So I was watching Cheech & Chong’s Up in Smoke last night, and at one point they are on a quest for a “lid”.
I got to wondering, whatever happened to the lid? My parents in the 60’s were very familiar with a lid; In the 90’s I was only familiar with the eighth or ounce. (In the 00’s I just have a bad habit of watching dumb movies. 
)
When did the shift away from saying “lid” happen and why? A SD search and a Google search have not been helpful.
I can’t believe no one has answered your question yet! Everyone on this message board must either be a youngster or waaay too legal…
I’ve always lived in the backwaters, where terminology tends to take a while to catch up, but as I recall, the term lid disappeared about the time marijuana quit being measured by “fingers”. A lid was usually a three or four finger baggie, or roughly and ounce.
So in answer to your question, lids disappeared when marijuana started being sold by the gram. Around here, about 1977.
When I was a poor college student in Montana, I carpooled with a few other fellow rural Montanan’s. On returning to the parking lot near where we lived, a gal stuck her head in the driver Wayne’s window and said, “Hey man, you wanna buy a lid?” Wayne’s response, “A lid, a lid for what?”
Struck me as pretty funny at the time, but maybe you had to be there.
Reminds me of the old Cheech and Chong routine “Let’s Make a Dope Deal”. Cheech, as the MC of a gameshow, asks Chong, the contestant, “How many joints are in a lid?” “One.” “One?” “Yeah, I roll really big joints, man.” “Our judges agree, they roll really big joints, too.”
That bit always left me a bit uncertain as to just how much dope was in a lid. I always knew what a quarter ounce was, but no one I knew ever talked about buying a lid. As far as a date/geographical reference, the last time I hung around pot smokers much was at the University of Oklahoma in 1986-1988.
I was under the impression that “lid” referred to the fact that the reefer used to be sold in a shoe polish can, or something like that. Could the disappearance of the term have something to do with the rise of the the ziploc baggie?
Down here in the South, a lid was exactly an ounce. Measured out. I never heard much about the finger-width measurement, but it sounds plausible.
We also continued to call it that until about 1981-82. I remember that pretty vividly since my first husband and I divorced in 1981 and he accused me of swiping the last of “his lid” before I left. I never took his lid.
It was mine in the first place. 