How the Pot holiday 4/20 came to be and who’s believed to be responsible
Unravelling the Origins and Spread of 4/20: Marijuana's High Holiday
Saturday marks marijuana culture’s high holiday, 4/20, when cannabis fans gather in clouds of smoke at music festivals, celebrate with all-you-can deals on chicken wings and other munchies, and take advantage of pot shop discounts in legal weed states.
Here’s a look at the holiday’s history:
Why 4/20?
The origins of the date, and the term “420” generally, were long murky. Some claimed it referred to a police code for marijuana possession or that it arose from Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” with its refrain of “Everybody must get stoned” — 420 being the product of 12 times 35.
But a consensus has emerged that it started with a group of bell-bottomed buddies from San Rafael High School in California, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest the crop, the story goes.
During fall 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint and head out to search for the weed patch. They never did find it, but their private lexicon — “420 Louie” and later just “420″ — would take on a life of its own.
The Waldos saved postmarked letters and other artifacts from the 1970s referencing “420,” which they later kept in a bank vault, and when the Oxford English Dictionary added the term in 2017, it cited some of those documents as the entry’s earliest recorded uses.
How did ‘420’ spread?
A brother of one of the Waldos was a close friend of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, as Lesh once confirmed in an interview with the Huffington Post. The Waldos began hanging out in the band’s circle, and the slang spread.
Fast-forward to the early 1990s: Steve Bloom, a reporter for the cannabis magazine High Times, was at a Dead show when he was handed a flyer urging people to “meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420-ing in Marin County at the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot on Mt. Tamalpais.” High Times published it.
“It’s a phenomenon,” one of the Waldos, Steve Capper, once reflected. “Most things die within a couple years, but this just goes on and on. It’s not like someday somebody’s going to say, ‘OK, Cannabis New Year’s is on June 23rd now.’”
Capper went on to become a chief executive at a payroll financing company in San Francisco.
Bloom, who became editor-in-chief of Freedom Leaf Magazine, noted in a 2017 interview that while the Waldos came up with the term, the people who made the flyer — and effectively turned 4/20 into a holiday — remain unknown.
