California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) might have helped lead the push to legalize marijuana in the state—but that advocacy didn’t exactly come from a place of extensive personal experience. In fact, beside a “complicated” trip to the Grand Canyon involving cannabis, Newsom’s THC teetotaling was so “rigid” in his youth that even his father poked fun at him.
During an interview with Politico, and in a recent memoir he’s been promoting, the governor recognized that he became a somewhat unlikely champion of marijuana reform given his nearly lifelong abstinence. But when he considered the harms and waste of the drug war, he decided to make it part of his political legacy to advance the issue, in part by backing California’s Proposition 64 in 2016 to enact adult-use legalization.
“During my last term as lieutenant governor, it occurred to me that if I wanted to shape matters beyond the reach of my office, I needed only to grab the levers of California’s initiative process,” he wrote in his new book, Young Man In A Hurry. That included supporting Proposition 63 to place restrictions on large-capacity gun magazine clips and require background checks to buy ammunition, as well as Proposition 64 to end marijuana prohibition.
“Californians who had no idea what I did for a living were now referring to me as the ‘guns and weed dude,'” Newsom, who was one of the first high-profile politicians to endorse legalization even years before voters chose to enact the reform, wrote.
With an expansive email list that became “one of the largest political databases in the country,” the then-lieutenant governor recruited experts to help draft a white paper “making the case for legalizing cannabis” and then convened a blue-ribbon committee “to help raise funds and gather signatures.”
“Our messaging for both propositions appealed to common sense,” he said. “California already had been the first state to legalize the medicinal use of cannabis two decades earlier. Why not take it one step further?”
“Tens of thousands of Californians, the great majority Black and brown, were arrested each year for nonviolent marijuana felonies,” he said. “We were wasting the resources of cops and judges and taking up space in jails and prisons for cannabis, not to mention pulling families apart and worsening racial inequality.”
But as far as his own personal experience with marijuana is concerned, Newsom told Politico that the only time he partook in cannabis was a “complicated story” that occurred during a visit to the Grand Canyon. He was vague on the specifics of the expedition, then pivoted to his role in advancing Proposition 64.
“By the way, I legalized it in California. That was my initiative,” he said.”It was the great irony. I was the worst spokesperson. I remember—I’m sort of smiling now reflecting on that.”
Except that one toke down at the grand canyon…. https://t.co/6KkXSfcAJZ
— Jonathan Martin (@jmart) March 25, 2026
The governor also wrote in his book about another marijuana-adjacent story that happened when he was in Madrid at 19 years old. A straight-edge Newsom said he was watching Pink Floyd’s The Wall in a private movie room one night when “someone next to me rolled half a dozen joints and generously passed them around.”
“I had gotten through my first nineteen years without ingesting a mind-altering drug—so rigid that even my father poked fun at me—and I wasn’t going to start then,” he said. “I used the excuse of not caring much for the movie to head back to my room at the Ritz Hotel. This was our Madrid trip in a nutshell.”
Newsom’s father was evidently a bit more open to experimenting with drugs, at least in a clinical setting. The book describes how, in the late 1950s, the late William Newsom was financially struggling and took advantage of an opportunity to Palo Alto Mental Health Facility where they were paying $200 per day “for any brave soul willing to submit to experiments that Dr. Russel Lee was conducting with the drug LSD, which was barely known and still quite legal.”
“My father accepted the offer to spend two days under the influence of the psychedelic, during which time he was prompted by the doctors to recite the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and other ‘tactile’ verse and to document any relevant insights from the drug on a tape recorder,” Newsom wrote. “It was not long thereafter that my father divined a fork in the road: a career teaching literature to college students or a career practicing the law. Out of no special ardor, he picked the latter.”
In his book and in the Politico interview the governor also discussed an incident in which he came home to discover his foster brother and some friends smoking cannabis out of a pipe from an indigenous tribe that his uncle gave to him as a gift.
“This was the nearest thing I had to a sacred possession. It was hand carved out of fine wood, inlaid with granite, and decorated with eagle feathers, beads, and bear fur,” he wrote. “Suli had grabbed it off the fireplace mantle, where I had it on display.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Newsom asked his foster brother, who responded, “We’re smoking dope, man. Getting high.”
“I snatched the pipe out of his hands and ran into the bathroom,” the governor wrote. “I tried cleaning the resin from the bowl, but the stain already had become part of the wood. I must have washed and scrubbed the pipe twenty times before I judged it clean enough to return to the mantle.”
Newsom, the term-limited governor who is widely believed to be planning a run as a 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, has continued to defend the state’s marijuana law—and he recently leaned into the issue after President Donald Trump mistakenly called him “president of the United States” during Oval Office remarks in which the incumbent otherwise disparaged the Democrat. Playing into the gaffe, Newsom said legalizing marijuana was among the “many big announcements” his White House was making.
The governor similarly called for legalization in a separate post mocking Trump during a federal government shutdown last year, pledging to enact the reform as “leader of the free world.”
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Over his tenure as governor, Newsom has been somewhat selective about the types of drug policy reform bills he’s been willing to sign into law.
For example, in October, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have allowed certain marijuana microbusinesses to ship medical cannabis products directly to patients via common carriers like FedEx and UPS, stating that the proposal “would be burdensome and overly complex to administer.”
Newsom did sign a bill earlier that month aimed at streamlining research on marijuana and psychedelics.
In September, the governor also signed a measure into law to put a pause on a recently enacted tax hike on marijuana products.
Meanwhile, California officials recently awarded nearly $30 million in grants for marijuana-focused academic research projects.
Image element courtesy of Gage Skidmore.
