This Year’s 4/20 Celebrations Will Be the Biggest Yet as Weedmaps, Killer Mike, Berner, B-Real Roll Out Promotions

variety.com:

Roy Trakin The origins of 4/20 as a national cannabis holiday — what President Day is for mattress sales and St. Patrick’s Day is for wearing another kind of green — dates back to 1971, when a group of stoner buddies at San Rafael High School in Marin County dubbed the Waldos — for their predilection to hang out and smoke on a campus wall — would meet by a statue of chemist Louis Pasteur on the campus at 4:20 p.m.

to search for a fabled secret stash of pot hidden deep in the Point Reyes National Seashore.The term stuck as a code word for herb culture, and it’s become an international calling card for cannabis enthusiasts.“Retail events, product drops, shows… it’s a celebration of marijuana,” says Berner (Gilbert Milam Jr.), a pioneering Bay Area rapper-turned-cannabis entrepreneur like two of his clients, Cypress Hill’s B-Real (Louis Freese) and Run the Jewels’ Killer Mike (Michael Santiago Render). “I remember being in seventh or eighth grade and getting high at 4:20 every day.

It started in San Rafael with the Waldos, but it’s traveled all over the world. Everyone wanted to get high at that time.” Berner, who opened a Cookies store on Melrose Avenue in 2018, owns 48 total retail locations (including his CBD-oriented Lemonnade chain) in nine states in the U.S.

and five countries, including one apiece in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. He will also be busy with a number of promotions on that day, including the launch of his new cannabis-friendly social media app, Social Club, in conjunction with Weedmaps, the cannabis business and technology website set to position itself as the “Amazon of weed” when full legalization takes place.Weedmaps CMO/COO Juanjo Feijoo notes that his commerce site experienced a 250% increase in traffic.