50 years of 420: The Myths and the Legend

Everyone knows about 420, also known as “weed day”, but do you know where this tradition started? There’s a lot of misinformation flying around but the real story was verified when the actual creators came out 5 years after this term became mainstream. You may also not be aware that this is the 50th anniversary of the term 420!

The Myths

There are a lot of different stories going around about the origin of 420. Depending on who you ask you might get any of these popular answers.

1. Bob Marley would seem like the obvious answer. Some people think it commemorates his death when in fact he died on 5/11/81.
2. Another theory is that it comes from Bob Dylan’s song “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 because 12 multiplied by 35 is 420.
3. For some strange reason people think that because Adolf Hitler’s birthday is 4/20/1889 he is the source of the term. As he has no connection with cannabis this seems highly unlikely.
4. This myth comes from the magazine that is known for making 420 global. When they first coined this term in an article they claimed it came from the police department. 420 is not the police radio code for marijuana smoking in progress (It’s the radio code for homicide).
5. 420 doesn’t refer to the number of chemical compounds in cannabis either. There are only 315 that we know about.

So, Where Did 420 Start? The legend

It all began with 5 Californian teens referred to as “the Waldos” because of their long-term meeting place at a wall outside of their San Rafael high school. In 1971 they got news that a Coast Guard member had planted a large crop of cannabis and was unable to take care of it anymore. He abandoned the crop and gave the students a treasure map to find this hidden field of plants.

They began the search, meeting every day after sports practice at 4:20pm. “We would remind each other in the hallways we were supposed to meet up at 4:20. It originally started out 4:20 - Louis and we eventually dropped the Louis,” Waldo Steve says in an interview with the Huffington Post. The Waldos would smoke some weed and then hop in Steve’s ’66 Chevy Impala to go search the Point Reyes Forest. They spent weeks searching but they never ended up finding this elusive crop.

Although their search was unsuccessful, the term 420 stuck. They began to use it as a code word so that their teachers and parents would not know what they were talking about. “I could say to one of my friends, I’d go, 420, and it was telepathic. He would know if I was saying, ‘Hey, do you wanna go smoke some?’ Or, ‘Do you have any?’ Or, ‘Are you stoned right now?’ It was kind of telepathic just from the way you said it,” Steve says. “Our teachers didn’t know what we were talking about. Our parents didn’t know what we were talking about.”

How 420 Went Global

You might be wondering how this iconic phrase made it from California to just about everywhere in the world. The Waldos had close connections with The Grateful Dead and this is what eventually led to the widespread use of 420. Mark Waldo’s father managed the band’s real estate and Dave Waldo’s older brother was best friend with the bassist. They ended up going to all of The Grateful dead’s rehearsals and parties and used the phrase openly while blazing up together. “We’d go with [Mark’s] dad, who was a hip dad from the ‘60s,” says Steve. “There was a place called Winterland and we’d always be backstage running around or onstage and, of course, we’re using those phrases. When somebody passes a joint or something, ‘Hey, 420.’ So it started spreading through that community.”

This was just the beginning though. It was commonly used by The Grateful Dead’s following but still hadn’t become well known. In 1990 Steven Bloom, a reporter for the magazine High Times, went to a Grateful Dead concert in California. While milling through the crowd’s someone handed him a flier. “We are going to meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420-ing in Marin County at the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot on Mt. Tamalpais,” is written on it. This would be the first time he had heard it and he shared the secret with the rest of the world in an article he published. At this point, they took the word and ran with it. They built everything around 420 and wisely bought the domain name 420.com in the ‘90s. “I started incorporating it into everything we were doing,” High Times editor Steve Hager shared. “I started doing all these big events - the World Hemp Expo Extravaganza and the Cannabis Cup - and we built everything around 420. The publicity that High Times gave it is what made it an international thing. Until then, it was relatively confined to the Grateful Dead subculture. But we blew it out into an international phenomenon.”

After Fame

High Times took this California teen slang and made it into a global event. All over the world, people gather for a short amount of time to get stoned together. These five teens had absolutely no idea that their secret code would lead to a global movement. With 420 coming up roll a joint of your favourite strain and keep a 50-year “not so secret” tradition going.