Saturday marks marijuana culture’s major holiday, April 20, when college students gather, at 4:20 p.m., in clouds of smoke on campus quads and marijuana stores in the states. where marijuana is legal they thank their customers with discounts.
This year’s edition provides an opportunity for activists to reflect on how far their movement has come, now that recreational marijuana is allowed in nearly half of the states and the nation’s capital. Many states have instituted “social equity” measures to help communities of color, those most harmed by the war on drugs, reap financial benefits from legalization. And the White House has shown openness to marijuana reform.
Here’s a look at the history of 4/20:
Why 4/20?
The origins of the date, and the term “420” in general, were long unclear. Some claimed that it referred to a police code for marijuana possession or that it was derived from Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” with its refrain of “Everybody’s gotta get high” (420 is the product of 12 by 35).
But the prevailing explanation is that it began in the 1970s with a group of bell-bottom friends from San Rafael High School in California’s Marin County, north of San Francisco, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of being arrested for a plot of cannabis he was growing in the woods near Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest, so the story goes.
During the fall of 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would gather at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint, and go out to find the patch. of weed. They never found him, but his private lexicon – “420 Louie” and then simply “420” – would take on a life of its own.
The Waldos kept postmarked letters and other artifacts from the 1970s that referenced “420,” which they now keep in a bank vault, and when the Oxford English Dictionary added the term in 2017, it cited some of those documents as the first recorded uses.
How did the ‘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, now HuffPost. The Waldos began to frequent the gang 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 “gather at 4:20 on 4/20.” for 420-ing in Marin.” County at the Bolinas Ridge Sunset Site on Mount Tamalpais.” High Times published it.
“It’s a phenomenon,” one of the Waldos, Steve Capper, now 69, once told The Associated Press. “Most things die within a couple of years, but this goes on and on. It’s not like one day someone is going to say, ‘Okay, Cannabis New Year is now June 23.'”
While the Waldos came up with the term, the people who made the flyer distributed at the Dead show, and who effectively turned April 20 into a holiday, remain unknown.
How is it celebrated?
With marijuana, of course.
Some celebrations are larger than others: The Mile High 420 Festival in Denver, for example, typically draws thousands of people and describes itself as the largest free 4/20 event in the world. Hippie Hill in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park has also drawn large crowds, but the gathering was canceled this year, with organizers citing a lack of financial sponsorship and city budget cuts.
University quads and statehouse lawns are also known for hosting 4/20 celebrations, with the University of Colorado Boulder historically being one of the largest, though not so much since administrators banned the annual smoke vent more than one of each.
Some breweries make 420-themed beers, but without blends, including SweetWater Brewing in Atlanta, which is hosting a 420 music festival this weekend and whose founders went to the University of Colorado.
Lagunitas Brewing in Petaluma, California, releases its “Waldos’ Special Ale” each year on April 20 in partnership with the coiners of the term. That’s where the Waldos will be this Saturday to sample the beer, for which they chose “hops that smell and taste like the best marijuana,” said one Waldo, Dave Reddix, by email.
April 20 has also become a major industry event, where suppliers gather to test each other’s products.
Joseph DuPuis, co-founder of Doc & Yeti Urban Farms, a licensed cannabis producer, views a growing area in Tumwater, Washington, on March 15, 2023. (Eugene Johnson/AP Photo, File)
The politics
The number of states allowing recreational marijuana has increased to 24 after recent legalization campaigns were successful in Ohio, Minnesota and Delaware. Fourteen more states allow it for medical purposes, including Kentucky, where medical marijuana legislation passed last year will take effect in 2025. Other states only allow products low in THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, for certain conditions medical.
But marijuana remains illegal under federal law. It is listed along with drugs like heroin in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, meaning it has no federally accepted medical use and has a high potential for abuse.
However, the Biden administration has taken some steps toward marijuana reform. The president has pardoned thousands of people who were convicted of “simple possession” of federal and District of Columbia lands.
Last year, the Department of Health and Human Services recommended to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that marijuana be reclassified into Schedule III, which would affirm its medical use under federal law.
According to a Gallup poll last fall, 70 percent of adults support legalization, the highest level ever recorded by the polling firm and more than double the roughly 30 percent who supported it in 2000.
Vivian McPeak, who helped found Seattle’s Hempfest more than three decades ago, reflected on how far the marijuana industry has evolved in her lifetime.
“It’s surreal to walk past stores that sell cannabis,” he said. “A lot of people laughed at us and said, ‘This will never happen.’”
Police handcuff a suspect during a drug raid in Miami, May 18, 1979. (Al Diaz, / AP Photo, File)
What does it mean?
McPeak described 4/20 these days as a “mixed bag.” Despite the progress of the legalization movement, many small producers are struggling to compete against large producers, he said, and many Americans are still behind bars for marijuana convictions.
“We can celebrate the victories we have won and we can also strategize and organize to advance the cause,” he said. “Despite the kind of complacency some people may feel, we still have work to do. We have to keep earning that shoe leather until we get everyone out of jails and prisons.”
For the Waldos, 4/20 means, above all, a good time.
“We are not politicians. “We are jokers,” Capper said. “But there was a time that we cannot forget, when it was secret, furtive. …The energy of the time was more charged, in some ways more exciting.
“I’m not saying that’s all right; it’s not good that they put people in jail,” he continued. “You don’t want to go back there.”
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Associated Press writer Claire Rush contributed from Portland, Oregon.