Puff Puff … Cough Cough … Pass and Stop! Today, April 20th or 4/20 is deemed as National Weed Day. A day where cannabis lovers can get together, roll something, smoke something, laugh and joke about the lame individual who can’t roll a simple joint (sounds like any other day). But where does this day come from? It didn’t just grow from the ground up.
Check out the story behind National Weed Day, after the jump.
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National Weed Day began back when five students from San Rafael High School in San Rafael, Calif. – as a group, they called themselves the Waldos. During the fall of 1971, the Waldos were to meet at a statue of Louis Pasteur at the school at 4:20 around the same time they would be getting the free-ninty-nine Mary Jane from a plot of plants dumped off by a Coast Guard service member.
How did the term 4/20 expand into a holiday? Steve Waldo (fake name), one of the original Waldos said that they used the code around a popular band named, Grateful Dead, who then helped to popularize it when on tour. In comes a Huggington Post journalist…
In 1990, Steven Bloom, then a reporter for High Times magazine and later publisher of CelebStoner.com, received a flyer while walking in, where else, the parking lot of a Dead concert, according to the Huffington Post. The flyer detailed the story of 420, which began as “as the police code for Marijuana Smoking in Progress” in San Rafael, Calif. Though the part about the police code was later proven to be false, Bloom helped bring the term to the attention of High Times editor Steven Hager, who told the reporter to publish the flyer, which he did in 1991. Hager also adopted the term, so much so that he planned a festival around that date, created a section of the magazine named after the number and scheduled daily staff meetings for 4:20 p.m., according to the Daily Beast. High Times eventually got in touch with the Waldos and published the group’s story in the magazine in 1998.
Don’t forget, today for one day only, the popular film Friday will be showing in select theaters. Not only to celebrate a day of uniting smokers, but it’s also the film’s 20th anniversary. Although I personally am not a MJ smoker, it’s funny to watch Smokey and Craig do it.
SOURCE: Tech Times
