Last updated: April 2026
Every April 20, millions of people around the world pause on April 20th and often at 4:20 p.m. to celebrate cannabis together. There are rallies, festivals, record-breaking sales at dispensaries, and countless backyard gatherings that don’t make the news but matter just as much. It’s one of the few holidays that started entirely from the ground up, with no corporation, no government, and no official declaration. Just people who love cannabis finding each other.
The origin story is better than most people know. And where cannabis culture is headed is better than it’s ever been.
It Started With Five Teenagers and a Treasure Map
In the fall of 1971, five students at San Rafael High School in Marin County, California received something genuinely exciting: a hand-drawn map to an abandoned cannabis crop.
The map came from a friend whose brother was a U.S. Coast Guard member growing cannabis near the Point Reyes Peninsula. Worried about getting caught by his commanding officer, he decided to walk away from the plants and passed the map along with his blessing: go find it, it’s yours.
The five students, who called themselves the Waldos because they hung out by a wall on campus, agreed to meet after school and go find the stash. They needed a meeting time. They picked 4:20 p.m., after sports practice, at the statue of Louis Pasteur on the school grounds.
They never found the cannabis patch. They searched multiple times, driving out toward Point Reyes in a 1966 Chevy Impala with a Grateful Dead 8-track running, and came up empty every time. But along the way, “420” became their shorthand. They’d pass each other in the hall and say it. It meant: meet up, smoke, drive around, be alive together.
It was a private joke between friends. It was never supposed to leave that circle.
How a Private Code Went Global
What carried 420 out of Marin County was the Grateful Dead.
One of the Waldos, Dave Reddix, had a brother who managed a Dead side project. That connection got the group backstage access and eventually into the extended orbit of the band’s touring community. The code traveled with the roadies, the crew, and the Deadheads, a community of dedicated fans who followed the band across the country and had their own rich subculture of shared language and ritual.
By the late 1980s, 420 was in wide enough circulation that a group of Deadheads printed a flyer for a December 1990 concert in Oakland that read: meet on April 20 at 4:20 p.m. to smoke cannabis together. No explanation needed. Just a coordinated moment.
One of those flyers landed in the hands of a writer from High Times, who republished it. And that was that. Within a few years, 420 had gone from a regional Deadhead thing to a nationally understood code, and April 20 had become the unofficial cannabis holiday.
The Waldos preserved their evidence: handwritten letters from the early 1970s with “420 Louis” written in the margins, photos, memorabilia. The Oxford English Dictionary added the term in 2017, citing that documentation. For what started as five teenagers looking for free weed, it’s a remarkable trajectory.
What 420 Has Become
Today, 420 is part celebration, part statement. Cannabis retailers in the U.S. and Canada recorded over $50 million in single-day sales on April 20, 2025. Events happen in every state where cannabis is legal and in plenty where it isn’t. From Golden Gate Park to the National Mall, people gather every year to be visible, to celebrate openly, and to remind anyone paying attention that cannabis consumers are ordinary people who deserve to be treated that way.
There is something genuinely moving about that. For most of the past century, cannabis culture existed in the shadows. People who grew it, sold it, or used it faced real consequences, sometimes life-altering ones, for something that harmed no one. 420 was one of the few places where cannabis community got to be public and joyful, long before any state had legalized anything.
The Waldos themselves have reflected on this. When one of them, Steve Capper, drives around the Bay Area now and sees billboards advertising cannabis delivery, he describes it as mind-boggling. They were smoking on a high school wall in 1971 when possession could mean prison. The distance between then and now is extraordinary.
Where We Are and Where We’re Going
As of 2026, adult-use cannabis is legal in 24 states. Medical cannabis is legal in 40 states plus Washington D.C. The majority of Americans support full federal legalization. That’s a different country than the one the Waldos grew up in.
And yet there is still real work to do. Federal legalization hasn’t happened. People in half the country still can’t legally grow a plant in their own backyard. Cannabis records continue to affect people’s lives in states that have moved on. The stigma that accumulated over decades doesn’t dissolve the moment a law changes.
We believe every adult should be able to grow cannabis at home the same way they grow tomatoes or herbs. The plant deserves to be treated like what it is: a remarkable, useful, culturally rich piece of the natural world that humans have cultivated for thousands of years. The progress of the last decade has been real and meaningful. The work isn’t finished.
Happy 420 from Triangle Hemp
We started Triangle Hemp in 2017 because we believe in this plant and in the people who grow it. We’ve now helped thousands of home growers get started, and every season we get to watch more people experience what it means to grow something from seed to harvest with their own hands. It never gets old.
If you’re celebrating 420 this year, we hope it’s a good one. If you’re thinking about growing for the first time, there’s no better day to start planning. Browse our seed catalog and reach out at (919) 410-6945 if you want a recommendation. We’re happy to help.
Here’s to the Waldos, to the Deadheads who spread the word, to everyone who kept the culture alive when it wasn’t safe to do so, and to everyone celebrating openly today because of the ground they covered.
Happy 420.
About the Author
Matt, Co-Founder, Triangle Hemp – Matt has been growing plants commercially since 2013, starting with Endless Sun Farms before co-founding Triangle Hemp in 2017 alongside childhood friend Chase. Over more than a decade, Triangle Hemp has produced and sold over a million seeds to home growers, homesteaders, and hemp farmers across the United States. Matt and Chase manage seed selection personally, only carrying genetics we truly stand behind. Learn more about Triangle Hemp.
