The origins of 420

Once upon a time there were five High School students who would meet at 4:20 pm (two of the five friends had football practice) in front of the stature of Louis Pasteur in their San Rafael High School’s campus. Legend says that they became known as the “WALDOS” because of the original meeting place was outside the school’s wall. Others elicit a self-naming ritual to describe themselves, being the name Waldos a term coined by comedian Buddy Hackett to describe odd people. One day in 1971, a non-Waldo classmate came to the wall with a story and a map. The map was about the location of a marijuana garden in the forest of Point Reyes National Seashore. The pot belonged to the classmate’s brother in law, a Coast Guard reservist stationed at Point Reyes who would renounce to the pot patch and will give ownership to the Waldos. The “Cinco Amigos” would meet in front of the statue of Louis Pasteur at 4:20 pm to discuss how to proceed in the discovery. They drove for 45 minutes to the coast, in a 1966 Chevy Impala, listening to a Grateful Dead 8-track tape and passed around joints. They did not find the patch that day and the friends will pass each other in the halls and whisper “420 Louis” to each other whenever a meeting was needed. The patch was never found, they were probably to stoned! So “420Louis” was the code for getting high at the stature after school and later on “let’s get high anywhere”

DISSEMINATION OF 420 CODE

One of the five students older brother was a friend of Phil Lesh, a Grateful Dead band member and that lead to backstage passes and smoking sessions with herewith members who picked up the code. In the late 1980s flyers were circulated at the Grateful Dead concerts proclaiming 420 as the password of the stoner culture. The flyers erroneously explained that 420 was the police code for marijuana smoking in progress. Due to different and erroneous versions circulating at that time The five friends decided to keep the records of the origin of the term in a rented safe deposit box in a San  Francisco bank. The address of the bank just happened to be 420 Montgomery Street. That to me is an irrefutable proof that God was talking to them. Links between youth culture and the number surfaced after the April 20, 1999 Columbine massacre, when some speculated. That the shooters selected that day to coincide either with Hitler’s birthday or some date of unspecified importance to teenage youth culture.

There are other theories about the origin of 420:
– There are 420 chemical components in the marijuana (false).
– Grateful Dead always stayed in room 420 during tours (false as per their manager).

The code often appears in popular culture and mainstream settings. All of the clocks in Pulp Fiction are set to 4:20. The California medical marijuana bill was named SB420. As for the WALDOS, they remain in California and they are still friends. Two of them work in the financial world and lost a lot of money to the con artist Bernie Madoff. The other three are also successful, as head of
marketing for a Napa Valley winery, another in printing and graphics and the third one works for a roofing and gutter company.