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Drugs Live: Jon Snow, Jennie Bond, and unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Barack Obama, Boris Johnson and she of pink bus fame Harriet Harman are among the names who have dabbled in the drug in the past

Tuesday 03 March 2015 17:24 GMT

“Do I want food? Not particularly – unless it's grapes,” Jennie Bond giggled.

About 75 minutes into her Home Office-approved, NHS-supported trial of skunk, being filmed for Channel 4’s Drugs Live programme which airs at 10pm, it becomes evident that the former royal correspondent has the munchies.

“What was happening to me outstripped anything I have ever experienced,” he said, having sucked in “two huge balloons” of skunk.

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

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1/14Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Barack Obama

"As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Getty

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Bill Maher

"Look, I have never made a secret of the fact that I have tried marijuana... About 50,000 times."

Getty Images

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Boris Johnson

"It was jolly nice. But apparently it is very different these days. Much stronger. I've become very illiberal about it. I don't want my kids to take drugs."

AP

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Bill Clinton

"I experimented with marijuana a time or two."

Reuters

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Jon Stewart

“Do you know how many movies I wrote when I was high?”

Comedy Central

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Harriet Harman

"I did, when I was at university, smoke cannabis once or twice." But she quickly added she had not taken the drug since then. "I have indulged in the odd glass of wine but not cannabis."

PA

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Martha Stewart

“Of course I know how to role a joint.”

Getty Images

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Bill Gates

In Stephen Manes’ biography about the Microsoft founder, he writes: “As for drugs – well, Gates was certainly not unusual there. Marijuana was the pharmaceutical of choice…”

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Oprah Winfrey

Asked by Andy Cohen when the last time she’d smoked cannabis was, she answered: “Uh … 1982.” “Let's hang out after the show,” Cohen joked. “Okay,” Winfrey said, laughing. “I hear it's gotten better.”

Getty Images

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

George W. Bush

"I wouldn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried."

Getty

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Sarah Palin

"I can't claim a Bill Clinton and say that I never inhaled.”

AP

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

David Letterman

“I went through one period when I smoked a surprising, a really breath-taking, amount of grass almost every night.”

Getty Images

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Morgan Freeman

"Never give up the ganja."

Getty Images

Unexpected successful people who have admitted to smoking cannabis

Steve Jobs

“The best way I would describe the effect of the marijuana and the hashish is that it would make me relaxed and creative.”

“By the time I was completely stoned I felt utterly bereft,” he continued. “I felt as if my soul had been wrenched from my body. There was no one in my world. I felt I had lost all control and had only the vaguest awareness of who I was and what on earth I was doing. I cascaded into a very, very, dark place, the darkest mental place I have ever been. I was frightened, paranoid, and felt physically and mentally wrapped in a dense blanket of fog.”

They’d decided to test the drug on the unlikely human guinea pigs following reports that 25 per cent of all psychosis treated in Britain is associated with smoking skunk.

But it turns out, they aren’t the only surprising names who have ever experimented with cannabis. Take the unlikely candidates above, for example.

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