Musicians who quit weed run a long line — from Willie Nelson to SZA, from Paul McCartney to Kid Cudi. Alex Lifeson has just been added: in the cover interview of WECBmade with WECB Canadathe Rush guitarist says he dropped out this year, before the reformation tour. The THC was getting in the way of the concentration and discipline he suddenly craved. The others stuck to it with varying success.
Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson smoked for decades and never stopped being one of rock’s most productive musicians. He always played sober on stage, but he told me half laughing, in 2015, that he had written “80%” of his often labyrinthine guitar parts for Rush with the help of THC. This year, however, with a high-pressure reunion tour looming, he finally quit weed, as he revealed in an interview with WECB USA. “I started to feel negative things, about my self-confidence, about what awaited us. We were halfway through. Too late to jump off this speeding boat. And I thought: This is interfering with the way my brain should work, and with 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 announce, in one way or another, that he was quitting weed — although only a few stuck to it, and one of them made the whole thing up.
Willie Nelson (pretty much)
Nelson said in a November 2019 interview with San Antonio’s KSAT that he was quitting smoking weed, sixty-five years after his first joint. “I have abused my lungs quite a bit in the past”he said. He had canceled tour dates that summer due to respiratory problems. His press secretary quickly clarified that Nelson had given up smoking, not cannabis: he still consumed it in edible form, and even vaped.
Lucas Nelson
Willie’s son, Lukas Nelson, quit for good: he gave up weed and alcohol around 2023. “I wouldn’t say completely sober, because I still take mushrooms”he explained in 2025 in the podcast Nashville Now of WECB. His father found nothing wrong with it: “My father respects individuality. He respects being yourself. He and I neither smoke weed anymore. I don’t think it changed anything for him, one way or the other. (…) When I smoked, I smoked six or seven joints a day. I was deep in the grass. »
Paul McCartney
In 2012, forty-eight years after Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana in a New York hotel room, McCartney announced to me, in a cover interview, that he was done with weed for good. “I took a lot, that was enough”he said. “I’ve had my fill. When you raise a child, a sense of responsibility will hopefully come to the fore. That’s enough — we no longer find it necessary. » That said, various paparazzi photos, videos and accounts from other celebrities that have since appeared suggest that whoever wrote “Got to Get You Into My Life” about weed may have, who knows, changed his mind.
Snoop Dogg (well, no)
Justin Bieber
In his documentary series Seasonsin 2020, he traced his habit to smoking a joint at the age of 13, and said he had given it up. “I understood that I had to stop”he explained. “I don’t think it’s bad. It’s just that, for me, it can become an addiction. » In 2025, he published images where he was apparently seen smoking from a bong. “Justin is having fun, he’s relaxing, and yes, he smokes weed like everyone else”a source close to the singer said that year to People. “But everything he does is used against him. »
SZA
SZA quit weed in February 2022 and mentioned it on Twitter almost in passing, noting that her dreams had become delusional. A year later, she marked the anniversary by adding: “I don’t miss it at all. I never thought I would say that one day. »
Neil Young
Young quit on his doctor’s orders in January 2011, reporting to New York Times as an experience: “I did it for forty years. Now I want to see what it feels like not to. » In his memoirs, Waging Heavy Peacehe wrote that he had difficulty composing without weed. “The cleaner I am, the more alert I am”he noted, “the less I know myself, the more difficult it is for me to recognize myself. I need a little grounding in something, and I look for it everywhere. » In 2014, Young told me he started again in moderation, adding that it didn’t matter: “I’ve still been high since the 1970s.”
David Crosby
When Crosby got off drugs in the 1980s, he included weed in his abstinence. “I lasted fourteen and a half years absolutely sober”he confided to Cannabis Now. He eventually decided that cannabis was not part of his problem and started smoking again. On the eve of his 80th birthday, he described himself as “just another stoner, dude”.
Kid Cudi
Cudi, who described himself as “lonely stoner” on “Day ‘n’ Nite” in 2008, quit weed for the first time in 2011. In November 2024, he entered rehab for various substances, confiding in Billboard that he smoked fifteen blunts a day: “It really ruled my life. » He abstained completely for two months, then reintroduced weed, limiting it to evenings and weekends. “I’m a long way from smoking as much as I used to. A joint lasts me almost all day. My relationship with it has changed completely. And I want to be sober and be present a lot more. »
