The real 4/20 origin story is even better than you'd expect

Cannabis plants
(Image credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

The origins of a holiday for stoners are bound to be vague. But forget everything you've heard about 4/20 being Bob Marley's birthday, or 4:20 being teatime in Holland. As it turns out, the origins of this chilled-out holiday, as explained by Slate, come from a group of potheads at San Rafael High School in Northern California in the 1970s.

As for the meaning of the phrase, 420 originally referred to the time the high schoolers would meet after sports practice to hunt for a field of marijuana plants they'd heard was unattended. "We'd meet at 4:20 and... smoke the entire time we were out there. We did it week after week," one of the men told The Huffington Post. "We never actually found the patch."

They did, however, find a new code word for smoking pot, which teachers and parents had yet to learn. Their proximity to the spot where the Grateful Dead practiced for concerts likely led to the term's (and consequently, the holiday's) spread worldwide.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.