Why is the time 4:20 associated with marijuana?

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The code emerged in 1971 in the US city of San Rafael, California. It was created by a group of students who would meet on a wall outside the school to talk and smoke marijuana. Based on this habit, they earned the nickname “Waldos” (“muro”, in English, is “wall”).

That year, the kids found an awesome piece of junk: a handy map that would lead to a marijuana field in Point Reyes, outside San Francisco. To go in search of the treasure without warning, they used the encrypted message “4:20 Louis”. It was the signal to meet at 4:20 pm in front of the statue of French chemist Louis Pasteur.

They did several searches and didn’t find a foot, but the 4:20 thing started to act as code for the smoking bang. And took it. Like a candle lighting a curtain, it was adopted by friends and acquaintances of the Waldos until it reached fans of the Californian rock band Grateful Dead (from hits like “Touch of Gray” and “Truckin’”).

At the group’s concerts, pamphlets were circulated using the slang, already famous in the state. In December 1990, one of these pamphlets was discovered by Steve Bloom, editor of High Times, one of the first marijuana magazines in the US. It was a bomb! The publication reproduced the term in May 1991 and, from then on, it won the world.