Code Words: The Secret Language of the Underground

Filed Under: Don’t Say Weed

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Before dispensaries, buying weed meant avoiding the word itself.

Someone was holding. A friend knew where to score. Ten dollars got a dime bag. A lid ran about an ounce, roughly. In some circles the plant went by pizza, or T-shirts, because plain language got you noticed.

The words shifted by block, by crew, by who you trusted. A phrase that worked in one neighborhood meant nothing two towns over. That was the point. The less it traveled, the longer it lasted.

Prohibition pushed cannabis underground. The people inside that market built their own language to survive down there, long before the counterculture showed up to take credit for it.

Louis Armstrong recorded “Muggles” in 1928. By then muggles already meant marijuana on the street. Armstrong had his own word for it. In his own writings, preserved by the Louis Armstrong House Museum, he called it gage and dated his first smoke to Chicago in 1927.

“It was actually in Chicago when I first picked up my first stick of gage.”

TIME ran a piece called “Muggles” on September 7, 1931. It reported that marijuana cigarettes were moving under names like “muggles,” “reefers” and “Mary Warners.” It also noted Armstrong’s arrest and sentence.

The racial panic in that TIME piece was standard for the era. But it proved something else: the slang had already jumped the fence. Mainstream America needed a translator.

Jazz musicians didn’t invent cannabis slang. They put it on tour. They moved words between neighborhoods and clubs, and records carried those words into living rooms that would have slammed the door on the people who coined them.

Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow became the language himself.

Mezzrow was a Harlem-scene clarinetist who doubled as one of the city’s better-known marijuana suppliers. His 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues, came with a glossary of jive built into it.

His product got good enough that his name became the product. The glossary defines “the mezz” or “the mighty mezz” as top-shelf weed, or anything else worth bragging about.

“The best brand of marihuana; anything unusually good.”

A Mezzroll was a fat joint, hand-rolled, ends tucked.

That’s the whole mechanism. A person or a private joke turns into shorthand. The shorthand survives if enough people keep using it. Mezzrow’s name got lucky. Most slang never left the block where it started.

By the 1960s the vocabulary had standardized enough to write down. A glossary of drug-culture terms landed in the Congressional Record in 1967. One entry: nickel bag, five dollars of weed.

A dime bag ran ten. A lid meant roughly an ounce — ask anyone who bought weed before scales and lab tags, and roughly did a lot of the work in that sentence.

The joint got its own dialect. J’s, doobies, tokes. Hang onto one too long without passing it, and somebody called you out for bogarting.

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M O R E F R O M P O T C U L T U R E M A G A Z I N E

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None of it came with a guarantee. No label, no batch number, nobody standing behind the weight. The bag could be generous. It could be light. Somebody in the chain could have already pinched it before it got to you.

Quality moved just as fast. Good stuff one week. Seeds, stems and something that looked flattened under a truck tire the next.

Finding weed was often the harder problem. You handed cash to a friend, or a friend of a friend, or some guy who swore he could score, and you waited to find out if he came back with weed or just kept your money.

The language managed that risk. It gave people a way to talk quantity without a scale in the room, and quality without a lab behind it. It also worked as a password. Say the wrong word, or say it wrong, and the conversation ended before it started.

The most private slang is the hardest to recover, because it was built to disappear.

In the circles I ran in, pizza and T-shirts meant weed. Nobody explained the code twice. “You got any pizza?” sounded like dinner talk to anyone who wasn’t already in on it.

A parent on the other extension heard a conversation about T-shirts. The two people actually on the call heard money about to change hands for weed. That gap was the entire function of the code.

A word could belong to five friends or one dealer or a single zip code. Three miles away, a different crew used a different word for the same bag. When the people using it moved on, the word went with them. Nobody wrote it down. Writing it down was the opposite of the point.

One code beat the odds.

In 1971, five students at San Rafael High School calling themselves the Waldos started using “420 Louis” to set a time to meet after school and go look for an abandoned crop. Letters the Waldos kept, plus school records, back up their claim to it.

The Waldos’ version is still the best-documented origin story 420 has, even after decades of embellishment wore the edges smooth. The phrase rode the Grateful Dead’s touring circuit out of that one high-school friend group and into the entire culture.

Five teenagers’ private shorthand is now printed on t-shirts, clocks and dispensary awnings. That rarely happens. Most codes die exactly where they were born.

Researchers Bruce D. Johnson, Flutura Bardhi, Stephen J. Sifaneck and Eloise Dunlap went looking for how deep that vocabulary actually ran. Studying users and distributors in New York City, they logged 180 separate marijuana-argot terms.

Their read: the slang worked as a closed communication system, built to connect insiders and stall outsiders. The study went online in June 2005 and ran in The British Journal of Criminology that January.

That’s 180 reasons a tidy glossary will always undersell the real thing. Each term did a job. One flagged quality. One set a price point. One told you whether the person across the table belonged in the conversation at all, before a single gram changed hands.

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Legalization broke that whole system on purpose.

A dispensary customer asks for an eighth out loud. He checks the printed weight. He reads the potency numbers off the label. The guy behind the counter talks about cannabis like cannabis, no code required.

Nobody’s nostalgic for getting shorted in a parking lot. Legalization made the transaction safer and the product more honest. It also killed the language that safety and honesty never needed.

The slang that made it to the mainstream survives because somebody eventually wrote it down. The local stuff didn’t get that break. It lived in phone calls, parked cars, school hallways, conversations built to go over the head of whoever else was in the room.

Government paperwork survives because paperwork is how institutions hold onto power. The underground ran on memory instead, which means a piece of its language disappears every time the last person who used it stops telling the story.

Pot Culture Magazine wants what’s left of it before that happens.

If you had a word for weed because saying “weed” out loud wasn’t always safe, send it in. Give us the era, roughly, and the general location. Skip the names, the dealers, anything that could identify anyone.

Just the words.

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