Story by Jacob O’Gara
Illustration by Edwin Ouellette
Back in the day, when people tended to vote for FDR a lot and on-screen couples couldn’t share beds, anti-drug campaigns weren’t subtle. Produced by public health boards and church groups, docudramas like Reefer Madness meant to scare kids away from marijuana. In an exhortative style, they portrayed the “devil’s weed” as something almost literally demonic: one puff of a joint, and your wholesome son or daughter will turn into a sex-crazed, wild-eyed lunatic who dances to jazz!
Over seventy-five years later, weed is possibly the most boring illegal thing ever. Mainstream movies and television shows (Pineapple Express and Weeds) are centered on it, and the President of the United States has admitted to smoking it, saying “that was the point” when asked during a 2007 debate whether he had “inhaled” as a teenager. Nowadays, it’s not astonishing for politically-minded folk to voice support for marijuana legalization: what’s astonishing is that it hasn’t happened yet. Reefer Madness—the stern and shocking cautionary tale of yesteryear—is now a goofy camp classic, and parents and teens alike watch it with a bowl of popcorn in one hand and, sometimes, a joint in the other.
All of this makes the idea of a “holiday” based on a former in-joke among potheads a weird one. Today is that day—April 20, or “420” (“four-twenty”). 420 is a very important day in “cannabis culture,” as Wikipedia helpfully phrases it. It’s like Yom Kippur for stoners, minus all that atonement stuff. Since it was first coined in the early 1970s, 420 has flourished in “the parlance of our times,” to borrow from The Big Lebowski, whose hero, an avid marijuana enthusiast, is now a cultural icon.
For the intrepid 420-reference spotter, finding all of the nods in the arts to that magic number can make you feel like you’re in The Da Vinci Code or something; connecting the dots will create a map that’ll lead you to the Holy Grail of weed. Not true! But, did you know that all of the clocks in Pulp Fiction show the same time—4:20? Or that the score of the football game in Fast Times At Ridgemont High is 42-0? Or that “It Was A Good Day” by Ice Cube is exactly four minutes and twenty seconds long? And of course it’s a coincidence that California’s medical marijuana program was established by Senate Bill 420. Wade through all the 420 references out there and you start feeling less like Robert Langdon, suave and impeccably dressed, and more like the disheveled, nutty Jim Carrey straight out of The Number 23. Has American culture since the Ford Administration been controlled by a cabal of pot-smoking numerologists? Weed might not turn you into a bug-eyed, raving paranoid, as Reefer Madness claims, but 420 sure does.
Needless to say, the origins of 420 are a bit hazy. Then again, one can’t really expect the nation’s stoners to keep their stories straight if the rest of us think Paul Revere did all that “midnight ride” shit on his own, for example. (By the way, Paul Revere’s famous, now mythical, ride occurred only a couple days before April 20, 1775—oh God.)
The three most commonly cited explanations for 420 are: April 20 is the “most choice” time to plant weed; marijuana contains 420 chemical compounds; “420” is police code for marijuana possession. The next time someone gives you one of these three explanations as the origin story of 420, politely tell him (or her), “No, I don’t think that’s the case.” Then you can be the smartest person in the room by recounting this, the real 420 origin story:
The year is 1971, and San Rafael, California, is the grooviest place on Earth, what with noted party animals Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the White House and Governor’s Mansion of California, respectively. A group of five teenagers make plans to meet at the statue of Louis Pasteur at San Rafael High School; from there, they would go out in search of an abandoned crop of marijuana that they’d heard about. This fabled crop of free weed proved elusive; nonetheless, the five met at the statue for weeks, always at the same time: 4:20. Pretty quickly, they gave up the hunt and would instead just smoke the pot they already had. What began as a time to meet transformed into a time to smoke. What started out as a wink-wink, nudge-nudge code word among a crew of Bay Area stoners grew into a shibboleth among all stoners. Now, 420 has entered the general cultural lexicon, and is known by folk who are decidedly not a part of modern “cannabis culture,” like parents or California politicians.
A long time ago, many in the counterculture had a dream: If everyone just kicked back and smoked a joint or took a hit from a bong, things like the Cuban Missile Crisis would never happen again. Decades later, we recognize that that idea was rather half-baked. The stoner subculture has been robbed of its subversiveness, its uniqueness, now that everyone and his mother are hip to the lingo. The oxygen of any “secret society” is its secret language, and once everyone is fluent, the society loses its secrecy, and deflates completely.
I’m not defending pot culture in specific as a valuable thing. I’m defending the importance of all countercultures. Without them, society tends to be, at best, dull and vacuous, and at worst, totalitarian. Maybe it’s the curse of progress, but seventy-five years after Reefer Madness, the biggest danger of celebrating 420 isn’t that you’ll mutate into a ghoulish maniac. It’s that everybody’s doing it.
