Alex Lifeson Quit Weed for Rush’s Tour. These 10 Musicians Gave It Up, Too (Or At Least Tried)

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.