zine more than a decade ago, and I like it as an example of how a story grows, and can become culture, starting from a tiny seed (no pun intended) and spreading organically to a worldwide thing.

Generally speaking, I'm anti-drugs.  By that, I mean I think we should live lives without illegal hard drug use, and with as little prescription drug use as possible, only when medically necessary.  But then there's weed.  Many of my best friends over the years have been stoners, and stoners are, by and large, damn good people.  Often not too motivated, but even that's not true all the time.  Two of the smartest people I've ever met were serious stoners.

Personally, I smoked pot for about a year, starting from high school graduation, in 1984.  I quit during the delayed entry program when I joined the Marine Corps, and definitely needed to start back after I was dropped for a lie of omission to the recruiters.  Well, and that other thing, the test score thing apparently had something to do with me getting the boot. My high school friends always wanted to get me high, and I smoked just enough so I never had to actually buy any weed.

I stopped smoking when I moved to San Jose, CA in August of 1985, because I was getting really serious about BMX freestyle.  If I had kept smoking pot back then, I might actually have been a decent ramp rider, since most of them were stoners then (but not all), but who knows.

When I went back to visit my old high school friends in 1987, for a week, between two AFA contests, they got me blazed all week.  Then one gave me three hits of hash, which I'd never tried, and which I followed with two rum and Cokes at the airport, then I flew from Boise to Austin, high as a kite.  My plane flew over a thunderstorm at night while I was super buzzed, that was some crazy shit.  I was looking down out the window, watching clouds light up from the inside with lightning.

Then I never smoked again, except for a couple tokes at a Cirque du Soleil worker party, where I coughed, started laughing, fell over sideways, and promptly farted by accident.  The rest of the circle of smokers laughed for half an hour or so after that.

I'm happy not smoking weed, but also stoked that it's finally being legalized.  People don't need to be doing jail time for owning, smoking, and growing marijuana.  More important, that plant has a lot of legit uses, like using the fiber for paper, in particular.  We could save a LOT of trees by using more hemp paper.  Paper made from hemp, folks, not rolling papers, I mean.

I also have long thought that all Congresspeople and senators should get high before every legislative session.  1) Smoking weed leads to getting along well with others.  But more importantly, 2) if they all got high before the session, they would AT LEAST agree on munchies in 45 minutes or so.  If we could get everyone in Congress to agree on that one thing, it could lead to more agreement in other areas.  Our country needs that right now.

So if you smoke, toke it up, and celebrate this day, a day that's become an informal holiday because of a handful of people and their little inside story.

For all of you BMXers reading this, our attachment and love of the number 43 started with a similar type of story, only about 20 miles from where the 420 story began.  Remember, old school freestylers, I've decided to put on The White Bear's 43 Jam next April 3rd, (4/3/2020), in Boise, Idaho.  Boise is where I got into BMX, but more important, it lies at almost exactly 43 degrees of latitude.  Keep me honest and help me make that happen.  Whether you toke or not, enjoy the day.