The Untold Story of Paul McCartney and His Love for Weed
For more than six decades, Paul McCartney has been celebrated as pop music’s ultimate diplomat—the melodic genius, the charming Beatle, and the elder statesman of rock and roll. Yet woven quietly into the fabric of his songwriting, his activism, and even his criminal record is a decades-long love affair with cannabis. Long before marijuana became a mainstream wellness industry, McCartney treated the plant not merely as a rock-and-roll indulgence, but as a creative catalyst, a political cause, and, on one infamous occasion, a personal stash simply too good to flush down a hotel toilet.
The Delmonico Hotel and a Musical Awakening
McCartney’s relationship with cannabis began on a specific night in August 1964 at New York’s Delmonico Hotel. Until that evening, The Beatles were a band fueled by alcohol, cigarettes, and the slimming pills they had discovered in Hamburg. When folk legend Bob Dylan visited their suite and rolled a joint, a cultural tectonic plate shifted. Expecting wine, Dylan had misheard the lyric “I can’t hide” in “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as “I get high,” assuming the British quartet were already seasoned smokers.
Instead, it was McCartney’s very first encounter with marijuana. As the smoke filled the room, McCartney famously felt as though he had unlocked the meaning of life, frantically instructing road manager Mal Evans to follow him around with a pencil and paper to transcribe his profound realizations. The next morning, Evans handed him a crumpled slip of paper containing a single sentence: “There are seven levels.”
While the philosophy was questionable, the musical impact was immediate and transformative. Cannabis slowed down the frantic pace of Beatlemania, inviting introspection, studio experimentation, and a looser rhythmic sensibility. By 1965’s Rubber Soul—which John Lennon later dubbed “the pot album”—the influence was unmistakable. McCartney even wrote an explicit love song to the plant on 1966’s Revolver. “Got to Get You into My Life,” dressed up in bright Motown-style horns, sounded like a classic romance to unsuspecting radio listeners. In reality, McCartney later revealed to the BBC, it was an ode to marijuana—a secret hiding in plain sight.
The Reluctant Outlaw and the Times Advertisement
As the 1960s progressed, McCartney’s fondness for cannabis evolved from private recreation into public advocacy. In July 1967, just weeks after the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a full-page advertisement appeared in The Times of London. Titled “The law against marijuana is immoral in principle and unworkable in practice,” the manifesto called for the decriminalization of cannabis and the release of individuals imprisoned for possession.
Signed by 65 prominent British figures—including doctors, writers, and all four Beatles—the ad was actually bankrolled entirely by Paul McCartney. At a time when the British establishment was actively targeting rock stars with drug raids, McCartney put his own fortune behind the belief that criminalizing a benign herb was fundamentally unjust.
Following the breakup of The Beatles, McCartney retreated with his wife Linda to their remote farm in Campbeltown, Scotland. There, away from the glare of London’s paparazzi, cannabis became an everyday fixture of domestic and creative life. The couple even cultivated their own crop on the property—a decision that led to McCartney’s first drug conviction in 1972, when local police discovered five cannabis plants growing in his greenhouse and fined him £100. Far from deterred, McCartney endured several more minor busts throughout the 1970s and early 1980s across Sweden, Scotland, and Barbados, treating the fines as an inevitable tax on his lifestyle.
Inmate No. 22: The Tokyo Debacle
McCartney’s casual attitude toward international drug laws finally collided with reality in January 1980. Preparing to fly from New York to Tokyo for a sold-out, 11-date tour with his band Wings, McCartney packed nearly half a pound—219 grams—of high-grade marijuana right at the top of his suitcase. Years later, he admitted the sheer absurdity of the decision: he knew he wouldn’t be able to score anything in Japan, and the New York stash was simply “too good to flush down the toilet”.
Japan’s narcotics laws, however, were among the strictest in the world, carrying a maximum penalty of seven years of hard labor. When customs officials at Narita Airport unzipped his bag and found the vacuum-sealed stash, the tour vanished in an instant.
Stripped of his fame, the world’s most successful songwriter became “Inmate No. 22” at the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Center. For nine days, McCartney slept on a thin tatami mat, ate bowls of rice and gruel, scrubbed his cell, and bathed communally with fellow prisoners. At 6:00 a.m. every morning, guards barked his number in Japanese, and the former Beatle had to sit cross-legged and shout “Hai!” Remarkably, he adapted with Liverpudlian humor, leading sing-alongs of “Yesterday” with guards and inmates during bath time. After intense diplomatic intervention and nine days behind bars, Japanese prosecutors determined the stash was strictly for personal use, dropping the charges and deporting him. Upon returning home, McCartney secretly wrote a 20,000-word memoir of the ordeal titled Japanese Jailbird, locking it away in a vault with instructions that it never be published during his lifetime.
Putting Down the Pipe
Despite swearing to British tabloids upon his release in 1980 that he would never touch cannabis again, McCartney’s love for weed lingered well into his later decades. In 1984, following another arrest in Barbados, he stood before reporters at Heathrow Airport and once again defended marijuana as “far less harmful than rum, whiskey, nicotine, and glue”.
What the Japanese prison system could not accomplish, however, fatherhood and grandfatherhood eventually did. By the mid-2010s, McCartney quietly gave up smoking altogether. Explaining his decision in interviews, he noted that he no longer wanted to set a poor example for his children and eight grandchildren, trading his evening spliff for a glass of red wine or a margarita.
Yet McCartney’s legacy remains inextricably linked to the plant. From the hazy studio breakthroughs of Rubber Soul to the hidden double meanings in his greatest hits, cannabis helped soften the edges of pop perfectionism, allowing one of music’s greatest craftsmen to loosen his grip and let the music breathe.
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