Dry, warm springs mean grass fires but there's a grass fire that burns all year long and no hotter than today.
April 20 is four-twenty and that means marijuana enthusiasts will indulge, heading outdoors for safety meetings to enjoy another dance with Mary Jane.
For most, it's self-medication but for a growing number, it's essential medication, prescribed by a doctor to treat a variety of ailments, everything from nausea and insomnia to anxiety and migraines.
Marijuana has spread around the world because it's a hardy plant that even the most incompetent of gardeners can successfully grow in a variety of conditions but cannabis culture has taken even deeper roots in modern society right around the globe.
Reefer Madness, the now classic 1936 film, was supposed to warn the kids about the dangers of dope. Instead, it's best remembered today as a hilarious endorsement of the very activity the grown-ups were trying to stop.
Pot was the drug of choice in the hippie era through the late 1960s, embedding itself thoroughly in the counter-culture movement, from the comics of Robert Crumb to the animated Fritz The Cat movies.
Music quickly embraced the ganja and openly endorsed it. "Everybody must get stoned," Bob Dylan encouraged on Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 and "everybody smoke pot" advised the Beatles at the end of I Am The Walrus.
For a time between 1965 and 1975, it seemed every song was suggesting smoking up. Along Comes Mary. Eight Miles High. The Wind Cries Mary. Rocky Mountain High. I Want To Take You Higher. And It Stoned Me. And who could forget Puff The Magic Dragon? At the same time, the Doobie Brothers were starting to crank out the radio-friendly hits.
In black culture, pot was everywhere, first in reggae and then in rap and hip hop, as Peter Tosh and Bob Marley passed the roach to Cypress Hill and Snoop Dogg.
By the time Tom Petty was singing "let's get to the point, let's roll another joint" in 1994, nobody thought much about it except the censors, who once bleeped it but no longer do so.
The movies didn't miss out, of course.
In the 1970s, two comedians - Richard Martin and Tommy Chong, better known as Cheech and Chong - invented a whole sub-genre of comedy and movies, now known as stoner films, starting with 1978's Up In Smoke. Since then, sparking up at the movies, especially comedies, has been as ubiquitous as popcorn. A young Sean Penn became a movie star with his portrayal of Spicoli, the surfer dude stoner in Fast Times At Ridgemount High, in 1982. Hey, dude, where's the party?
Everybody from Jay and Silent Bob to the Trailer Park Boys to Harold and Kumar have made it hilarious to watch other people getting high and crazy.
Marijuana has become so normalized that politicians are no longer asked if they inhaled and wouldn't have to apologize if they did. Justin Trudeau can admit to taking a few puffs, even after becoming an MP, and still become prime minister. The Harper Conservatives sounded like shrill Reefer Madness lunatics when they tried to make a big deal about it. A year ago, as Stephen Harper's health minister, Rona Ambrose was outraged about the Supreme Court ruling which expanded the use of medical marijuana. Now, as interim Conservative leader, she'd like Trudeau to bring forward a law to legalize pot for adults as a way to manage the pot dispensaries and protect the kids.
In other words, by the time the next federal election rolls around, marijuana will likely be just like tobacco, legal to roll one up outside the polling station, before going inside to mark a ballot.
Once that arrives, the relevance of four-twenty, both the date and the time of day as a symbolic opportunity to rebel by sparking up, will disappear and the prohibition era of pot will recede as quickly into the antiquated past as legalizing booze sales did.
There is still work to do by policy makers around who will supply it, where and to whom it could be sold and the government's role in overseeing its distribution and sales and then profiting off the collected taxes. In the cultural sphere, stoned driving will rightly be as egregious an offense as drunk driving and having bloodshot eyes at work will be as frowned upon as coming back from lunch with liquor on the breath.
Whether you like the smell or not, pot has arrived.
It's four-twenty forever.
