It’s 4/20 again, Oh boy! I’m not big on celebrating 4/20 as a holiday. I mean, if somebody hands me a joint, any day of the year, I’ll happily smoke it, but as a holiday, 4/20 comes up a day late and a dollar short, if you ask me.
April 19th is the day to celebrate. Think about it. The psychedelic revolution was born on April 19 1943. April 19 is “Bicycle Day,” the day Albert Hoffman first discovered the psychoactive properties of LSD, and took his famous bike ride home from the Sandoz lab in Switzerland. Also, the Battle of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, the first major battle in the American Revolution. April 19th is a day to remember that sometimes revolution is a good thing, and some things are worth fighting for. That’s something to celebrate.
What happened on April 20th that has anything at all to do with marijuana? Nothing. Nothing at all.
What did happen on April 20th? What is the most significant thing to happen, in the whole history of civilization, on April 20? Adolf Hitler was born. Remember him? What a guy. He cast his shadow over the entire 20th Century, and remains an iconic symbol of pure evil to this day. That’s not something I want to celebrate.
Hitler’s birthday should be marked by a somber day to remember the horrible things the Nazis did, and to remember that people did those things. April 20 is a day to remember that at one time, Hitler was a baby, just like millions of other babies, and his mother loved him and took care of him and sent him to school, and he grew up to become Der Fuhrer of the Third Reich, and to instigate the most ghoulish bloodbath of a blood-soaked century. April 20th is a day to remember that any little baby can grow up to become another Hitler someday, and that’s something every perspective parent should think about.
Anyway, the fact that Adolf Hitler was born on on April 20th hangs like a pall over the entire day, making it unfit to celebrate. Unless, of course, you are a fascist. Fascists love to celebrate Hitler’s Birthday. If you ask me, fascists are behind the whole business of celebrating April 20th as some kind of pot holiday. I think the whole 420 phenomena is part of a CIA CoIntelPro disinformation campaign designed to derail the revolutionary elements of the cannabis counter-culture.
The whole 420 back-story seems pretty dubious. Supposedly, some Bay Area high-school kids concocted 420 as a code word for getting high, because it took exactly 4:20 seconds for them to walk to their favorite place to smoke herb. That doesn’t make sense because: A, Some kids are faster than others. B, Who times their walks like that? And C, Kids would compete to see who could get there faster, so 420 would eventually become 418, 415, or even 412. Within a few years, some particularly fast stoners would have whittled it down to 3:58.
Also, consider this: All over the country, people constantly coin new code-words for marijuana, ranging from “bass strings” to “turf.” all of these terms must enjoy a certain amount of popularity to be effective, but all of them lose their “cool” once you hear them on TV. Code-words, after all, have to be changed once the enemy has broken the code. 420 on the other hand just seems to get more popular the more banal it becomes. Speaking of things that get more popular the more banal they sound…
Look at where this story comes from. Apparently, some of these apocryphal 420 kids were friends of Phil Lesh, the bass player for the Grateful Dead. Supposedly, 420, as a code-word for marijuana, arose within the Grateful Dead subculture. That story doesn’t check-out either. If you saw the Dead back in the ’70s, you never heard the term 420, at least I don’t recall hearing it when I saw them back in ’78, when I saw them at Music Hall in Cleveland, a great venue that only seats 3,000 people, and the show didn’t sell out.
But a few years later, the Grateful Dead sure did. At the height of Reagan’s War on Drugs, suddenly, this washed-up Woodstock era band of drug-addled geezers had a smash hit on MTV. Next thing you know, the Grateful Dead were the biggest tour on the planet, selling-out stadiums and arenas all over the country, and all over the country, millions of drugged-up, hippied-out, middle-class white kids started calling marijuana, 420. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
I’ve never trusted the Grateful Dead since then, and I assumed they were a front for the CIA. Here’s why: First, they were the least revolutionary of the psychedelic rock bands. The Grateful Dead didn’t drop LSD in Nixon’s coffee machine, like Grace Slick did,
…and they didn’t set things on fire, like Jimi Hendrix did.
They just took drugs and played music. That made the Dead safe for consumption, in the eyes of the CIA. That’s why the CIA used the Grateful Dead to derail, demotivate and lobotomize the psychedelic revolution.
By combining pitifully low doses of LSD with excessive amounts of stoned-out bluegrass Americana music, the Grateful Dead turned America’s disaffected youth into mindless party animals incapable of original thought, let alone revolutionary action. The Grateful Dead offer nothing remotely revolutionary, original, or even interesting in their music. Instead, with the CIA’s help, they threw a huge wet blanket of blandness over the imagination of a whole generation.
The whole point of the Grateful Dead was to stop people from experimenting with music and drugs, and instead, make sure that whenever people found drugs, the CIA could drown them in a murky sea of rehashed country-western, bluegrass, folk-rock pap. The Grateful Dead Disneyfied the psychedelic experience, and Jerry Garcia was a stooge who, wittingly or unwittingly, helped the CIA control the minds of America’s youth.
Today, people all over America are celebrating Adolf Hitler’s Birthday by smoking a joint while they listen to dumb redneck music. That’s how effectively the CIA used the Grateful Dead to subdue and incapacitate the psychedelic revolution. You may think this theory sounds like delusional paranoia, but do you have a better explanation?
I didn’t think so.
