Saturday marks marijuana culture’s high holiday, 4/20, when college students gather — at 4:20 p.m. — in clouds of smoke on campus quads and pot shops in legal-weed states thank their customers with discounts.

This year’s edition provides an occasion for activists to reflect on how far their movement has come, with recreational pot now allowed in nearly half the states and the nation’s capital. Many states have instituted “social equity” measures to help communities of color, harmed the most by the drug war, reap financial benefits from legalization. And the White House has shown an openness to marijuana reform.

(T)he prevailing explanation is that it started in the 1970s with a group of bell-bottomed buddies from San Rafael High School, in California’s Marin County north of San Francisco, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at nearby Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest the crop, the story goes.

During fall 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint and head out to search for the weed patch. They never did find it, but their private lexicon — “420 Louie” and later just “420” — would take on a life of its own.

  • Flying Squid
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    27 months ago

    I never said people weren’t allowed to.

          • Flying Squid
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            7 months ago

            I’m the one telling people what I feel it should be and how I will not celebrate it. I don’t care what you or anyone else does.

            Why are you insulting me? I didn’t insult you.

              • Flying Squid
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                37 months ago

                I think it should be another way, but it won’t be, so I don’t care.

                Can you really not carry on a conversation without insulting people? I don’t believe for a minute that you’d hurl insults at a stranger like this if you could look them in the eye.

          • Flying Squid
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            -47 months ago

            That was not my opinion. Maybe don’t speak on my behalf?

              • Flying Squid
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                -17 months ago

                The entire post was only about what I personally felt and what I personally should do. I made that absolutely clear in the entire post. I never suggested that anyone else should do anything. At all.

                I certainly never suggested that anyone else shouldn’t have a party.

                Did you even read my comment to the end or did you just jump in early so you could put words in my mouth?

                  • Flying Squid
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                    17 months ago

                    Yes. That is my opinion of what it should be even though it isn’t. Why am I not allowed to have that opinion?