420 is the number of a bill to legalise cannabis

The argument

California Senate Bill 420 is the Medical Marijuana Program Act, which legalized medical marijuana in California in 2003. This bill provides a concrete example of a strong link between marijuana and the concept of 420, strongly indicating that the bill created the term as it is now understood. What distinguishes the bill from every other candidate origin is that it is documented, dated and official: it is the one point at which the number and the drug were joined together in a form that anyone can verify. That matters because the alternatives cannot be verified at all. The phrase lacks a distinct origin because it is drug slang that did not originate in popular culture, and slang of that kind leaves no record of its own beginning. Even if some group coined the term, there is no single person who can claim to have created 420. This is because 420 as a thing was created by exponential numbers of people using it in group or social situations to spread it around — a process with no author and no first moment that could be identified even in principle. 420 was formalized as early as 2003, and formalization is a different act from coinage. Before the bill, the number circulated as slang among people who already knew what it meant; afterwards it appeared in statute, in reporting on the statute, and in public argument about the law, where it was legible to everyone. A term that only insiders recognise and a term that a legislature has attached to marijuana in law are not the same object, whatever they have in common. Therefore 420 was originally created by all its users, but the 2003 bill gave birth to a strong, public link between marijuana and 420, thereby creating 420 as it exists today. By taking 420 out of the public lexicon and formalizing the link between marijuana and 420, the bill officially created it — which is why the answer to where 420 comes from is the law.

Context

Senate Bill 420 legalized medical marijuana in California. This connects 420 and marijuana, indicating a possible origin of the modern term. Settling where 420 originates from would settle a decades-old cultural debate.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although California Senate Bill 420 may have provided an official, public link between marijuana and 420, the bill did not create it. 420 is a piece of slang that has been used in its modern usage since the 1970’s. The CA Senate Bill is from 2003. 420 has contested origins, but it is definitive that nothing so recent created it. Furthermore, it is more likely that the legislators of bill 420 were aware that 420 was a celebration of marijuana, and therefore used that number for the bill as a sort of harmless, quiet joke.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The bill did not formalise a link that the number lacked; it took its number from a link that already existed. 420 has been in circulation as marijuana slang since the 1970s, so a 2003 statute cannot be what attached the number to the drug. [Rejecting P2] Having no single identifiable originator is not the same as having no origin. A term can spread through diffuse social use and still be firmly established decades before any legislature notices it. [Rejecting P3] Codification presupposes something already in existence to codify. If the legislators chose the number because of what it already meant, the bill records the association rather than creating it — and the more plausible reading is that the numbering was a quiet joke about a term already widely understood.