What does 420 mean: the story of the number that became the secret code for marijuana

A few years ago, on her first trip to California, Melina Banchero traveled – alone and her backpack – to this country in another country that is California, in the United States. Before leaving Buenos Aires, she had booked a hotel in the city of San Francisco and on arrival, after many hours of flight and anxiety, the receptionist greeted her with a smile, a wink and a phrasing: “We are 420 friendly”.

Melina, then a psychology student at UBA, was able to translate the meaning of the sentence but not its signifier. It was a code he had no way of deciphering. Translated, the girl from the hotel told him that there was “Friendlies with the 420”. But the Argentine tourist did not understand; At first he thought he was being given a special room, the four hundred and twenty suite, but then, upon receiving the key with the for nothing special 119, he realized that it was not that privilege, but a another who did not report to his intellectual. achieve.

For a moment she was silent, tried to pretend she knew what they were talking about, but finally, curious, asked the clerk what she meant by “eight twenty.” “Ahhh! You know, 420 ″, the one at the hotel responded in English, and immediately took a“ joint ”under the counter, as they say in the United States, or joint, the nickname by which he is known in the United States. south of the equator line. “Welcome to California”, Viet, the Asian-American receptionist added, and handed him the cigar.

Melina hadn’t just reached the cradle of horse racing, Al first state to legalize marijuana in the world, but also in the country where a group of teenagers invented a three-digit code in 1971 who over the years has become the global symbol of a segregated community that for many years had (and must) do everything in secret to avoid going to jail: the cannábica.

Every April 20, for many years, more and more parts of the world celebrate something like the “Marijuana Day”. At 4:20 p.m. on the 20th of the 4th, thousands of users of the millennial factory upload an allegorical manifestation of cannabis to their social networks: Instagram fills with virtual smoke and GIFs with 420 animated cartoons, some radios are animated and show reggae, culture stores offer discounts, rappers like Snoop dog O Wiz Kalifa or the locals L-Gante, Wax Yes DukiAmong many others, their “marijuana” is a flag and the sky, if you look closely, turns a little green.

420 (pronounced “eighty”) is the universal code for marijuana, an issue that does not say anything in itself, but at the same time succeeded, at the same time as the discussion on the regulation of cannabis was taking shape all over the planet, to globalize the conversation around the issue.

Today, 420 will be a hot topic. And not just because it’s April 20 (4/20, which in the US is 4/20) but because he is 50 years olds from the moment when, according to the most reliable version, this code was born between five Californian friends of the city of San Rafael.

There is a lot of mythology surrounding this acronym. That this was the code in which the Californian police warned that they were dealing with a felony for the consumption of marijuana (“Marijuana smoking progress”), that 4:20 is tea time in Holland, that there has 420 chemical components of the cannabis sativa plant. But Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz and Mark Gravich, a quartet that in their teens called themselves the Waldos, are the only ones who can show physical evidence that they had something to do with the problem in question.

Based on the story they have been telling for 20 years, It all started on a fall day in 1971, at harvest time, when the Waldos, high school students at San Rafael High School, received a tip: A member of the Point Reyes Peninsula Coast Guard could no longer tend his small field with the (illegal) cultivation of marijuana plants.

The Coast Guard officer himself had made a map for them to get there and it happened to the Waldos, who made the decision to go on a treasure hunt, a story of similarities to the one told in the book “Marijuana, the story”, who tells how the porteño hippies went in search of cannabis plants in the industrial cultivation of the textile company Linera Bonaerense in the late 1970s, on the outskirts of the city of Luján.

So the Waldos They agreed to meet at 4:20 p.m. at the school monument to Louis Pasteur, because at that time everyone could arrive on time after the extracurricular subjects that each followed.

The first outings to find the harvest were unsuccessful, but the group did not give up on the idea of ​​getting this marijuana for free. “We would meet at 4:20 am and get in my old Chevrolet Impala 66 and of course we would smoke and smoke instantly up to Point Reyes and smoke the entire time we were there. We did it week after week“, Dijo Steve al Huffington Post.

The code between them began to be “Louis 4.20” until the number simply survived. The treasure was never found but the custom has remained and the boys began to meet to smoke on a wall outside the school (“wall”, in English, hence “Waldos”). For them, saying “420” was a way of talking about marijuana without being understood by their teachers or their mothers nor other companions who did not share the habit of the sweet plant.

The code could have been born and died with these five friends, but there are issues that don’t have much explanation. San Rafael is 50 kilometers from the large city of San Francisco. The Grateful Dead, one of the iconic hippie, Californian and psychedelic groups of the late ’60s, left town for Mary County, a neighborhood a few blocks from Waldos School.

Nothing was lacking for the dead to connect with the Waldos and 420 extended through Californian counter-culture gas pipelines. Mark’s father took over the rock band’s real estate. Dave’s older brother, Patrick, was the manager of an alternative band some of the Dead had set up with. David Crosby and he became good friends with the bassist Phil lesh.

The Waldos they began to attend rehearsals of the mythical group and to smoke with them. “So we used to go out and listen to them play music and smoke while they rehearsed for concerts. But I think my brother Patrick maybe leaked 420 by Phil Lesh. And me too, because I was dating Lesh and his band like roadie (leader) when they were doing a summer tour that my brother was leading, ”Reddix said.

The Waldos also attended the group’s parties. “We were going with Mark’s dad, who was a modern 1960s dad,” Steve told The Huffington Post. “There was a place called Winterland and we were always running backstage, or on stage and of course we used those phrases. When somebody passed a joint or something, it was ‘Ey, 420’. Then it started to spread throughout this community, ”he said.

On December 28, 1990, a group of Deadheads (as Greatful Dead fans called themselves) in Oakland distributed flyers urging people to smoke “420” on April 20 at 4:20 pm. One of the leaflets ended up in the hands of Steve bloom, former columnist for High Times magazine, the world’s leading publication devoted to cannabis cultivation.

The magazine featured the leaflet in a 1991 memo and began to refer to 420 all over the world, just as marijuana began to be used in China at least 10,000 years ago and has spread throughout cultures across the changing world. The Waldos code became known around the world and in 1998, after the group of friends wrote to a journalist at the magazine, the High Times first revealed that the “Waldos” were the creators of 420.

The code has gone global and is currently a means of “giving away” a conversation on the issue of regulating cannabis. All this for information that reached four teenagers half a century ago about a crop they never found. But in 2016, after researching for two years, the Waldos finally met. to the owner of these crops, Gary Newman (who was already 68 years old).

The man told them that while stationed at Point Reyes he tended the area lighthouse and planted the incredibly famous pot on federal land very close to his workplace. He maintained the culture for several years but indeed in the fall of 1971, the agent became paranoid for fear of being caught. So he drew the treasure map on a sheet of paper and gave it to his brothers-in-law, Bill and Pat McNulty. It was Bill who shared the card with Steve Capper. Newman went 45 years not knowing his plant was the inspiration for a global code, used by the cannabis community from Canada to Tierra del Fuego.

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