International Marijuana Day (April 20) was last Monday, and potheads around the world all got really high at 4:20 p.m. to celebrate. Or protest. Or something. Probably they just wanted to get high.
What is this tradition? Where did it come from? And why is it so popular?
There are a lot of myths about where it came from. Until recently, I was under the impression that section 420 of the California penal code referred to marijuana possession, but that’s not true. Section 420 refers to obstructing the entrance to public land. Not even close.
Some good things have happened on April 20. In 1534, Jacques Cartier set out from the Old World to eventually land on what is now the coast of Eastern Canada. In 1657, freedom of religion was granted to the Jews of New Amsterdam (today New York City). And in 1902, Pierre and Marie Curie refined radium chloride. Those two probably could have used some medical marijuana.
So have some bad things. The CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster was on 4/20. So was the Columbine massacre in 1999, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.
And quite famously, 4/20 was Adolf Hitler’s birthday in 1889. Interestingly, April 20, 1945 is also reported as the last day that Hitler saw daylight before retreating into his bunker.
Although none of these things are the reasons that stoners get together and smoke pot publicly with what they hope is impunity.
The truth, it would seem, is actually pretty mundane. A group of high school kids in the 1970s calling themselves the Waldos started the 420 tradition by meeting at a statue of Louis Pasteur at around 4:20 p.m. Probably because it was right after class let out.
They started the code of saying “420” to mean “let’s go get high in front of the Louis Pasteur statue.”
It caught on, and now 420 is used all over the place as a code for marijuana, and April 20 is a widely celebrated pseudo-holiday.
Coincidentally, Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard successfully falsified the theory of spontaneous generation on April 20, 1862. Up until then it was a scientific theory that things like maggots could spontaneously appear on rotting meat.
Did the Waldos know this? Uncertain — it doesn’t seem like they spent a lot of time in class.
