[G]uess who’s sporting the Vermont license plate every marijuana proponent would dream of having?
How about the state’s former top law enforcement officer.
Yes, former Attorney General William Sorrell is the proud owner of the state plate with the number 420, which hangs on his pumpkin-orange personal Jeep.
“Four-twenty” is a well-known code phrase in the pot-smoking culture for the consumption of cannabis and refers to both the time of day and the date. On April 20 (or 4/20) pot smokers have held public rallies, including at the University of Vermont, where they openly imbibe and call for the legalization of marijuana.
There’s no agenda, no message he’s trying to send.
It was all a coincidence, Sorrell said.
As a high-ranking state official, Sorrell was eligible for a low-number plate. While he was attorney general, his plates bore the numeral 7. (The lieutenant governor is 2, the state treasurer 3, for example.)
He was appointed attorney general by Gov. Howard Dean in 1997 and left office at the beginning of this year. Sorrell was the longest-serving attorney general in state history.
When Dean was preparing to leave office in 2003, recalled Sorrell, a longtime aide to the governor contacted Sorrell and said Dean wanted to give Sorrell and his three sisters vanity license plates to use whenever he had to turn in the plates he used as attorney general.
Vanity license plates, for friends of the governor, are typically three digits, with lower numbers indicating more prestige. Sorrell recalled saying sure, he’d like a plate after he left office, but wasn’t told what the three-digit number would be.
The plates from Dean, he said, sat in storage at the Department of Motor Vehicles for 13 years until December, when Sorrell knew he would be leaving office and went to get them.
He opened the envelope on his way out of the DMV. “I started to laugh out loud,” he said.
Yes, Sorrell said, he understood the irony given his post.
Sorrell had requested a conservation plate, which the DMV had not done. So he went back upstairs, he said, and requested a “420” plate with the fish signaling it was a conservation plate.
Dean, on the other hand, didn’t initially make the connection. Sorrell recalled asking his friend about the license plates over lunch this past summer at Handy’s in Burlington. Some people thought the former governor had picked the number as a joke, Sorrell said, but Dean didn’t see the connection between the number 420 and pot consumption until Sorrell reminded him of the April 20 protests.
Sorrell also described attending an event shortly before leaving office where he asked colleagues what was the “funniest and perhaps most likely to be stolen” three-digit vanity plate Sorrell could own, and one of them correctly guessed “420.”
“I took it out of the manila folder and raised it in the air, laughing. Everybody got a huge kick out of it,” Sorrell said.
The 70-year-old described the reaction he’s received on the road.
A lot of thumbs up. One person who Sorrell said was clearly inebriated loudly yelled at him “that is so awesome.” Another wanted to know how much extra he’d had to pay to score the prized number (nothing extra). One sister got No. 430; the other two received vanity plates in the 500s.
While attorney general, Sorrell supported legalization for recreational use. For the record, Sorrell would not discuss whether he had consumed marijuana and said he didn’t care what people thought or if they deemed the plate inappropriate for him to have.
“I’m not going to trade it,” he said. “It makes me smile every time I see it. It’s a source of pleasant amusement.”
