Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson said he abruptly ended his 20-year habit of smoking marijuana and threw away his entire stash because he wanted to regain his focus, discipline and playing confidence for the band’s comeback tour.
Alex Lifeson told Rolling Stone that marijuana sometimes sparked creativity, but he felt his playing and execution suffered when he was high. “I really enjoyed smoking pot,” he said. “You know, I started smoking pot when I was a young teenager for the first time, and gone through periods where I didn’t, but certainly for the last, I don’t know how many, 20 years or so, I’ve been a pretty regular pot smoker. In the studio I enjoyed it because I found it did spark some creativity that was different from the straight world.”
“But I never felt like the execution was as good as when I didn’t smoke pot,” Lifeson continued. “And it didn’t really matter because some of the projects that I was working on… I found that when I was playing, I wasn’t playing that well. I mean, I would play every night, but I didn’t feel like I was playing that well, and I thought maybe being high was interfering with that.”
“But I did start to have kind of negative feelings about my confidence, and about what was ahead of us, and that we were just like halfway through the process, and, you know, it’s too late to jump off this ship that’s screaming across the sea,” the guitarist added. “I thought this is interfering with the way my brain should be working, and the kind of focus and discipline that I all of a sudden really wanted to have in my life.”
“I got up the next morning, and I went to the bathroom, and I took all my little jars of pot and the pipes, I threw in a garbage bag.,” he later said. “And then I went in the kitchen, and in that drawer I took all my pipes and threw it on the pot again. Then I went in the studio … I looked at one container of these pre-rolls, I thought, ‘Oh, I really like these. Maybe I’ll just hang on to these.’ And I was like, ‘Al, this is not the idea!’ So I tossed that in.”
“I went to every little place I had stashes… it was a garbage bag like this, full of pipes and bongs,” Lifeson concluded. “All my friends said, ‘Why did you throw it out? You could have called me!’ And the other day I was staying on stage thinking, “Thank God I’m not smoking pot anymore.'”
Lifeson made the decision during a major turning point for Rush. The band’s Fifty Something Tour is its first tour since 2015 and its first since drummer and lyricist Neil Peart died in 2020.
The comeback features Lifeson and Geddy Lee alongside drummer Anika Nilles and keyboardist Loren Gold. The expanded lineup has delivered a nearly three-hour set while revisiting Rush’s catalog.
The shows have also been framed as a tribute to Peart rather than a simple nostalgia trip. Lee and Lifeson presented the tour as a celebration of Rush’s music and Peart’s legacy.
Lee described the reunion by saying that he and his longtime friend Alex Lifeson would hit the road to pay tribute to Rush’s past and to Neil by performing a wide selection of the band’s songs.
That context makes Lifeson’s decision to clear out his marijuana stashes more than a personal reset. It reflects his effort to approach Rush’s return with the discipline, precision and confidence he said he wanted back.
