This is a big week in the altered-consciousness universe. Tuesday, April 20, is, of course, 4/20, the date “cherished by pot smokers around the world as a reason to toke up with friends and massive crowds each year,” as a 2019 Vox article put it. The holiday pays tribute to the afternoon hour, 4:20 p.m., when a group of stoners at San Rafael High School, in the San Francisco Bay Area, would gather in the early 1970s to get high. (The shift from time of day to calendar date works only in the U.S.; everywhere else in the world April 20 is 20 April. But I haven’t heard of anyone trying to make “204” work.)
I’d known (and written about) “420” for years. But until very recently I hadn’t known about the week’s other big event: April 19, Bicycle Day. It commemorates the day in 1943 that the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took some LSD and then rode his bicycle home from the Sandoz laboratory in Basel, where he was employed.
Bicycle Day blotting paper via eBay