The Surprisingly Verifiable Origin Story of 420

The number 420 is one of the most recognized symbols in modern cannabis culture. It is also one of the few cultural artifacts whose origin can be pinned, almost to the day, to a specific group of teenagers in a specific town in California.

The town is San Rafael. The year is 1971. The teenagers called themselves the Waldos.

What the Internet Thinks

Before getting to what actually happened, it is worth clearing out the field. There are at least a half-dozen popular explanations for the origin of 420, almost all of them wrong.

It is not a police radio code for cannabis in progress. The California Penal Code section 420 has nothing to do with marijuana — it actually deals with obstructing entry to public lands. It is not a reference to Bob Dylan's "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" (12 × 35 = 420), though the math is convenient. It is not Hitler's birthday, though that has been claimed in earnest by people who should know better. It is not the date Bob Marley died (he died on May 11). It is not a count of the active chemical compounds in cannabis (the actual number is in the hundreds and was not known in the 1970s).

These theories spread because they sound clever. The actual story is better, and unlike the others, it is documented.

The Waldos

In the fall of 1971, five friends at San Rafael High School in Marin County, California, started meeting after school at a statue of Louis Pasteur on the school grounds. They picked the spot because it was outside, public, and slightly out of the way. They called themselves "the Waldos" — they hung out by walls. The original five were Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz, and Mark Gravich.

That fall, they got a tip. A friend claimed that a Coast Guardsman had planted a cannabis crop on Point Reyes, gotten reassigned, and abandoned it. The Waldos were given a hand-drawn map. They decided to find it.

The plan was to meet after football practice — at 4:20 PM, by the statue of Louis Pasteur — drive to Point Reyes, and search. "4:20 Louis," they called it. They went out looking, week after week. They never found the grow.

But "4:20 Louis" became shorthand. It was an inside joke, a reminder, a code word that worked in front of teachers and parents who had no idea what it meant. Over time it shortened to just "420."

Why This Spread

If the story ended there, it would be a forgotten high school in-joke. It did not end there because of where San Rafael was located in 1971: forty minutes north of San Francisco, in the cultural orbit of the Grateful Dead.

Dave Reddix's older brother managed a Grateful Dead side project and was friends with the band's bassist, Phil Lesh. The Waldos hung around the Dead scene. Their slang traveled into it. By the mid-1970s, "420" had become Dead-tour vocabulary — a piece of vocabulary that, like everything else in the Dead's orbit, eventually spread across the country with the touring crowd.

In 1991, a High Times reporter named Steven Hager picked up a flyer at a Dead show in Oakland advertising a "420" gathering. He wrote about it in the magazine. High Times spent the next several years investigating and eventually credited the Waldos as the verified source.

How We Know

The Waldos kept things. By the time the High Times investigation started, several of them had postmarked letters and notes from the early 1970s using the term "420" — physical, dated documents that predated every other claim. They keep these in a vault at a San Francisco bank. The Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and the BBC have all examined the evidence and concluded that the Waldos' story holds up.

The Waldos are now in their late sixties. Several still live in the Bay Area. They have been generous with the story, occasionally make appearances around April 20th, and seem to find the whole thing mostly funny. Steve Capper has said in interviews that they are simultaneously proud of having coined a term that is now globally recognized and slightly embarrassed that it came out of a fruitless treasure hunt for a stash that probably never existed.

The Quiet Lesson

There is something charming about this. The most internationally recognized number in cannabis culture does not come from a chemical formula, a calendar date, a piece of legislation, or an act of rebellion. It comes from five high school kids who liked to hang out by a wall, picked a meeting time at random, went looking for free weed, and never found any.

That is, in its way, the most accurate possible origin story for cannabis culture. Most of it has always been about hanging out with your friends and looking for something that may or may not be there.