5 Pop Singers Who Smoke

4/20 is upon us. To celebrate the fun, cannabis-loving holiday, we listed five pop stars who smoke weed.

The origins of the date and the term “420” started with a group of hippie teens from San Rafael High School in California, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of getting arrested for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the Waldos permission to harvest the crop.

During the fall of 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint, and head out to search for the weed patch. They never found it, but their private lexicon — “420 Louie” and later just “420″ — would take on a life of its own.

The Waldos saved postmarked letters and other artifacts from the 1970s referencing “420,” which they later kept in a bank vault, and when the Oxford English Dictionary added the term in 2017, it cited some of those documents as the entry’s earliest recorded uses.

A brother of one of the Waldos was a close friend of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. The Waldos began hanging out in the band’s circle, and the slang spread. By the '90s, 4/20 became a phenomenon. One of the Waldos, Steve Capper, reflected, “Most things die within a couple of years, but this just goes on and on. It’s not like someday somebody’s going to say, ‘OK, Cannabis New Year’s is on June 23rd now.'”

With the legalization of marijuana passing in more states, many dispensaries offer discounts to celebrate 4/20. 24 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia have legalized small amounts of cannabis for adult recreational use.

Most recently, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Rhode Island passed legislation allowing individuals 21 or older to possess certain amounts of cannabis. With the exception of Delaware, these new laws permit individuals to home-grow marijuana—however, the number of plants one can legally cultivate varies by state. In all six of these jurisdictions, medical use cannabis was legalized prior to adult recreational use.