Another year, another spate of news reports about 4/20. If you haven’t heard, every April 20th, there are marijuana smoke-ins across the country, particularly on college campuses. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, 4/20 is now an established tradition. But 4/20 is about more than marijuana: it’s about civil rights and a young ethnicity asserting itself.

Ethnicity doesn’t require race, and although hippie culture was born by non-traditional means, it’s a forty-year old ethnicity--it looks like an ethnicity, it walks like an ethnicity, it talks like an ethnicity, and society treats it like an ethnicity. Ethnic groups tend to create holidays, and it’s no accident that a Boulder group is called "I Swear that 4/20 is a holiday . . . ." Now, there are other reasons why hippie culture is ethnic--it has its own cuisine, its own distinctive traditions, values and symbols, its own music and literature, its own norms of appearance, its own settlement patterns, and it’s often transmitting generationally, among many others--but let’s talk drugs.

Particular drugs often have an ethnic identity, especially if we define drugs in a scientific way, including all substances, legal or otherwise, used for medicinal, religious, recreational or performance-enhancing purposes. Caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, peyote, marijuana, opium, Valium, Viagra--they’re all drugs. Every culture has them. The Germans are renown for their beers, the French for their wines, the Scotch for their Scotch, certain Andean groups for keeping a cocoa leaf in cheek, the English for drinking tea, and so forth. Even when a drug, say tobacco, seems ubiquitous, the way a culture uses it is often distinctive.

Historically, American drug laws have been used to persecute "undesirable" ethnic groups--if you want to go after a group, go after its drugs. It hasn’t been a question, then, of use versus abuse or of public health; it’s been a question of who uses a particular substance. In 1855, the mayor of Chicago, who hated Irish and German immigrants, tried to suppress their beer gardens and saloons, resulting in the Lager Beer Riot--hundreds of Irish- and German-Americans were trapped on the city’s bridges and gunned down by police. Later, the first national laws prohibiting a substance, opium, were written to hound Chinese-Americans. Then, laws restricting cocaine, and especially marijuana, were created to persecute a variety of ethnic minorities: Mexican-Americans, African-Americans and "Hindoos."

The architects of American drug policy have been bigots. Longtime Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger was a notorious racist. Former President Nixon, the originator of our current War on Drugs, is shown in White House tapes to be a virulent ethnic chauvinist, and according to the group Common Sense Drug Policy, he "believed many of the myths about marijuana and tied it very closely to . . . blacks, Jews and the counterculture."

Today, the glaring double-standard between marijuana and alcohol shows that pot prohibition still isn’t about protecting the public: it’s primarily about harassing hippies. It’s a way of discriminating against the counterculture and jailing its members--a pretext for persecution.

On the other side stand the 4/20 people; they’re asserting their ethnic rights. Now, if you asked them if they were ethnic, most would likely say, "I don’t think so." Then again, if in 1850 you’d asked an Irish-American if she or he was ethnic, you would’ve heard something like, "Ethnic, what’s that?" That a group doesn’t fully recognize its ethnic nature doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one.

Of course, some counterculturists don’t even smoke pot, and despite being labeled "the drug culture," hippie culture is about so much more than marijuana. It’s about thousands of highly successful natural-foods stores and other thriving businesses; it’s about the creation of the personal computer; it’s about valuing the environment; it’s about alternative medicine; it’s about grown-up "underground" newspapers; it’s about dozens of our best actors, musicians, comedians, artists, athletes and scholars; it‘s about a community comprising roughly ten percent of the population.

But if you poke someone with a pin, that person will most likely turn towards the pinprick. Since society pokes the counterculture with the pin of pot laws, that’s where these 4/20 activists turn, where they fight back. Like those Irish- and German-Americans of old Chicago, in resisting repression of their culture’s drug use, they assert their civil rights.

Ethnic persecution makes America worse, less American; resistance to ethnocide makes America better, more egalitarian. Ironically, CU spokesperson Bronson Hilliard, discouraging 4/20 activities, echoes Mr. Lincoln’s appeal to "our better angels." Were he alive today, surely that great fighter for social justice, that quintessential American, would stand with the stoners.