IT'S 420 DAY!!! Marijuana Recipes: 'High Times Cannabis Cookbook' Author Gives Edible Weed Advice 20APR12
Warren Haynes, the Allman Brothers Band guitarist, routinely plays
with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, touring as The Dead.
It's the spring of 2009, he's just finished a Dead show in Washington,
D.C., and he gets a pop quiz from The Huffington Post.
Where does "420" come from?
He pauses and thinks, hands on his sides. "I don't know the real
origin. I know myths and rumors," he says. "I'm really confused about
the first time I heard it. It was like a police code for smoking in
progress or something. What's the real story?"
Wavy Gravy is a hippie icon with his own ice cream flavor who has
been hanging out with the Dead for decades. HuffPost spots him outside
the same concert. Asked about the term 420, he suggests it began
"somewhere in the foggy mists of time. What time is it now? I say to
you, 'Eternity now.'"
Depending on whom you ask or their state of inebriation, there are as
many varieties of answers as strains of medical bud in California. It's
the number of active chemicals in marijuana. It's teatime in Holland.
It has something to do with Hitler's birthday. It's those numbers in
that Bob Dylan song multiplied.
The origin of the term 420, celebrated around the world by pot
smokers every April 20, has long been obscured by the clouded memories
of the folks who made it a phenomenon.
The
Huffington Post chased the term back to its roots and was able to find
them in a lost patch of cannabis in a Point Reyes, Calif., forest. Just
as interesting as its origin, it turns out, is how it spread.
It starts with the Dead.
It was Christmas week 1990 in Oakland. Steven Bloom was wandering
through The Lot, that timeless gathering of hippies that springs up in
the parking lot before every Grateful Dead concert, when a Deadhead
handed him a yellow flyer.
"We are going to meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 420-ing in Marin County at
the Bolinas Ridge sunset spot on Mt. Tamalpais," read the message, which
Bloom dug up and forwarded to HuffPost. Bloom, then a reporter for
High Times magazine and now the publisher of
CelebStoner.com and co-author of "Pot Culture," had never heard of "420-ing" before.
The flyer came complete with a 420 backstory: "420 started somewhere
in San Rafael, California in the late '70s. It started as the police
code for Marijuana Smoking in Progress. After local heads heard of the
police call, they started using the expression 420 when referring to
herb -- Let's Go 420, dude!"
Bloom reported his find in the May 1991 issue of
High Times, which the magazine found in its archives and
provided to HuffPost. The story, though, was only partially right.
The origin of 420 had nothing to do with a police code, though the
San Rafael part was dead-on. A group of five San Rafael High School
friends known as the Waldos -- by virtue of their chosen hangout spot, a
wall outside the school -- coined the term in 1971.
The Waldos never envisioned that pot smokers the world over would
celebrate each April 20 as a result of their foray into the Point Reyes
forest. The day has managed to become something of a national holiday in
the face of official condemnation. Officials at the University of
Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, Santa Cruz, which
boast two of the biggest "smokeouts,"
pushed back in 2009
in typical fashion. "As another April 20 approaches, we are faced with
concerns from students, parents, alumni, Regents, and community members
about a repeat of last year's 4/20 'event,'" wrote Boulder's chancellor
in a letter to students. "On April 20, 2009, we hope that you will
choose not to participate in unlawful activity that debases the
reputation of your University and degree, and will encourage your fellow
Buffs to act with pride and remember who they really are."
But the Cheshire cat is out of the bag. Students and locals will show
up around four, light up at 4:20 and be gone shortly thereafter. No
bands, no speakers, no chants. Just a bunch of people getting together
and getting stoned.
THE FIVE WALDOS
Today the code often creeps into popular culture and mainstream
settings. Some of the clocks in "Pulp Fiction," for instance, are set to
4:20. A "Price Is Right" contestant won YouTube celebrity by bidding
either $420 or $1,420 for everything. In 2003, when the California
Legislature codified the medical marijuana law that voters had approved,
the bill was named SB 420.
"We think it was a staffer working for [lead Assembly sponsor Mark]
Leno, but no one has ever fessed up," says Steph Sherer, head of
Americans for Safe Access, which lobbied on behalf of the bill.
California legislative staffers spoken to for this story say that the
420 designation remains a mystery, but that both Leno and the lead
Senate sponsor, John Vasconcellos, are hip enough that they must have
known what it meant. Vasconcellos says he has no idea how it got the
number 420 and wouldn't have known what it meant at the time. (If you
were involved with SB 420 and know the story,
email me.)
The code also pops up in Craigslist postings when fellow smokers
search for "420 friendly" roommates. "It's just a vaguer way of saying
it, and it kind of makes it kind of cool," says Bloom, the pot
journalist. "Like, you know you're in the know, but that does show you
how it's in the mainstream."
The Waldos have proof, however, that they used the term in the early
'70s. When HuffPost spoke with the men in 2009, they requested
anonymity, preferring to go by the names they call each other -- Waldo
Steve, Waldo Dave, Waldo Mark, etc. Pot was still, after all, illegal.
Since then, however, California has decriminalized possession of
marijuana so that getting snagged costs little more than a parking
ticket. Medical marijuana shops dot the landscape, and the plant has
become dramatically more culturally acceptable.
In the spring of 2012, they agreed to go on the record with HuffPost.
"The baby boomers have been taking over. People are dying off. The generations behind them are fine," explains Steve Capper.
"I think I read recently a poll where somewhere like 47 percent of
the American public are okay with marijuana," says Dave Reddix. (In
March 2012, a
Rasmussen poll found 47 percent of Americans support legalization of marijuana.)
Mark Gravitch also agreed to be identified. The other two aren't yet ready.
The Waldos' story goes like this: One day in the fall of 1971 --
harvest time -- the Waldos got word of a Coast Guard service member who
could no longer tend his plot of marijuana plants near the Point Reyes
Peninsula Coast Guard station. A treasure map in hand, the Waldos
decided to pluck some of the free bud.
The Waldos, who were all athletes, agreed to meet at the statue of
Louis Pasteur outside the school at 4:20 p.m., after practice, to begin
the hunt.
"We would remind each other in the hallways we were supposed to meet
up at 4:20. It originally started out 4:20-Louis, and we eventually
dropped the Louis," Capper, 57, says.
The first forays were unsuccessful, but the group kept looking for
the hidden crop. "We'd meet at 4:20 and get in my old '66 Chevy Impala,
and, of course, we'd smoke instantly and smoke all the way out to Point
Reyes and smoke the entire time we were out there. We did it week after
week," says Capper. "We never actually found the patch."
But they did find a useful codeword. "I could say to one of my
friends, I'd go, '420,' and it was telepathic. He would know if I was
saying, 'Hey, do you wanna go smoke some?' Or, 'Do you have any?' Or,
'Are you stoned right now?' It was kind of telepathic just from the way
you said it," Capper says. "Our teachers didn't know what we were
talking about. Our parents didn't know what we were talking about."
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THE DEAD
It's one thing to identify the origin of the term. But Wikipedia and
Urban Dictionary already included references to the Waldos by 2009, when
HuffPost first wrote this account. The bigger question: How did 420
spread from a circle of California stoners across the globe?
As fortune would have it, the collapse of San Francisco's hippie
utopia in the late '60s set the stage. As speed freaks, thugs and con
artists took over The Haight, the Grateful Dead packed up and moved to
the Marin County hills, just blocks from San Rafael High School.
"Marin County was kind of ground zero for the counterculture," says Capper.
The Waldos had more than a geographic connection to the Dead. Mark
Gravitch's father took care of real estate for the Dead. And Dave
Reddix's older brother, Patrick, managed a Dead sideband and was good
friends with bassist Phil Lesh. Patrick Reddix tells HuffPost that he
smoked with Lesh on numerous occasions. He couldn't recall if he used
the term 420 around Lesh, but guessed that he must have.
The Dead, recalls Dave Reddix, 57, "had this rehearsal hall on Front
Street, San Rafael, California, and they used to practice there. So we
used to go hang out and listen to them play music and get high while
they're practicing for gigs. But I think it's possible my brother
Patrick might have spread it through Phil Lesh. And me, too, because I
was hanging out with Lesh and his band [as a roadie] when they were
doing a summer tour my brother was managing."
The bands that Patrick managed for Lesh were called Too Loose to
Truck and Sea Stones; they featured not only Lesh but rock legend David
Crosby and acclaimed guitarist Terry Haggerty.
The Waldos also had open access to Dead parties and rehearsals. "We'd
go with [Mark's] dad, who was a hip dad from the '60s," says Capper.
"There was a place called Winterland, and we'd always be backstage
running around or on stage and, of course, we're using those phrases.
When somebody passes a joint or something, 'Hey, 420.' So it started
spreading through that community."
Lesh, walking off stage after a Dead concert in 2009, confirms that
Patrick Reddix is a friend and says he "wouldn't be surprised" if the
Waldos had coined 420. He isn't sure, he says, the first time he heard
it. "I do not remember. I'm very sorry. I wish I could help," he says.
As the Grateful Dead toured through the '70s and '80s, playing
hundreds of shows a year, the term spread though the Dead underground.
Once
High Times got hip to it, the magazine helped take it global.
"I started incorporating it into everything we were doing," Steve Hager, then editor of
High Times,
tells HuffPost in 2009. "I started doing all these big events -- the
World Hemp Expo Extravaganza and the Cannabis Cup -- and we built
everything around 420. The publicity that
High Times gave it is
what made it an international thing. Until then, it was relatively
confined to the Grateful Dead subculture. But we blew it out into an
international phenomenon."
Sometime in the early '90s,
High Times wisely purchased the web domain
420.com.
The Waldos say that it took just a few years for the term to spread
throughout San Rafael and start cropping up elsewhere in the state. By
the early '90s, it had penetrated far enough that Dave Reddix and Steve
Capper began hearing people use it in unexpected places -- Ohio,
Florida, Canada -- and spotted it painted on signs and scratched into
park benches.
In 1998, the Waldos decided to set the record straight and got in touch with
High Times.
"They said, 'The fact is, there is no 420 [police] code in
California. You guys ever look it up?'" Bloom recalls. He had to admit
that, no, he had never looked it up. Hager flew out to San Rafael, met
the Waldos, examined their evidence, spoke with others in town, and
concluded they were telling the truth.
"No one's ever been able to come up with any use of 420 that predates
the 1971 usage, which they had established. So unless somebody can come
up with something that predates them, then I don't think anybody's
going to get credit for it other than them," Hager says.
THEIR 420 STASH
The Waldos have evidence to back up their story, now stashed away in a
vault in a San Francisco bank. Reddix, Gravitch, Capper and another
high school friend, Patty Young, gave HuffPost a tour of the vault,
where they keep a flag with 420 stitched onto it, letters, newspaper
clippings and other pieces of memorabilia.
The men remain positively giddy about their impact on an
international subculture. "Attention, ladies and gentlemen, the Waldos
are here!" exclaims Reddix outside downtown San Francisco's flagship
Wells Fargo. He picks up a plastic "Caution, Wet Floor" sign to use as a
megaphone. "You are witnessing history!"
And there it all is: A clipping from a 1970s issue of San Rafael
High's school newspaper, in which a student claimed the one thing he'd
want to say in front of his graduating class was simply "4-20." A letter
postmarked 1975, from Waldo Dave to Waldo Steve, rife with 420
references. The official 420 flag, which Young tie-dyed in her art
class.
The bank teller watches as the Waldos show off their archives. "Do you know what 420 means?" Capper asks him.
The teller pauses, then grins sheepishly. "Yes, sir," he says.
The Waldos are slightly conflicted about what to do next. Reddix is
gung-ho about telling the story widely and publicly. Capper is more
circumspect, worried that releasing too much would cost them future
commercial possibilities.
The Waldos are considering a documentary, a dictionary of the rest of
their slang and whatever else might be out there for five guys who
coined the term 420 four decades ago.
"I still have a lot of friends who tell their friends that they know
one of the guys that started the 420 thing. So it's kind of like a cult
celebrity thing. Two years ago I went to the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam.
High Times magazine flew me out," says Reddix.
But "we never made a dime on the thing," he says, half boasting, half lamenting.
Reddix is now a credit analyst, with a side interest in filmmaking that led to the documentary
"Roots Music Americana."
He works for Capper, who owns a specialty lending institution and lost
money to the con artist Bernie Madoff. When we spoke in 2009, Capper was
spending more time composing angry letters to the Securities and
Exchange Commission than he did getting high.
The other three Waldos have also been successful, says Capper, who
notes he keeps in close touch with them all. One is head of marketing
for a Napa Valley winery. Another is in printing and graphics. Gravitch
is an operations manager in the construction industry.
"I've got to run a business. I've got to stay sharp," says Capper,
explaining why he rarely smokes pot anymore. "Seems like everybody I
know who smokes daily or many times in a week, it seems like there's
always something going wrong with their life, professionally or in their
relationships or financially or something. It's a lot of fun, but it
seems like if someone does it too much, there's some karmic cost to it."
"I never endorsed the use of marijuana. But hey, it worked for me,"
says Reddix. "I'm sure on my headstone it'll say, 'One of the 420
guys.'"
Ryan Grim is the author of "This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America," available from Amazon and at independent bookstores.
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Three Waldos -- (from left) Mark Gravitch, Dave Reddix and Steve Capper -- along with friend Patty Young.
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