Adolph "Bong Hit"-ler?

Originally published April 12, 2007

April 20^th is a very confusing holiday to me. For those of you who don’t know April 20^th, more commonly known as 420, is the day when pot heads all over the world celebrate their hobby of getting high by getting high. But there is something a lot of people don’t know about April 20^th. It is also Hitler’s birthday. I remember the first time someone told me that it was 4/20 and that they were going to celebrate. I didn’t understand why they were celebrating, but than I remembered Hitler’s birthday was April 20^th and I thought this person was simply being anti-Semitic. It turned out he was simply a stoner.

The origins of 4/20 had always been confusing to me. What did the date of April 20^th have to do with marijuana? Did Hitler’s birthday have anything to do with it? Apparently it started when some kids in the 70’s would get high everyday after school at 4:20 PM. This turned into a codeword for marijuana and eventually it turned into a holiday.

So Hitler’s birthday has nothing to do with 4/20. Though it is possible to look at the celebration of marijuana as being strategically placed on Hitler’s birthday. A lot of bad things have happened on April 20^th, aside from Hitler’s birthday. The Columbine shootings happened on that date in celebration of Hitler’s birthday, The Oklahoma City bombing took place a day before April 20^th, and certainly dozens of white supremacist groups rally on Hitler’s birthday. So perhaps the reason the marijuana celebration is on Hitler’s birthday is so that these hateful psycho’s just get high instead of committing acts of terrorism. You show me a guy who sits around all day smoking pot, watching cartoon network, and eating fritos, I’ll show you a guy who is not a threat to society. Wouldn’t it have been better if Timothy McVeigh had just gotten baked instead of bombing a building. Or if Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had stayed home and smoked a bowl instead of going on a shooting rampage. The Red Army faction actually dissolved itself on April 20^th in 1998. It might have been because they all just wanted to get high instead of trying to bring communism to Western Europe. Maybe if Hitler had gotten high on his birthday it would have made him lazy and less motivated. Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, and him would just have sat around eating bratwurst instead of starting a world war and committing genocide.

There is one thing about 4/20 that makes me a little nervous. That is potheads taking it too seriously. I saw the editor of “high times” magazine on the news once saying that pot heads are persecuted for their use of marijuana as a sacrament and that they are like the Christians who were persecuted by the Romans. I’m not a religious scholar, but a comparison of the persecuted Christians to current day potheads is not very accurate. If you were a Christian in roman times, you were fed to the lions. If you are caught with pot today, you are arrested and granted bail. When you start to bring religion into a cause it becomes dangerously close to becoming a terrorist cause. If you smoke reefer it won’t bring you any closer to God. It’ll just bring you closer to eating a ton of junk food. Marijuana has inadvertently thwarted several malicious acts on Hitler’s birthday, and hopefully it’ll keep doing that. So until next time my loyal readers. Stay happy, and always know that I love you.