Paul McCartney (b. June 18, 1942)
A member of one of the most successful rock-n-roll groups of all time, Paul McCartney helped pay for a July 24, 1967 advertisement in the London Times that called for legalization of pot possession, release of all prisoners on possession charges, and government research into marijuana's medical uses. Other signatories included VIPs John Lennon and DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick.
Bob Dylan turned the Fab Four onto pot in 1964, something Paul recently wrote about. Lennon told a Paris newspaper that their band smoked pot at Buckingham Palace before being decorated by the queen in 1965.
"I think we could decrimalize marijuana, and I'd like to see a really unbised medical report on it," McCartney said after being deported from Japan for bringing nearly half a pound of marijuana into Tokyo for a concert tour on January 13, 1980. Exactly four years later, he and his wife Linda were arrested for marijuana possession in Barbados.
McCartney has now admitted that his song "Got to Get You Into My Life" was written not to a woman, but to marijuana. (Source: Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now.) "Let Me Roll It," from the 1973 "Band on the Run" album, is also considered to be about pot. The album was recorded in Nigera, where McCartney said he smoked the strongest weed he ever had with Fela Kuti in an interview with Marc Maron where he noted that "for the creative process it was required" while talking about a reunion he had with Mick Jagger.
At Superbowl 2005, McCartney played "Get Back" with the lyric, "Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona for some California grass." The following year, McCartney and wife/killjoy Heather Mills officially split, within months after the news went out that Mills would not allow him to smoke pot. He announced he had stopped smoking during a 2012 child custody battle with Mills.
The LA Times reported in 2010 that he and Linda's fashion designer daughter Stella was incorporating hemp fabrics into her designs, and she has kept hemp in some of her sustainable collections. Stella said in 2017 she would take her father's unpublished book "Japanese Jailbird" to a desert island to remind her of the importance of "family and freedom." The Mirror reported in 2021 that McCartney is growing hemp at his family farm.