Sharon Stone used cannabis for years to manage seizures after a near-fatal stroke. She quit, got sick, and blamed what she says is being put into weed today. Her neurologist, she says, has watched people die from it. The medical record points somewhere else.
Sharon Stone recently spoke about her health and once again discussed her relationship with cannabis. The Basic Instinct actress revealed that she decided to quit weed and stop taking one of the medications she had been prescribed following the 2001 stroke that nearly cost her life.
Stone, 68, said she wanted to reclaim her life and stop depending on substances. But her history with marijuana is less straightforward than that statement suggests: for years, the actress had described using it as a way to cope with the neurological aftereffects of that life-changing event.
Sharon Stone had been cutting back on medications for years
For Stone, the decision to quit weed was not an isolated one. In a recent Variety interview, she said that she had been trying for years to reduce the number of substances that had been part of her daily life since the stroke. She explained that over time she had managed to stop taking “the majority of the drugs” prescribed to her following the event.
The actress did not specify which medications she had originally been taking or what they were for. Her account frames the decision as part of a broader effort to regain autonomy after decades of treatment and living with neurological aftereffects.
Stone described the past year as a period of personal recovery. “This has been a period for me in this last year of really reclaiming my life,” she said. That process included both reducing her medications and quitting cannabis.
From smoking pot in an attempt to prevent seizures to quitting completely
In September 2001, Stone suffered a ruptured vertebral artery and experienced a brain hemorrhage that lasted nine days. Her recovery was long and difficult: she had to relearn how to walk, talk, and read, stepped away from acting, and continued to face seizures and other neurological difficulties. She has also stated that the process affected her career, her finances, and her family life.
In October 2023, the actress explained that cannabis had become part of how she got through daily life. “For so long, I smoked marijuana to try not to ever have a seizure in public,” she said. She didn’t mention dosages, strains, medical recommendations, or specific products. But she did make clear what was driving her use: she was embarrassed about having a seizure in front of other people and feared it would ultimately close doors for her in Hollywood.
Her public connection to the plant was no secret either. In 2017, she attended the launch of Beboe, a luxury cannabis brand that sought to normalize its use among a sophisticated audience. Her attendance did not prove that she was a customer, investor, or ambassador, but it did place her closer to the cannabis world.
Stone revealed that in September 2025, against her doctors’ advice, she stopped taking one of the medications prescribed after her stroke. She didn’t say which one it was or whether she tapered off it gradually. She did say that the experience was “like going off of fucking heroin” and that she was very ill for four and a half months.
After that, she quit cannabis as well. She said she became ill again, this time for about a month.
Stone attributed her reaction to what she believes is being added to cannabis today, saying that “they put so much stuff in it now.” She added: “It’s not like you’re pulling it out of the ground anymore. It’s not like when we were kids.” She then recounted a conversation with her doctor: “I went to my neurologist, and he said, ‘Sharon, I’ve had people dying in the emergency room from marijuana.’”
What the medical record actually shows
Stone is recounting her own experience and a conversation with her doctor. She is not presenting evidence, and she does not claim to be. She did not name the neurologist, identify the products she was using, or point to any testing. High Times cannot evaluate cases we cannot see. What can be checked is whether the published record contains anything resembling what he described.
Two things in her account are worth separating first. The drug she compared to heroin was a prescription medication she had been taking since her stroke, not cannabis. And nowhere did she say cannabis had stopped working. By her own telling she used it that way for years, and she gave it up as part of a decision to live without any substances at all.
On the question of death, there is no established lethal dose of cannabis in humans, and a fatal overdose from THC alone has never been documented in the medical literature. The most cited statement of that came from the DEA itself. In the 1988 federal rescheduling docket, the agency’s own chief administrative law judge, Francis Young, found that “nearly all medicines have toxic, potentially lethal effects. But marijuana is not such a substance. There is no record in the extensive medical literature describing a proven, documented cannabis-induced fatality.” He noted that aspirin, sold over the counter, caused hundreds of deaths a year, and that eating ten raw potatoes could produce a toxic response while it was “physically impossible to eat enough marijuana to induce death.” Young concluded that marijuana in its natural form is “one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” The DEA’s administrator overruled him. Cannabis stayed in Schedule I.
The largest modern examination of the question comes from King’s College London, published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in 2022. Researchers reviewed 3,455 deaths in England between 1998 and 2020 in which cannabinoids were detected at post-mortem. In 96% of them, other drugs were present too. Just 136 involved cannabis alone, and in that group the leading cause of death was traumatic injury. Cannabis toxicity was cited in one.
That gap between detection and causation is what makes a claim like the neurologist’s easy to arrive at and hard to support. Cannabinoids show up in post-mortem toxicology constantly, and increasingly: in 7% of cases reported to England’s National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths through 2011, and 18% by 2020. A clinician reviewing files where THC keeps appearing could come away certain he has watched patients die from marijuana. The coroners who ruled on those deaths almost never agreed.
None of that means emergency rooms never see cannabis. They do, for acute anxiety and panic, disorientation, the cyclical vomiting of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, and children who have gotten into an edible. Those visits are real, and the last category is a genuine argument for child-resistant packaging. What the record does not show is people dying from the drug itself.
There is also a duller explanation for a month of feeling terrible than anything having been added to the product. Cannabis withdrawal syndrome was added to the DSM-5 in 2013 and is recognized in the ICD-11. Symptoms usually begin within one to three days of stopping, peak in the first week and clear within two to three weeks, with sleep and mood effects sometimes running longer in long-term daily users. Researchers have consistently described its severity as comparable to tobacco withdrawal. It is unpleasant, and unlike alcohol or benzodiazepine withdrawal it is not dangerous and does not require medical supervision. It is also the ordinary, well-documented thing that happens when a longtime daily consumer stops.
Her other concern, that something is being put into the product, has a real precedent, and it points somewhere specific. Between March 2019 and February 2020, the CDC confirmed 68 deaths and more than 2,800 hospitalizations from EVALI, a severe lung injury the agency linked to vitamin E acetate, a thickening agent cut into illicit THC vape cartridges. People did die in emergency rooms. The cause was an additive, not the cannabis, and federal investigators found the cases were overwhelmingly tied to cartridges bought from informal sources rather than licensed stores.
Which cuts the opposite way from how her comment lands. Licensed markets require testing for pesticides, residual solvents, heavy metals and microbial contamination before a product reaches a shelf, and a great deal of what sells in them is grown in living soil and comes with a lab report attached. Those requirements are uneven from state to state, and the industry has its own documented problems with lab shopping and inflated potency numbers, which is an argument for tightening them rather than for walking away. The channels with no testing requirement at all are the ones that produced vitamin E acetate, and the intoxicating hemp products now shipping into states with no legal cannabis market.
What her story does show is a profound shift in her relationship with marijuana: she went from using it for years to try to avoid seizures in public to including it among the substances she decided to quit in order to regain control of her life. That is her decision to make, and she is entitled to it. It is not a finding about the plant.
This story was updated on July 24, 2026 to add medical context on cannabis-related deaths, withdrawal and product testing.
Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
