Huffington Post – by Ryan Grim
Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band
guitarist, routinely plays with the surviving members of the Grateful
Dead, now touring as The Dead. He’s just finished a Dead show in
Washington, D.C. and gets a pop quiz from the Huffington Post.
Where does 420 come from?
He pauses and thinks, hands on his side. “I don’t know the real origin. I know myths and rumors,”
he says. “I’m really confused about the first time I heard it. It was
like a police code for smoking in progress or something. What’s the real
story?”
Depending on who you ask, or their state of inebriation, there are as many varieties of answers
as strains of medical bud in California. It’s the number of active
chemicals in marijuana. It’s teatime in Holland. It has something to do
with Hitler’s birthday. It’s those numbers in that Bob Dylan song
multiplied.
The origin of the term 420, celebrated around
the world by pot smokers every April 20th, has long been obscured by the
clouded memories of the folks who made it a phenomenon.
The Huffington Post chased the term back to its
roots and was able to find it in a lost patch of cannabis in a Point
Reyes, California forest. Just as interesting as its origin, it turns
out, is how it spread.
It starts with the Dead.
It was Christmas week in Oakland, 1990. Steven
Bloom was wandering through The Lot – that timeless gathering of hippies
that springs up in the parking lot before every Grateful Dead concert –
when a Deadhead handed him a yellow flyer.
“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,” reads the message, which Bloom dug up and forwarded to the
Huffington Post. Bloom, then a reporter for High Times magazine and now
the publisher of CelebStoner.com and co-author of Pot Culture, had never
heard of “420-ing” before.
The flyer came complete with a 420 back story:
“420 started somewhere in San Rafael, California in the late ’70s. It
started as the police code for Marijuana Smoking in Progress. After
local heads heard of the police call, they started using the expression
420 when referring to herb – Let’s Go 420, dude!”
Bloom reported his find in the May 1991 issue of
High Times, which the magazine found in its archives and provided to
the Huffington Post. The story, though, was only partially right.
It had nothing to do with a police code — though
the San Rafael part was dead on. Indeed, a group of five San Rafael
High School friends known as the Waldos – by virtue of their chosen
hang-out spot, a wall outside the school – coined the term in 1971. The
Huffington Post spoke with Waldo Steve, Waldo Dave and Dave’s older
brother, Patrick, and confirmed their full names and identities, which
they asked to keep secret for professional reasons. (Pot is still, after
all, illegal.)
The Waldos never envisioned that pot smokers
the world over would celebrate each April 20th as a result of their
foray into the Point Reyes forest. The day has managed to become
something of a national holiday in the face of official condemnation.
This year’s celebration will be no different. Officials at the
University of Colorado at Boulder and University of California, Santa
Cruz, which boast two of the biggest smoke outs, are pushing back. “As
another April 20 approaches, we are faced with concerns from students,
parents, alumni, Regents, and community members about a repeat of last
year’s 4/20 ‘event,'” wrote Boulder’s chancellor in a letter to
students. “On April 20, 2009, we hope that you will choose not to
participate in unlawful activity that debases the reputation of your
University and degree, and will encourage your fellow Buffs to act with
pride and remember who they really are.”
But the Cheshire cat is out of the bag. Students
and locals will show up at round four, light up at 4:20 and be gone
shortly thereafter. No bands, no speakers, no chants. Just a bunch of
people getting together and getting stoned.
The code often creeps into popular culture and
mainstream settings. All of the clocks in Pulp Fiction, for instance,
are set to 4:20. In 2003, when the California legislature codified the
medical marijuana law voters had approved, the bill was named SB420.
“We think it was a staffer working for [lead
Assembly sponsor Mark] Leno, but no one has ever fessed up,” says Steph
Sherer, head of Americans for Safe Access, which lobbied on behalf of
the bill. California legislative staffers spoken to for this story say
that the 420 designation remains a mystery, but that both Leno and the
lead Senate sponsor, John Vasconcellos, are hip enough that they must
have known what it meant. (If you were involved with SB420 and know the
story, email me.)
The code pops up in Craig’s List postings when
fellow smokers search for “420 friendly” roommates. “It’s just a vaguer
way of saying it and it kind of makes it kind of cool,” says Bloom.
“Like, you know you’re in the know, but that does show you how it’s in
the mainstream.”
The Waldos do have proof, however, that they
used the term in the early ’70s in the form of an old 420 flag and
numerous letters with 420 references and early ’70s post marks. They
also have a story.
It goes like this: One day in the Fall of 1971 –
harvest time – the Waldos got word of a Coast Guard service member who
could no longer tend his plot of marijuana plants near the Point Reyes
Peninsula Coast Guard station. A treasure map in hand, the Waldos
decided to pluck some of this free bud.
The Waldos were all athletes and agreed to meet
at the statue of Louis Pasteur outside the school at 4:20, after
practice, to begin the hunt.
“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 tells the Huffington
Post.
The first forays out were unsuccessful, but the
group kept looking for the hidden crop. “We’d meet at 4:20 and get in my
old ’66 Chevy Impala and, of course, we’d smoke instantly and smoke all
the way out to Pt. Reyes and smoke the entire time we were out there.
We did it week after week,” says Steve. “We never actually found the
patch.”
But they did find a useful codeword. “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.”
It’s one thing to identify the origin of the
term. Indeed, Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary already include references
to the Waldos. The bigger question: How did 420 spread from a circle of
California stoners across the globe?
As fortune would have it, the collapse of San
Francisco’s hippie utopia in the late ’60s set the stage. As speed
freaks, thugs and con artists took over The Haight, the Grateful Dead
picked up and moved to the Marin County hills – just blocks from San
Rafael High School.
“Marin Country was kind of ground zero for the counter culture,” says Steve.
The Waldos had more than just a geographic
connection to the Dead. Mark Waldo’s father took care of real estate for
the Dead. And Waldo Dave’s older brother, Patrick, managed a Dead
sideband and was good friends with bassist Phil Lesh. Patrick tells the
Huffington Post that he smoked with Lesh on numerous occasions. He
couldn’t recall if he used the term 420 around him, but guessed that he
must have.
The Dead, recalls Waldo Dave Reddix, “had this
rehearsal hall on Front Street, San Rafael, California, and they used to
practice there. So we used to go hang out and listen to them play music
and get high while they’re practicing for gigs. But I think it’s
possible my brother Patrick might have spread it through Phil Lesh. And
me, too, because I was hanging out with Lesh and his band [as a roadie]
when they were doing a summer tour my brother was managing.”
The bands that Patrick managed for Lesh were
called Too Loose To Truck and the Sea Stones; they featured not only
Lesh but rock legend David Crosby and acclaimed guitarist Terry
Haggerty.
The Waldos also had open access to Dead parties
and rehearsals. “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.”
Lesh, walking off the stage after a recent Dead
concert, confirmed that Patrick is a friend and said he “wouldn’t be
surprised” if the Waldos had coined 420. He wasn’t sure, he said, when
the first time he heard it was. “I do not remember. I’m very sorry. I
wish I could help,” he said.
Wavy-Gravy is a hippie icon with his own ice
cream flavor and has been hanging out with the Dead for decades.
HuffPost spotted him outside the concert. Asked about the origin of 420,
he suggested it began “somewhere in the foggy mists of time. What time
is it now? I say to you: eternity now.”
As the Grateful Dead toured the globe through
the ’70s and ’80s, playing hundreds of shows a year – the term spread
though the Dead underground. Once High Times got hip to it, the magazine
helped take it global.
“I started incorporating it into everything we
were doing,” High Times editor Steve Hager told the Huffington Post. “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.”
Sometime in the early ’90s, High Times wisely purchased the web domain 420.com.
Bloom, the reporter who first stumbled on it,
gives High Times less credit. “We posted that flyer and then we started
to see little references to it. It wasn’t really much of High Times
doing,” he says. “We weren’t really pushing it that hard, just kind of
referencing the phrase.”
The Waldos say that within a few years the term
had spread throughout San Rafael and was cropping up elsewhere in the
state. By the early ’90s, it had penetrated deep enough that Dave and
Steve started hearing people use it in unexpected places – Ohio,
Florida, Canada – and spotted it painted on signs and etched into park
benches.
In 1997, the Waldos decided to set the record straight and got in touch with High Times.
“They said, ‘The fact is, there is no 420
[police] code in California. You guys ever look it up?'” Blooms recalls.
He had to admit that no, he had never looked it up. Hager flew out to
San Rafael, met the Waldos, examined their evidence, spoke with others
in town, and concluded they were telling the truth.
Hager still believes them. “No one’s ever been
able to come up with any use of 420 that predates the 1971 usage, which
they had established. So unless somebody can come up with something that
predates them, then I don’t think anybody’s going to get credit for it
other than them,” he says.
“We never made a dime on the thing,” says Dave, half boasting, half lamenting.
He does take pride in his role, though. “I still
have a lot of friends who tell their friends that they know one of the
guys that started the 420 thing. So it’s kind of like a cult celebrity
thing. Two years ago I went to the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. High Times
magazine flew me out,” says Dave.
Dave is now a credit analyst and works for
Steve, who owns a specialty lending institution and lost money to the
con artist Bernie Madoff. He spends more time today, he says, composing
angry letters to the SEC than he does getting high.
The other three Waldos have also been
successful, Steve says. One is head of marketing for a Napa Valley
winery. Another is in printing and graphics. A third works for a roofing
and gutter company. “He’s like, head of their gutter division,” says
Steve, who keeps in close touch with them all.
“I’ve got to run a business. I’ve got to stay
sharp,” says Steve, explaining why he rarely smokes pot anymore. “Seems
like everybody I know who smokes daily, or many times in a week, it
seems like there’s always something going wrong with their life,
professionally, or in their relationships, or financially or something.
It’s a lot of fun, but it seems like if someone does it too much,
there’s some karmic cost to it.”
“I never endorsed the use of marijuana. But hey,
it worked for me,” says Waldo Dave. “I’m sure on my headstone it’ll
say: ‘One of the 420 guys.'”
Ryan Grim is the author of This Is Your Country
On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America, also available
at independent bookstores.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/20/420-meaning-the-true-stor_n_543854.html
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