High Times Greats: Steve-O’s Swedish Adventure

From the December, 2003 issue of High Times comes Steve Bloom’s item on Steve-O, who turns 47 years old on June 13.

Jackass prankster Steve-O thought he had a brilliant idea: He’d swallow a condom filled with pot in Norway and smuggle it into Sweden. “It was my international drug-smuggling skit,” says Steve-O. But when he arrived in Sweden at the end of May, the authorities didn’t think the prank was too funny.

“When I got to Sweden, it took seven days for me to crap it out,” he explains. “That entire time we had interview after interview. Pretty much every interview I did I told them, ‘I swallowed a condom full of pot!’ The police wound up seeing one of the articles the morning I crapped it out, and I got ambushed by Swedish plainclothes officers as I walked out of the hotel.”

The stunt started in the airport in Oslo, Norway. “This was an idea I was really excited about,” Steve-O explains. “Take a condom, stuff it with marijuana, tie a knot, and swallow it, so then when I crapped it out, I could roll up a joint and say, ‘Now that’s good shit!’ I was really drunk at the time I did it. It took me three tries to get the damn thing stuck in my throat. I started freaking out. It was a scary episode.”

Steve-O Gets Thrown in Jail

Not as scary as getting thrown into a Swedish jail—in solitary confinement, no less. “They wound up finding a pill of Ecstasy and some twigs in my hotel room,” he says. “They were convinced I still had it in me. They took me to the hospital and put me on an X-ray machine. The X-ray revealed a foreign object in my body. They saw this as a good reason to lock me up for five days.”

Steve-O (a.k.a. Stephen Glover) was charged with possession of five grams of marijuana and Ecstasy and released from jail. “The Swedish document I signed says, ‘Narcotica Smuggling.’ It’s all going to be on my Volume 3 video. We got everything on video—the digging out of the crap, the entire arrest, my out-of-jail wrap-up. It’s a signature piece.”

In addition to his Don’t Try This at Home DVDs, Steve-O’s been working on a new MTV series, The Nature Show. “It’s my belief that nature programming has been hurting for a sense of humor for some time now,” he says. “Our first promo will show a baboon jerking off, then pan over to us jerking off. Imitation is the highest form of flattery, you know?”