It’s 420 day! Over on our main site we’ve discussed the significance of 420 (or 4:20), but we thought it would be fun to debunk some of the popular myths associated with our “holiday.”
- 420 refers to the number of chemical compounds in cannabis.. Actually there are 315 identified chemical compounds, including THC.
- It’s the date that Jimi Hendrix (or Janis Joplin or Jim Morrison) died. A quick check of Wikipedia reveals that Hendrix died on the 18th of September, Joplin on the 4th of October, and Morrison – the closest to 4/20 – died on July 3rd. But all three were aficionados of the weed, in their days.
- It’s the hotel room number the Grateful Dead always reserved when touring. Snopes.com says this is bogus. And they asked Dennis McNally, spokesperson for Grateful Dead Productions, so they’d know.
- It’s the best date to plant cannabis seeds. Well, generally speaking springtime is when you plant anything you’re trying to grow (except tulips and daffodils and such), but there’s no one best date. In fact, depending on which climate zone you live in, the optimal planting time might be as early as March or as late as June.
- It’s the date when Albert Hofman took the first intentional hit of LSD. Actually, this one is true, but since it happened in 1943, and the term 420 wasn’t coined until 1971, that’s just coincidence.
# The 20th of April is the best time to plant marijuana.
There’s no one “best time” — that answer would change from one part of the country to another, or even one country to another.
# Albert Hofmann took the first deliberate LSD trip at 4:20 on 19 April 1943.
This was indeed the case — his lab notes back this up. But this wasn’t the source of “420,” just an oddball coincidence. (For the pedants out there, Hofmann’s first LSD trip, which was accidental, took place on 16 April 1943.)
# It’s the code you send to your drug dealer’s pager.
Yeah, right. All drug dealers recognize a ’420′ page as “Please be waiting on the corner with my baggie of wildwood weed.”
# When the Grateful Dead toured, they always stayed in Room 420.
Untrue, says Grateful Dead Productions spokesman Dennis McNally.
