Being a country music legend comes with its occupational hazards. For example, if you’re Loretta Lynn—the Queen of Country, a star for five decades—you know Willie Nelson. And when you know Willie, you may find yourself invited onto his tour bus.
And… well, you can guess where this is going.
Lynn, who turned 84 years old this year, is still going strong. She’s still going out on tour, and earlier this year, she released an album featuring a track she cut with Willie, who she calls “one of the greatest people in the whole world.”
She is also suffering from a touch of glaucoma, one of the afflictions for which marijuana provides a measure of relief. So Willie does what we expect he’d do to anyone, least of which a treasured long-time friend: He offers her a hit, the very first toke of THC in the coal-miner’s daughter’s long and storied life.
It did not go well.
“I got glaucoma and they gave me one of these cigarettes,”
Lynn told PEOPLE magazine. “I took one smoke off of it and it hit me right here in the chest. I like to have died!”
“Glaucoma is just going to have to take over.”
We’re sorry to hear that, but we suspect poor Loretta is not the first person to find herself overpowered by Willie’s daily tonic.
The pair are still friends, and she doesn’t seem to think any less of him for his prodigious cannabis habit, but hopefully he’ll start keeping some lower-octane stuff on hand the next time he’s introducing someone to cannabis. Or offer them a vaporizer.