Happy 4/20! Celebrate your love of marijuana by blazing up; or, er, uhm, whatever it is you want to do.

Seriously, I do not understand why people think 4/20 is a special day to toke reefer. I know that people think 4:20, either a.m. or p.m., is pot hour thanks in part to “tea time” in the United Kingdom and the subsequent labeling of marijuana clubs in the 1920s as “tea pads,” but I just don’t understand what the allure is of celebrating that time of day or particularly the date of April 20, apart from for fun.

It was funny or “cool” back in high school, but as we age, the rebellious youth angle is fairly unsubstantial. And I don’t understand why we should have a special day — even if it isn’t a “real” holiday — dedicated to something trivial. It isn’t as if the pot heads of the world get together on April 20 to remember the brave, stoned souls who died in wars or for causes.

Today, people smoke pot because it is fun. Maybe some older folks are still trying to prove a point, and they can try to do so, but for you college-age kids, don’t try to make it into anything more than an excuse to have fun and be high.

Back in the day, when hippies roamed the Earth and soldiers were being sent to die needlessly in countries that didn’t want them — oh wait, maybe it hasn’t changed too much — marijuana was a means of rebelling.

The 1960s were a time for peace and love and getting high for reasons I can no more expound upon than someone who was a teenager from then would understand why today we enjoy “Jersey Shore.”

But widespread enjoyment of “Jersey Shore” is overexaggerated, and similarly, so was the widespread drug use so many people want to believe the 1960s to have been.

In a 1969 Gallup poll — which was the first year Gallup had asked about illegal drug use — only 4 percent of adults said they had tried marijuana. This did not count the number of people who simply didn’t trust polls and so didn’t answer questions, or the teenagers smoking it — but still, 34 percent said they didn’t even know the effects of marijuana use.

Today most people know what happens when you use marijuana: you order pizza, watch bad comedy and take a nap. No wonder marijuana is so appealing to college students.

Back to history, the government started into its bad big marijuana scare tactics and found that it was generally only effective on people who had never tried or been in contact with drugs; big surprise there.

As Vietnam continued, hippies and other youth used marijuana as a way to fight authority. Sit-in protests, by what I have read, were pretty boring, and marijuana likely helped pass the time.

OK, fine, pot had other rebellious reasons other than passing time, such as the fight against it being generally propaganda-driven and the amount of jail time given for marijuana possession being so outlandishly high that getting high to prove a point became a powerful counter-culture movement, but really, the reasons varied from person to person.

Rounding down your history lesson, which has meandered about much after the fashion of weed conversations do, the 1970s still saw pot as a means of fighting authority and sticking it to “The Man.” The Man responded by declaring marijuana as a Schedule I drug; as dangerous as heroin and LSD, where even cocaine is only Schedule II.

Seriously, cocaine is an addictive drug whose effects are dangerously easy to under evaluate and overdose on; it is fairly easily described as a  gateway drug. However, as Dennis Leary said in regard to the effects of pot and bongs, “They say marijuana leads to other drugs. No it doesn’t. It leads to f**king carpentry.”

Which brings us to the 1980s. The mid-through late-1980s saw a boom in drugs for recreational use by youth and those teens now adults from the 1960s and 1970s. The upswing in drug use scared the hell out of government officials and drugs were declared as a No. 1 priority to help save the country from itself.

To finish this history, drugs in the 1990s and on through the new millennium are not really a form of rebellion. People want to get high the same as kids want to get drunk: it’s something fun to do and attractive because it is illegal.

When someone tells you you cannot do something, the urge to do so goes up; that’s just a part of being human. But this isn’t rebellion. Sure, you can ramble on and on about the positive effects of marijuana for cancer patients and whatnot. I’ve heard them all and I am fine with the idea of a cancer patient doing whatever they feel like; my mother has cancer and I wouldn’t look down on her for anything she said helped.

But let’s get real here, folks — the only thing the majority of pot heads can claim to be rebelling against is the utter failure labeled the War on Drugs. Youth today aren’t rebelling against The Man anymore, youth today are bored and want to get a little loopy because being high — to a certain degree anyway — feels pleasant and makes things funny.

So today or in the future, when you celebrate April 20 or 4:20 or the yearly High Times Cannabis Cup — which is mighty entertaining — smoke or support marijuana for the real reason you are behind it: You think it’s fun.

Rally the government about legalization, sign every petition you like and become involved with local or national programs to legalize, but don’t pretend that you have some great battle against The Man. The Man currently is waging a war on drugs that is losing worse than efforts in Vietnam. And do you really need to be fighting a government action where the 28-year-old guy, sitting in his underwear, eating a Twinkie and laughing at cartoons for hours is the enemy?

As the illustrious Bill Hicks so aptly pointed out, “There’s a war going on, and people on drugs are winning it! Well what does that tell you about drugs? Some smart, creative motherf**kers on that side.”