So Where Did “4:20″ Come From, Anyway?

You don't have to be someone who even indulges in it, but you've surely heard the reference to the time, and now the date; the pot culture has taken April 20 as its own holiday.

No, not that kind of pot.

But everything has to start somewhere, right? So where did this whole 4:20 (or 4/20 thing) start?

From Wikipedia, which anyone who knows me knows this happens to be the authority on everything:

A group of people in San Rafael, California, calling themselves the Waldos because "their chosen hang-out spot was a wall outside the school", used the term in connection with a fall 1971 plan to search for an abandoned cannabis crop that they had learned about. The Waldos designated the Louis Pasteur statue on the grounds of San Rafael High School as their meeting place, and 4:20 p.m. as their meeting time. The Waldos referred to this plan with the phrase "4:20 Louis". Multiple failed attempts to find the crop eventually shortened their phrase to simply "4:20", which ultimately evolved into a codeword that the teens used to mean marijuana-smoking in general. Mike Edison says that Steven Hager of High Times was responsible for taking the story about the Waldos to "mind-boggling, cult like extremes" and "suppressing" all other stories about the origin of the term.

It's apparently a big deal, especially in Colorado, where on I-70 east of Denver people kept stealing the sign for mile marker 420 and they eventually changed it to this: