420, 420, Forget It

What is the secret of 420? It is a question passed down through the generations. Or, well, one generation.

420, you see, is the international code for smoking marijuana. Among stoners, it's the most popular time to smoke weed (4:20 a.m., technically, an innovation, I suppose, of combination cokehead-stoners). It's also the most popular day for public or open weed smoking (April 20th, or 4/20). Plus I've heard it referred to as the police code for possession of marijauna, even though anyone arrested for this offense multiple times will tell you that's clearly untrue. (Not that I've been...Geez, you threaten the life of one Pope and people start thinking you're some kind of criminal...)

But where did 420 come from? Why does this seemingly-random number find itself associated with sweet, sweet cannabis all over the country? What does it mean? I've heard several theories, many in the last few days, but I've yet to be convinced of the veracity of any of them.

Here are what some of the leading scholars of bluntology have hypothesized:

• April 20th is Hitler's birthday (this part is definitely true). So, skinheads have intentionally associated this date with smoking weed, a popular activity among youth, in order to spread the Good News about Hitler.
• In 1943, Albert Hoffman took the first intentional dose of LSD at exactly 4:20 pm
• A 1955 Indian film entitled Mr. 420 deals with a notoriously devious man
• In the HP Lovecraft short story "In the Walls of Eryx," a man has a bizarre encounter with some demonic shrubbery at exactly 4:20
• The Beatles song "Come Together" is exactly 4 minutes and 20 seconds in length

I like that last one the best. I mean, it has the appeal of being true, which isn't like a lot of the theories set forth in the Wikipedia entry on the subject. And since The Beatles themselves were so instrumental to popularizing marijuana among America's youth, it's only fitting their influence would find its way into even the tiny details of the drug culture.

But none of these is likely to be the real reason 420 has become associated to one of America's most popular illegal activities (just behind drinking and driving, massive embezzlement, beating the crap out of your wife or girlfriend and, you know, killing dudes).

High Times and Snopes.com both point the finger at a group of high school kids in San Rafael, California in the early 70's. These kids were in a group of stoners called The Waldos, and they would meet after school every day at...you guessed it...4:20 to get high.

But this answer doesn't really satisfy me, I have to say. I mean, could 12 or so high school kids possibly spread this information around to enough people to have it completely sweep the nation? Would that be the first time an inside joke has spread this wide? I mean, yeah, I know it was the 70's and all, and that's 30 years ago, but really think about the power of communication it would take to get every young person in America to know that a certain number represents a certain drug.

Think about it this way...Remember when all the kids in the Bay Area were saying "hella"? That was really annoying, right? And it probably started as just a couple of kids saying "that's hella sweet" all the time before others just picked up on it. And now you've got Gwen Stefani on the radio saying that she's "feeling hella good," so it has spread to everyone.

But "hella" was something of a national phenomenon. It was everywhere. They even goofed on it in "South Park." In the 1970's, our massive media machine, with Internet downloading, TiVO and satellite TV spreading all of this stuff around the world constantly to anyone with the technology to watch it. In the 1970's, cassette tapes were the New Hotness.

I don't know...it just seems unlikely to me. If one of those Waldos had entered the TV business or something, and inserted the joke into a commercial or sitcom or whatever, then I could see how the thing got so popular. But otherwise...these must have just been the coolest high school kids ever. Their comedy was reaching a wider audience than Flip Wilson and Sonny & Cher combined.