Why is pot called 420

The legend of the Waldos. According to Chris Conrad, curator of the Oaksterdam Cannabis Museum in Oakland, California, started as a secret code among high schoolers in the early s. For them, it was an ideal time: They were out of school but their parents still weren't home, giving them a window of unsupervised freedom. They met at that time every day near a statue of Louis Pasteur, the scientist who pioneered pasteurization. CNN Money: 10 things to know about legal pot.

The time became a code for them to use in front of their unsuspecting parents, and gradually spread from there -- possibly via Grateful Dead followers -- across California and beyond.

It's even the number of a California Senate bill that established the state's medial marijuana program. That autumn, the five teenagers came into possession of a hand-drawn map supposedly locating a marijuana crop at Point Reyes, north-west of San Francisco. The friends - who called themselves the Waldos because they used to hang out by a wall - met after school, at pm, and drove off on their treasure hunt.

They never found the plot. So did friends and acquaintances, who included - at a couple of steps removed - members of the Grateful Dead rock band. The most accepted root of the high holiday starts with some high school kids in San Rafael, California, back in Sloman says the phrase started as " Louis," meaning "at [they'd] meet by the Louis Pasteur statue outside the high school" and get high. It turns out one of these kids' older brothers was friends with Grateful Dead's bassist, Phil Lesh.

And the group—"they called themselves 'Waldos,' " Sloman says—started getting high with the Grateful Dead at their rehearsal studio in San Rafael. Around , High Times magazine senior editor Steve Bloom saw a flyer at a Dead concert that "told the story of , and that was news to me," he wrote in a copy of the magazine obtained by the Huffington Post.

Bloom wrote that "" was originally California police code for smoking pot. But it turns out the story on the flyer was horseshit. Bloom says "after about five years," the Waldos story emerged. Which is "about five years" if you're baked. So it checks out. This one's pretty simple. Oh how nice this would be, to trace the high holiday back to one of the best artists to listen to while engaging in the devil's lettuce. Major rallies occur across the country, particularly in places like Colorado, California, and 15 other states where marijuana has been legalized.

But as support for marijuana legalization grows, the festivities are becoming more mainstream and commercialized. As a result, marijuana businesses are looking to leverage the holiday to find more ways to sell and market their products.

And that tells us a lot about how cannabis is changing in America as marijuana is legalized. Sign up to receive our newsletter each Friday. Why April 20? Steven Hager, a former editor of the marijuana-focused news outlet High Times , told the New York Times that the holiday came out of a ritual started by a group of high school students in the s.

As Hager explained, a group of Californian teenagers ritualistically smoked marijuana every day at pm. The ritual spread, and soon became code for smoking marijuana. Another theory is that there are active chemicals in marijuana, hence an obvious connection between the drug and the number. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling. Some people just want to get high and have fun.