Rush’s Alex Lifeson spent decades as one of rock’s most brilliantly productive stoners. He always played concerts sober, but half-joked to me in 2015 that he wrote “80 percent” of his oft-labyrinthine parts for Rush’s music with THC assistance. But this year, with a high-pressure reunion tour looming, he finally quit weed, as he revealed in our recent cover story interview, published in collaboration with Rolling Stone Canada. “I started having these negative feelings about my confidence and about what was ahead of us. We were halfway through the process. It’s too late to jump off this ship that’s screaming across the sea. And I thought, this is interfering with the way my brain should be working, and the kind of focus and discipline that all of a sudden I really wanted to have in my life.”
The Rush legend is far from the first musician to publicly talk about quitting weed in some fashion — though only some of them stuck to it, and one of them was totally making it up.
Willie Nelson (sort of)
Nelson said in a November 2019 interview with San Antonio’s KSAT that he was done with smoking weed, 65 years after his first joint. “I have abused my lungs quite a bit in the past,” he said. He canceled tour dates that summer over breathing problems. His publicist soon clarified that Nelson had given up smoking, not cannabis itself: he still used edibles and even vaped.
Lukas Nelson
Willie’s son, Lukas Nelson, quit more definitively, swearing off weed and alcohol around 2023. “I wouldn’t call it sober completely, because I’ll still do mushrooms,” he said on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast in 2025. He explained that his dad had no problem with his decision: “My dad respects individuality. He respects being yourself. He and I both now don’t smoke weed. I don’t think it mattered to him either way… When I was smoking I’d smoke six, seven joints a day. I was so into weed.”
Paul McCartney
In 2012, 48 years after Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana in a New York hotel room, McCartney told me in a cover-story interview that he was finally done smoking weed. “I did a lot, and it was enough,” he said. “I smoked my share. When you’re bringing up a youngster, your sense of responsibility does kick in, if you’re lucky, at some point. Enough’s enough – you just don’t seem to think it’s necessary.” That said, various paparazzi photos, videos, and accounts from other celebrities in the intervening years suggest that maybe, just maybe, the guy who wrote “Got to Get You Into My Life” about weed might have changed his mind.
Snoop Dogg (except not)
“After much consideration and conversation with my family, I’ve decided to give up smoke,” Snoop posted in November 2023. It seemed vaguely possible, since he had mentioned in an interview earlier that year that becoming a grandfather made him want to slow down. Soon enough, however, a company that sells smokeless fire pits annoyed the entire Internet by revealing that it had hired Snoop as its “smokesman” and that the whole thing was a stunt.
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Miley Cyrus
Cyrus told Billboard in May 2017 that she stopped smoking to make her album Younger Now. “I want to be super clear and sharp,” she said. A month later, in an interview with Jimmy Fallon, she gave a second explanation, detailing a dream where she got too high and died during an SNL monologue. She was smoking again by early 2019, explaining that she got high with her mom. In 2025, though, she told Zane Lowe that she was done with all drugs and alcohol: “Sobriety is really like my god.”
Justin Bieber
In his 2020 docuseries Seasons, he traced a weed habit back to a joint at age 13, and said he’d given it up. “I realized that I had to stop,” he said. “I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just that for me, it can be a dependency.” By 2025, he was posting images that seemed to show him smoking a bong. “Justin is having fun, vibing out and yes, he smokes weed like everyone else,” a source close to Bieber told People that year. “But everything he does is being weaponized against him.”
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SZA
SZA quit weed in February 2022 and mentioned it on Twitter almost in passing, noting that her dreams had gotten wild. A year later she marked the anniversary, adding “don’t miss it at all. Never thought I’d say that.”
Neil Young
Young quit on doctor’s orders in January 2011, framing it to the New York Times as an experiment: “I did it for 40 years. Now I want to see what it’s like to not do it.” In his memoir Waging Heavy Peace, he wrote that he was having trouble writing songs without weed. “The straighter I am, the more alert I am,” he wrote, “the less I know myself and the harder it is to recognize myself. I need a little grounding in something and I am looking for it everywhere.” In 2014, Young told me he had started up again in moderation, adding that it didn’t matter: “”I’m still high from the Seventies.”
David Crosby
When Crosby got clean from drugs in the 1980s, he included weed in his abstinence. “I did 14 and a half years absolutely sober,” he told Cannabis Now. Eventually, he decided cannabis wasn’t part of his problem, and started smoking again. On the eve of his 80th birthday he called himself “just another stoner, man.”
Kid Cudi
Cudi, who called himself a “lonely stoner” on 2008’s “Day ‘n’ Nite,” first quit weed in 2011. In November 2024, he entered rehab for various substances, telling Billboard that he had been smoking 15 blunts a day: “It truly ruled my life.” He abstained completely for two months, then brought it back, limiting the habit to evenings and weekends. “I’m not smoking nowhere near as much weed as I was smoking before. A joint lasts me all day, damn near. So my relationship has changed with that in a major way. And I’m just more interested in being sober a lot more and being more present.”
