04-21-2008, 05:09 PM
strawhat_luffy Wrote:Happy B-day AppleHead.
damn it'd be nice to have a birthday on 4/20...
Columbine and Adolf Hitler.
Er... not so good.
But now that you've mentioned it, it's no wonder that people kept asking if I wanted to join them for a smoke. For the past few years, I thought they were just being nice.
THE STORY OF 4/20!
The Web is rife with speculation regarding the origin of the term "420." An old yarn has it that 420 was a California police code cops used when they'd spotted someone getting high, and that drug users co-opted the word. Some think it has to do with Hitler's birthday, April 20th -- which is, not entirely coincidentally, also the day in 1999 that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people, and themselves, at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
But the consensus opinion has come to rest on a theory put forth by Steven Hager, the editor of High Times, in the magazine in 1998. Hager told the story of the Waldos, a group of San Rafael High School kids who gave Hager evidence -- letters, and so on -- to show they had created the term 420.
This is how the term began, according to Hager's article: "One day, while (the Waldos) were sitting on the wall, a friend gave them a treasure map to a pot patch on nearby Point Reyes Peninsula. 'His brother grew the patch,' said Steve (one of the Waldos).
"The Waldos decided to meet after school and pick the patch. Since school got out at 3:10, and since some of the Waldos had after-school activities that lasted approximately one hour, someone decided they should meet at exactly 4:20 p.m., at the statue of Louis Pasteur, which was located near the entrance to the school parking lot."
After that, the Waldos -- who have their own site at Waldo420.com -- naturally began using 420 as shorthand for cannabis. The Waldos were big fans of the Grateful Dead, and, as Hager explains in his article, "the 420 expression leaked into the Deadhead community and spread from there."
In an e-mail message, Hager said that the Internet further aided the spread of the term, as "Deadheads were the first big group of Internet users."
From Wired:
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/n...2/04/51986
