Mark Megahan
World weed appreciation day is creeping around to fall on a Saturday, this April 20. While every toker knows that 420 is stoner code for cannabis, nobody really knows where it came from. Historians actually tracked down the origin and recovered documents to prove it.
A world of weed
Now that happy weed is legal in all the civilized states of America, 420 festivals bring buds from around the world. Along with edibles and concentrates galore.
A counter culture forced to hide the bong and stash the roaches can freely partake and exchange mind staggering libations with those of their kind.
Most members of today’s cannabis culture know nothing of what the sixties and seventies were really like. Despite draconian laws which could send you to jail for half a bong hit, weed was everywhere.
Unless you went out of your way to attract heat, the man turned a blind eye. Every time an election rolled around, the supply dried up. That was about the worst we had to cope with until the feds started spraying paraquat on Mexican dope. We smoked it anyway.
Stoners soon developed their own code, around Pittsburgh back then it might be time to “fab” or “cab.” Fill a bowl and catch a buzz. In California, a small group of weed smokers had a code of their own.
They just happened to use it in the right places at the right times and the rest is marijuana history.
San Rafael High School
It turns out that 420 ground zero happens to be San Rafael High School. The term was first used in the 1970s by a group of friends in California’s Marin County north of San Francisco. The weed smokers who called themselves “the Waldos” were Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz and Mark Gravich.
According to the legend, “A friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at nearby Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teenagers permission to harvest the crop.”
The young stoners spent the fall of 1971 meeting up at 4:20pm every day. 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.”
Despite their diligent efforts, they never found it. They never imagined that what started as the phrase “420 Louie,” shortened to 420, would take on a life of it’s own. You can thank High Times Magazine for that.
“Postmarked letters and other artifacts from the 1970s referencing 420” still exist. They’re safely stashed in a bank vault. They’ve been there ever since the Oxford English Dictionary added the term in 2017. Those documents prove “the earliest recorded uses” of the ganja related phrase. A brother of the group “was a close friend of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh.”
The kids “began hanging out in the band’s circle and the slang spread.” In the early 1990’s, “Steve Bloom, a reporter for the cannabis magazine High Times, was at a Dead show when he was handed a flier 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 and now it’s a weed “phenomenon.“
