HeadChange

A little history about April 20th or 420

For most peo­ple, today might as well be listed on the cal­en­dar (I’m sure some peo­ple do have it on their cal­en­dar) as a reli­gious hol­i­day. For years, April 20th (4/20) has been a day of non-stop pot smok­ing cel­e­bra­tion. Cel­e­bra­tion for what?

There’s a lot of con­fu­sion about this day. Some say that 4/20 is related to Hitler’s birth­day and the Columbine shoot­ing that occurred in 1999. The fact is; Hitler made no asso­ci­a­tions with mar­i­juana, just because his birth­day is on April 20th, doesn’t mean that he smoked pot.The Columbine shoot­ing also had any­thing to do with the date. The term was actu­ally never heard of until 1971. There have been many of things that hap­pened on April 20th as well as the birth of many well-recognized peo­ple, the com­mu­nity has com­piled a list of events, births and deaths that have occurred on April 20th.

It all started back in 1971 at San Rafael High School in San Rafael, Cal­i­for­nia. A group of kids who called them­selves Waldo’s, started using the term as a code-word for a time to go get stoned after school. The code described the time of day (4:20 PM) that these Waldo’s would meet to get their buzz on, there are more details from recent inter­views of the group of nearly a dozen kids, but who really cares about that?

Since the start of the term four-twenty, it’s mean­ing has changed quite a bit. Con­trary to what most peo­ple think, the orig­i­nal term was not describ­ing April 20th. What the Waldo’s prob­a­bly didn’t know back then, was that they were start­ing a huge trend for those who enjoy marijuana.

Even know that today, the mar­i­juana cul­ture doesn’t use the term exactly as it was cre­ated, it’s still a really big part of many events relat­ing to Earth Day and mar­i­juana decrim­i­nal­iza­tion. I think that most of those who par­tic­i­pate on 4/20 would find it inter­est­ing to have some back­ground on it.

A young mar­i­juana plant