8 Famous Poets Who Smoke Weed

• Cannabis has influenced literary traditions across centuries – from 19th-century Parisian salons to Beat Generation gatherings and Rastafarian spiritual practices, poets have incorporated cannabis into their creative processes.
• Historical evidence is often limited but culturally significant – Evidence of historical poets’ cannabis use is limited and often anecdotal, yet these figures shaped literary movements.
• Creative effects vary by individual and dosage – While many cannabis users report enhanced creativity, controlled studies show mixed results depending on dose and tolerance.
• Women poets have significantly contributed to cannabis-influenced literature – Figures like Anne Waldman and Diane di Prima created groundbreaking work while advocating for both cannabis and women’s liberation.
• Contemporary poets carried this into the legalization era – poets like John Sinclair turned cannabis criminalization itself into protest poetry and public rallying, helping to push marijuana policy into mainstream civil liberties debates.
• Cannabis may facilitate divergent thinking at low doses – Some controlled studies report perceived creativity increases at low doses, while objective tests show mixed results.
• Strains and products exist that honor literary figures. Some brands occasionally release literary-inspired strain names; availability varies by market and can be explored through Herb’s cannabis products.

Allen Ginsberg (author of Howl) didn’t just smoke marijuana; he went on record about it, marched for it, and wrote policy arguments defending it.

In the mid-1960s, Ginsberg helped launch and publicize LeMar (“Legalize Marijuana”), one of the first organized marijuana-legalization groups in the U.S. He published “The Great Marijuana Hoax” in The Atlantic (1966), calling cannabis criminalization a civil-liberties issue, not just a lifestyle issue. Photographs and reporting documents him literally holding pro-marijuana signs at public rallies.

Ginsberg argued that banning cannabis wasn’t just about drugs — it was about the government policing states of mind. That framing (weed laws = censorship + surveillance) shows up in modern legalization campaigns.

Charles Baudelaire (author of Les Fleurs du mal) moved in the same Paris circle as the Club des Hashischins, a mid-1800s gathering of writers, artists, and doctors who consumed hashish paste (a cannabis resin preparation) in formal “sessions” to study consciousness. 

He wrote extensively about intoxication and hashish in essays that became Les Paradis artificiels (“Artificial Paradises,” 1860), one of the earliest serious literary analyses of cannabis effects on perception, euphoria, paranoia, and selfhood. He described hashish as seductive but dangerous — not a simple creativity cheat, more like a temporary “artificial paradise” that can flip on you psychologically.

Even in 1860, Baudelaire was already warning that cannabis can trick you into thinking you’re profound when maybe you’re just extremely high. That tension (vision vs. delusion) still shows up in drug writing today.

Bob Marley is best known as a reggae musician, but his lyrics are widely studied as political and devotional poetry. In Rastafarian faith, ganja (“herb”) is sacramental — it’s smoked in ritual “reasoning” sessions to open spiritual insight, moral clarity, and connection to Jah (God). 

Marley openly smoked cannabis as a holy plant and condemned laws that criminalized it, framing those laws as tools of colonial repression against Black Jamaicans. He famously called herb “the healing of the nation,” not a vice.

For Marley, weed was prayer, protest, medicine, and anti-colonial defiance all at once. That is a totally different framing than Western “stoner culture.”

Jack Kerouac, known for On the Road, also wrote long-form poems and jazz-influenced “spontaneous prose,” which he treated as a kind of chant or improvisational verse.

In letters to Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac described writing large parts of Doctor Sax “high on tea,” “tea” being Beat slang for marijuana — basically saying he cranked whole chapters while stoned, straight through without stopping. Cannabis was part of the Beat lifestyle: late-night sessions with Kerouac, Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others where they’d talk, read, smoke, and riff until dawn.

Kerouac romanticized “first thought, best thought,” and cannabis fed that myth — the idea that raw, unedited brain-surge is literature. But he was also a heavy drinker and used other drugs, so weed wasn’t his only fuel.

William S. Burroughs (best known for Naked Lunch) also produced poetry and experimental “cut-up” texts. He was deeply involved with illegal substances, including marijuana, and very vocal about drug laws.

Burroughs talked about “tea heads” (marijuana users) versus heroin users in Junky, and he placed weed inside a larger map of underground economies and personal freedom. In later interviews, he flat-out predicted marijuana legalization and argued that prohibition was pointless, unenforceable, and mostly about state control.

Burroughs treated cannabis criminalization as evidence that the government’s real project was social control. That paranoia-turned-politics shaped his poetry and performance persona and fed straight into later counterculture rhetoric.

Diane di Prima openly lived, wrote, and organized inside a weed- and acid-friendly underground in the 1950s–70s, while also mothering, publishing, and helping build alternative presses Di Prima’s memoirs and interviews recall parties in New York with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac — “talking, reading, smoking, drinking” — where cannabis was part of the scene. She literally got told by Kerouac that she’d “never be a writer” if she went home early to relieve her babysitter. She wrote politically charged poems/letters about revolution, free expression, and bodily autonomy, treating cannabis and psychedelics as tools of cultural liberation, not just recreation.

Di Prima wasn’t just “a woman hanging with the Beats.” She’s on record describing herself and her circle as women who “smoked dope, dug the new jazz,” and built their own creative/political world. That’s first-person documentation of cannabis use tied directly to her identity as a poet.

Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (Naropa University) with Allen Ginsberg and helped build a feminist, ritual, high-energy spoken/sung poetry tradition. Waldman literally wrote “13 Tankas In Praise of Smoking Dope” (1969), celebrating “a toke of good grass” and describing cannabis as freeing the mind. 

Her chant-poem Fast Speaking Woman pushed a voice that’s trancey, incantatory, body-forward, and politically charged — and she’s historically associated with cannabis-positive counterculture alongside Ginsberg and di Prima.

Waldman turns cannabis from “stoner fun” into ritual female power. She treats altered consciousness as a doorway to autonomy, vision, and public voice — not as a joke and not as a purely male domain.

John Sinclair (Detroit poet, band manager, counterculture organizer) is one of the clearest weed + poetry + prison cases in U.S. history. In 1969, he was sentenced in Michigan to 9½–10 years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover officer. He served about 29 months.

The “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” in December 1971 drew ~15,000 people — including John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder, and Allen Ginsberg — demanding his release and denouncing harsh marijuana laws as political repression. Sinclair was freed shortly after. He went on to publish pro-cannabis poetry, essays, and public speeches, tying marijuana criminalization to racism, class control, and police surveillance.

Sinclair’s case helped drive Michigan toward looser cannabis penalties, inspired the long-running Hash Bash protest in Ann Arbor, and turned “weed sentencing” itself into a spoken-word issue. That’s poetry as direct legal pressure.

The pop stereotype is “poet gets high, channels genius,” but reality is way more layered.

In 19th-century Paris, Charles Baudelaire and other elite writers met at the Club des Hashischins and ingested hashish paste (a cannabis resin preparation) to observe and write about its mental effects. He later published those reflections in Les Paradis artificiels (“Artificial Paradises,” 1860).

In the Beat era, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, Anne Waldman, and others didn’t just quietly use marijuana — they read poems at weed-filled gatherings, marched for legalization, and described cannabis in print.

Cannabis affects mood, time perception, inhibition, working memory, and focus. All of those shape how writing feels.

Studies with regular cannabis users show that a low THC dose (~5 mg to ~6 mg) didn’t reliably boost creativity scores — but didn’t tank them either. A high THC dose (~22 mg) made people worse at divergent thinking (coming up with lots of novel ideas fast), even though many felt more creative.

Cannabis can make you feel “unlocked,” but it can also make your actual ideas objectively worse, especially if you overdo it.

This matches how a lot of poets actually worked: light cannabis for flow, then sober editing.

Gary Snyder — Pulitzer Prize–winning poet of Turtle Island — wrote “Buddhist Anarchism,” arguing for radical personal freedom, including “the right of individuals to smoke hemp.”

Snyder clearly defends the right to smoke cannabis as part of spiritual/eco-political autonomy. However, because we don’t yet have a direct, sourced “I personally smoked weed” quote on record, the way we do for the eight names above, we list him in context but not in the core “8 Famous Poets Who Smoke Weed.”

Not automatically. Studies show high THC can hurt idea-generation scores even in regular users, and low THC doesn’t reliably boost them either.

The poet still has to do the work — especially the edit. Weed can lower the fear barrier. It can’t rewrite a weak line into a strong one.

Because for many poets it wasn’t “just getting high.” For Ginsberg and Sinclair, weed was a First Amendment / civil liberties fight. For Marley, ganja was holy and anti-colonial. For Waldman and di Prima, cannabis is linked to feminist self-determination, sexual autonomy, and ecstatic performance.

So when these poets talk about weed, they’re also talking about who gets to control your body, your voice, your gods, and your mind.

It happens. Dispensaries and growers sometimes slap poet/activist names (like John Sinclair) on limited-run strains as homage. Those names are more about tribute and marketing than standardized genetics — so “a Sinclair OG” in Michigan might be nothing like “Sinclair” somewhere else.