Tag: The Flobots

“420,” pronounced “four-twenty,” has established itself quite definitively in the pop culture zeitgeist as a blanket term for all things marijuana, spawning everything from straight-faced legitimacy to raucous Internet memes. The exact origins of the term 420 are heavily contested, with theories ranging from connections to Bob Marley and Grateful Dead to the number being shared with the quantity of ingredients in cannabis and the code for marijuana consumption. All are untrue. Instead, 420 originated with high school students in San Rafael, California in 1971, who decided on a time—4:20 pm, though probably not on April 20th—to meet at a statue and smoke together. It stuck as a broader allusion to marijuana in general, and now enjoys its status as a flagship term for the drug.