Famous People Who Smoke Weed: 17 Verified Cannabis Users (2026)

By James Buddsey · Updated October 30, 2026

Famous people who have smoked weed, on the record, include Louis Armstrong, Carl Sagan, Paul McCartney, Bob Marley, Willie Nelson, Snoop Dogg, Seth Rogen, Whoopi Goldberg, Steve Jobs, Michael Phelps, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Kamala Harris. Every name below is backed by the person’s own words or by reputable reporting, linked in each entry. We left out anyone whose cannabis use rests on rumor.

This page began years ago as “50 Successful Marijuana Users,” a short video round-up from HuffPost Live that no longer plays. We rebuilt it in 2026 with a stricter rule: fewer names, each one documented. Lists of “celebrities who smoke weed” are everywhere online, and many of them repeat guesses, misread song lyrics or recycle quotes that nobody can trace. Seventeen verified names are more useful than fifty maybes.

Famous Cannabis Users at a Glance

Musicians Who Smoke Weed

Louis Armstrong

The most influential jazz musician of his era was also one of its most open cannabis users. Armstrong was a heavy marijuana smoker for much of his life, spent nine days in jail after a 1930 arrest outside a Los Angeles club, and called the plant “a thousand times better than whiskey,” as History.com recounts. His arrest came seven years before the federal Marihuana Tax Act, which our history of marijuana in America covers.

Paul McCartney

McCartney was arrested in Tokyo in January 1980 when customs officers found roughly half a pound of cannabis in his luggage, which cancelled a Wings tour of Japan. In 2015 he told an interviewer he had stopped smoking, partly to set a better example for his grandchildren, as The Independent reported.

Bob Marley

Marley embraced Rastafari in the 1960s, a faith that treats ganja as a sacrament, and he was arrested for cannabis possession in Jamaica in 1968 and again in London in the 1970s. His state funeral in Kingston in 1981 was one of the largest events in Jamaican history, described by The Observer. For the religious side, read our guide to Rastafari and cannabis.

Willie Nelson

Nelson titled a 2012 memoir Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die, launched his own cannabis brand, Willie’s Reserve, in 2015, and has served for years as co-chair of the NORML advisory board. In November 2010 Border Patrol agents at the Sierra Blanca, Texas, checkpoint found about six ounces in his tour bus; Texas Monthly followed the case as prosecutors joked about having him sing in court instead of serving time. Fiona Apple was arrested at the same checkpoint in 2012; our history of Sierra Blanca checkpoint arrests covers both cases.

Snoop Dogg

Snoop Dogg has made cannabis part of his public identity since the 1990s and told a California court in 2007 that he held a medical recommendation for migraines, the Los Angeles Times reported. His November 2023 announcement that he was “giving up smoke” turned out to be an ad for a smokeless fire pit, as CNN explained. In 2024 he opened his first licensed dispensary, S.W.E.D., in Los Angeles, Los Angeles Magazine reported.

Melissa Etheridge

Etheridge spoke openly about using medical cannabis while going through chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2004 and 2005, including in an NBC Dateline interview. In 2012 she recorded a radio ad backing Colorado’s Amendment 64. Cannabis can ease chemotherapy nausea; our cannabis and cancer guide explains what the evidence does and does not support.

Actors and Entertainers

Seth Rogen

Rogen has never hidden his own use. He co-founded the cannabis company Houseplant with his longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg, launching it in Canada in 2019, The Guardian reported. He told MTV News back in 2011 that he smokes “a lot of weed” when he writes.

Whoopi Goldberg

Goldberg has said she smoked marijuana shortly before accepting her Academy Award for Ghost, People reported. In 2016 she co-founded Whoopi & Maya, a line of cannabis products for menstrual cramps, saying cannabis was the only thing that had given her relief, per USA Today. The company closed in 2020.

Montel Williams

The talk-show host, a former Marine and naval officer, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999 and has said for decades that cannabis eases his neuropathic pain. He lobbied for Maryland’s medical cannabis law, as The Washington Post covered in 2011. Our cannabis and MS page reviews the research.

Tommy Chong

Half of Cheech and Chong built a career on stoner comedy and has spoken about his own cannabis use for decades. In 2003 he was sentenced to nine months in federal prison for selling glass pipes through his family’s company, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

Politicians Who Admitted Smoking Weed

The political shift has been dramatic. In 1987 Douglas Ginsburg withdrew his Supreme Court nomination after admitting he had smoked marijuana, as newspapers reported at the time. Five years later a presidential candidate still felt he had to hedge. By 2019, a senator running for president volunteered that she had inhaled.

• Bill Clinton admitted during the 1992 campaign that he had tried marijuana as a student in England, adding that he “didn’t inhale,” a line still quoted in coverage such as CBS News.
• Barack Obama wrote in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father about using marijuana as a teenager in Honolulu, where he belonged to a group of friends known as the “Choom Gang,” ABC News reported, drawing on David Maraniss’s biography.
• Kamala Harris said on The Breakfast Club radio show in February 2019 that she had smoked in college and, unlike Clinton, did inhale, while also endorsing legalization (CBS News).

Scientists, Founders and Athletes

Carl Sagan

The astronomer behind Cosmos contributed an anonymous essay, signed “Mr. X,” to Harvard psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon’s 1971 book Marihuana Reconsidered. In it he described cannabis as a spur to insight and creativity. Grinspoon revealed the author after Sagan’s death in 1996, and the essay is archived online in full. Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan, later chaired NORML’s board.

Steve Jobs

On a 1988 Defense Department security-clearance questionnaire, Jobs disclosed using marijuana and LSD between roughly 1970 and 1974. The file, released in 2012, was reported by Wired.

Michael Phelps

Months after winning eight gold medals in Beijing, Phelps was photographed using a bong at a party in South Carolina in 2009. He confirmed the photo, apologized, lost a Kellogg’s sponsorship and was suspended for three months by USA Swimming, according to The New York Times. He went on to win more Olympic golds.

Ricky Williams

The Heisman Trophy winner was suspended repeatedly under the NFL’s drug policy in the 2000s and walked away from the game in 2004. He later told CNBC that his cannabis use cost him about $10 million in lost pay and fines, and he went on to launch his own line of cannabis wellness products. The NFL has since softened its rules; see our report on NFL marijuana policy.

Advocates Who Are Not on This List

Supporting legalization is not the same as using cannabis, and several famous reformers have been careful to make that distinction. Edmonds, Washington, travel writer Rick Steves co-sponsored Initiative 502, the 2012 measure that legalized cannabis in Washington, and later chaired NORML’s board, but his own essay on a new approach to marijuana frames his work as “anti-prohibition” rather than pro-pot. We also left out celebrities whose names show up on other lists based only on lyrics, film roles, unsourced quotes or business deals involving CBD.

What These Stories Show

Three patterns stand out. First, arrests: Armstrong in 1930, McCartney in 1980, Nelson in 2010 and Chong in 2003 were all prosecuted under laws that have since changed in many places. Second, medicine: Etheridge, Williams and Goldberg all describe using cannabis for a health problem, which is why medical programs came first in most states. Third, politics: the move from Ginsburg’s withdrawal in 1987 to Harris’s easy admission in 2019 tracks the jump in public support for legalization, from 12% in 1969 to around two-thirds today, charted in our poll tracker.

None of this means cannabis is risk-free. Daily use carries a real risk of cannabis use disorder, and a celebrity’s tolerance is no guide to your own dose.

Celebrities Who Smoke Weed: FAQ

For adults 21+ in legal states. General information, not medical advice.