Eyes roll out when someone is talking about weed and when it is about the weed day, people definitely go mad over it. And here’s the day, the today itself, April 20, widely called as the International Weed Day has its own charm and reasons.
However, there’s no stout reason to believe why this day is celebrated as the Weed day, and there are a number of myths, stories and beliefs behind this. Let us walk through the series of stories.
1) The Legend of the California Penal Code:
There are people who believe that this date, when considered roughly as 420, is actually taken from the California criminal codes which indicate the kind of punishment given to those who use or distribute marijuana. However, the present codebook reflects 420 as the punishment for obstructing entry on public land.
Here’s an another version of Penal Code story:
2) The Police Radio Code:
Neither LAPD nor NYPD even has a code 420. San Francisco Police have one, but it’s for a “juvenile disturbance.”
3) The Dylan’s Song:
Who doesn’t know about Bob Dylan’s epic classic “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” and its lyrics turns out quite interesting when the singer says “Everybody must get stoned.”
Now mathematics comes in here, the multiplication of 12X35 is 420. Got it?
4) The Story Of Waldos:
The curator of the Oaksterdam Cannabis Museum in Oakland, California says that the number 420 was a secret code for the high schoolers in the early 1970s.
And according to this story, a group of friends at San Rafael High School in Marin County, California, who called themselves “the Waldos,” would often meet at 4:20 p.m. to smoke weed and get high. They believed it as the ideal time as they will be out of school but their parents still weren’t home, giving them a window of unsupervised freedom. They used to meet every day near a statue of Louis Pasteur, the scientist who pioneered pasteurisation, at that time.
It’s even the number of a California Senate bill that established the state’s medical marijuana program.
So far, after all these possible stories, the final one, ‘The Story Of Waldos’ is the most appropriate one.