The Psychedelic High Holidays: Bicycle Day, 4/20, and 9/20
Call them what you want. We’re calling them the High Holidays, partly because the joke is good and partly because naming a thing is how you start to build it.If you are deep enough in the psychedelic community, three holidays are already circled on your calendar. If you are newer to it, here is what you are about to get invited to: Bicycle Day, 4/20, and Mushroom Day. Two in April, one in September. And yes, one of the April two is technically cannabis, but cannabis and psychedelics have always shared a calendar, a counterculture, and most of the same group chats.We are counting it.We’re Fireside Project, a free, confidential peer support line for people navigating psychedelic experiences. Each year, thousands of people reach out to us to move through moments that range from curious to overwhelming. What follows is our field guide to these three psychedelic holidays, what they are, why they matter, and how to move through them with a little more grounding.
4/19, Bicycle Day: The LSD Holiday the Psychedelic Community Built
Before it was a day, it was a bike ride.For psychonauts, allies, and anyone who has ever felt something crack open during a psychedelic experience, Bicycle Day is the closest thing the community has to a patron saint’s feast. It is celebrated on April 19th and marks the anniversary of the first intentional LSD experience in 1943.Psychedelics themselves are ancient. Indigenous communities across the Americas, Africa, and Asia have been in deep relationship with these medicines for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years, and nothing that happened in a Swiss lab in 1943 changes that.But the particular culture most of us are standing inside today, the modern Western psychedelic movement with its clinics and conferences and integration circles and 3 a.m. conversations about the nature of ego, traces a surprising amount of its lineage back to a chemist, a bicycle, and an accident.
The Psychedelic Holiday Backstory (It Is Better Than You Remember)
Albert Hofmann, a researcher at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Basel, first synthesized LSD-25 in 1938 while looking for a circulatory stimulant. It sat on a shelf for five years.On April 16th, 1943, he accidentally absorbed a trace amount through his fingertips, went home dizzy, woozy, and intrigued, and wrote about “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.”Three days later, on April 19th, he did the thing every curious scientist is supposed to not do and dosed himself on purpose. He took 250 micrograms, which he assumed was a conservative starting point. It was, in fact, several times a full recreational dose.Wartime Switzerland had almost no cars on the road, so when it became clear that getting home was urgent, Hofmann climbed onto his bicycle. His lab assistant rode alongside him, which is the detail most people forget and the one that matters most. The first intentional LSD trip in human history was also the first time anyone sat for anyone else on LSD. Eight decades of peer support begin on that road.Whether you spend 4/19 in ceremony, at a gathering, on your couch with a close friend, or just quietly thinking about what psychedelics have given you, it counts.
How to Trip Sit on Bicycle Day
If you are sitting for someone else on 4/19, which is its own kind of sacred work, we are here for you too. Fireside Project supports trip sitters as much as trippers. You can call or text 62-FIRESIDE to think something through, get grounded, or just have a steady voice on the line while the person you’re sitting for moves through their own thing. Daily, 11am to 11pm PT. Save the number before you need it.
What is 4/20? The Real Origin Story of the Cannabis Holiday
4/20 is an informal cannabis holiday observed on April 20th each year, widely associated with cannabis culture and communal use. The internet has offered you many origin stories for 4/20. It is a police code. It is a Bob Dylan lyric multiplied. It is the number of active compounds in cannabis. None of these are true.
The Real Origin Story
In 1971, a group of high school students in San Rafael, California called themselves the Waldos. They heard about an abandoned cannabis crop somewhere near Point Reyes and agreed to meet at the Louis Pasteur statue at their school at 4:20 p.m. to go look for it. They never found the crop. But 4:20 became shorthand between them, then shorthand in their circle, then shorthand in a Grateful Dead scene one of them was adjacent to, and from there it leaked out into everything.So 4/20 is, in its purest form, a holiday about friends meeting up to look for something together and coming home with a joke instead. Which, if we’re being honest, is more or less the premise of cannabis.
The Quiet Thing About 4/20 Nobody Tells You
Cannabis is not the substance that generates the most calls to our psychedelic support line. Psilocybin is, by a wide margin. Cannabis sits third, behind mushrooms and LSD.But cannabis has a different distinction, and it is the one that matters on 4/20. Of every substance we track, cannabis has the highest rate of caller-reported distress. Higher than psilocybin. Higher than LSD. Higher than ketamine or MDMA. When someone calls us about cannabis, they are more likely to be having a hard time than a caller on anything else.The two questions we hear most often, almost word for word, are "How long is this going to last?" and "Can you OD on weed?"The short answers, for the record: it depends, but possibly several hours. And no, you cannot fatally overdose on cannabis, but you can still end up in distress intense enough to send you to an emergency room, which is its own kind of harm worth avoiding.Today's cannabis is stronger than it was ten years ago. Edibles hit unpredictably and hours late. And if you needed any more proof that the High Holidays really do belong on the same calendar, psilocybin plus cannabis is the single most common substance pairing we see on the support line, which means a lot of 4/20 calls are really 4/19-and-4/20 calls in disguise. If you want the longer version of what we see and how we help, we have a whole page on cannabis support.None of this is a reason to be scared of cannabis. It is a reason to treat it like the psychoactive medicine it is. If a 4/20 session lands somewhere you didn't expect, you are not broken and you are not alone. You can call or text the support line at 62-FIRESIDE.
9/20, Mushroom Day: The Holiday That Is Still Finding Its People
If 4/19 is the cathedral and 4/20 is the block party, 9/20 is the backyard potluck nobody has posted about yet (well, except Rolling Stone)
A New Holiday, Still Emerging
Mushroom Day is a newer psychedelic holiday celebrated on September 20th, focused on psilocybin awareness, education, and culture. It was coined in 2015 by Nicholas Reville, a mushroom advocate in Providence, Rhode Island, as what he called an “educational day of action.” September 20th was chosen for three reasons: autumn is when mushrooms are most plentiful in the wild, it falls close to the equinox and the symbolism of a change in direction, and it is a quiet echo of 4/20 and the long movement toward cannabis reform that preceded mushrooms by a generation.Right now, 9/20 is mostly a deep cut. It lives in specific corners of the psychedelic community and has not yet broken through to the wider culture. That is part of the point. If you’ve heard of it, you are early. If this is the first you are hearing of it, welcome.
Why We Want 9/20 to Grow
Mushrooms deserve their own day. The psychedelic calendar is richer when it spans more than a single weekend in April, and psilocybin’s cultural moment, its clinical research, its decriminalization wave, its place in countless people’s healing, all of it has earned more than an afterthought.For the definitive write-up on the holiday’s origins, we recommend Madison Margolin and Shelby Hartman’s piece in Rolling Stone. Madison is a longtime contributor to Fireside Project, and the article is still the best thing written about 9/20.Mark it on your calendar. Tell one friend. That, more or less, is how culture gets built.
A Word on TripCheck
One of the quieter things we offer, and one of our favorites, is TripCheck: a scheduled check-in call during a psychedelic experience. You pick the time, we call you, we stay on as long as you need.People who use TripCheck tell us the call itself is only half of it. The other half is the knowing. Knowing a call is coming, knowing a real person will be on the other end, becomes part of your set and setting well before the experience begins. It softens the whole container.You can schedule TripCheck at firesideproject.org.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Psychedelic Holidays
What are the psychedelic holidays?
The psychedelic holidays are three dates that mark key moments in psychedelic history and culture: Bicycle Day (April 19th), 4/20 (April 20th), and Mushroom Day (September 20th). Each one marks a different substance, community, and story, and together they form the informal psychedelic calendar.
What is Bicycle Day?
Bicycle Day, observed on April 19th, commemorates the first intentional LSD experience, taken by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1943. The holiday's name comes from Hofmann's famously unsteady bike ride home from his lab in Basel as the effects set in. Bicycle Day has become one of the most significant cultural holidays in the modern psychedelic community.
Why is 4/20 a cannabis holiday?
4/20 began as a meeting time (4:20 p.m.) used by a group of California high school students called the Waldos in 1971 to search for an abandoned cannabis crop. The shorthand spread through their circle, into the Grateful Dead scene, and eventually into the wider culture, where April 20th became the unofficial cannabis holiday. It is now observed worldwide each year.
What is Mushroom Day?
Mushroom Day, observed on September 20th, is a newer psychedelic holiday focused on psilocybin awareness, education, and cultural recognition. It was coined in 2015 by mushroom advocate Nicholas Reville as an educational day of action. September 20th was chosen because autumn is when mushrooms are most abundant in the wild and because the date echoes 4/20 and the decades of cannabis reform that came before.
Do you need to use psychedelics to observe these holidays?
No. Many people observe the psychedelic holidays through reflection, reading, art, community gatherings, or integration work. Participation can look different for everyone, and no substance use is required.
What should I do if a psychedelic experience becomes challenging?
You are not alone. Fireside Project runs a free, confidential peer support line available during and after psychedelic experiences. You can call or text 62-FIRESIDE (623-473-7433) daily between 11am and 11pm PT to connect with a trained peer supporter.
With You, With Care
Three days, three different stories about how psychedelic culture gets built. Bicycle Day gave us our origin myth. 4/20 gave us our most mainstream sibling and, more quietly, the substance with our highest distress rate. 9/20 gives us the chance to build something new together. However you observe any of them, Fireside Project is here. During and after. For trips that are challenging, and trips that happened hours, years, or decades ago and still haven't finished unfolding.
Psychedelic Support Line: 62-FIRESIDE (623-473-7433)
Daily, 11am to 11pm PT.
Call, text, WhatsApp, or the Fireside app.
