GQ Profiles Willie Nelson

September 20, 2015 Ina Blaze

Chris Heath profiles the indomitable weed advocate and country god, Willie Nelson, in a endearing and edifying piece for GQ. It's full of gems like uncovering who Willie smoked weed with ontop of the White House roof (a member of the President's family!), his emergency pension plan (selling his braids that recently were auctioned for $37,000), and the story, produced below, about his first time.

[Willie] Nelson believes that he tried pot for the first time when he was 11 or 12, though he didn’t realize it until much later on. “I was with a cousin of mine, he was about 15. He had asthma and the doctors gave him a cigarette to smoke. An asthma cigarette. And he offered me a puff off it, and I didn’t particularly care for it so I handed it back to him. But years later, when I smoked my first what-I-knew-was-marijuana, I said, ‘Wait a minute—I’ve had this before.’ And it took me right back to my cousin with the asthma cigarette.” That seems like weird medicine for asthma—I ask whether it worked for his cousin. “Yeah,” he replies, as though the notion that a joint would be the best medical treatment for asthma were the least unlikely part of the story. "Oh yeah.”