Trying to be a better parent, Paul McCartney swears off smoking dope

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problems getting permission to enter the United States because of the drug arrests.

In a 2004 magazine interview, McCartney said, “I tried heroin just the once. Even then, I didn’t realize I’d taken it. I was just handed something, smoked it, then found out what it was. It didn’t do anything for me, which was lucky because I wouldn’t have fancied heading down that road. I did cocaine for about a year around the time of ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ coke and maybe some grass to balance it out. I was never completely crazy with cocaine.

“I’d been introduced to it and at first it seemed OK, like anything that’s new and stimulating. When you start working your way through it, you start thinking, ‘Mmm, this is not so cool an idea,’ especially when you start getting those terrible comedowns.”

Of his ordeal, he said: “I kept thinking, ‘What have I done to my family?’ I was thrown into nine days of turmoil. It was very, very scary.”

Shunned by society before the 1960s, today marijuana is the most widely used illegal drug among youth, according to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.