Has Anyone Ever Smoked Weed In Space?

The image, of course, is a hoax. In fact, Hadfield was holding a much more wholesome bag of Easter eggs to share with his fellow crewmates. But has anybody ever smoked weed in space? How about alcohol and cigarettes?

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Has anybody ever drunk alcohol in space?

First up, good old-fashioned alcohol. One of the main advantages of alcohol as a substance to use in space is that you don’t have to set it on fire to feel its effects. As long as you don’t “really fancy a flaming zombie” it would be possible to get drunk in space with minimal risk to your surroundings. Nevertheless, it is prohibited on board the ISS.

“Alcohol is not permitted onboard the International Space Station for consumption,” Daniel G Huot, spokesperson for NASA’s Johnson Space Center, told the BBC in 2017. “Use of alcohol and other volatile compounds are controlled on [the] ISS due to impacts their compounds can have on the station’s water recovery system.”

That said, we know for sure that one person has taken alcohol into space, before drinking it on the Moon. During Apollo 11, the first human spaceflight to the lunar surface, Buzz Aldrin took wine and bread from the Webster Presbyterian Church in Houston in order to privately perform communion on himself. 

“I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me,” Aldrin explained in a 1970 piece for Guideposts magazine, per the Guardian. “In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.”

Has anybody ever smoked cigarettes in space?

Smoking in space is a little more dangerous, and prohibited on the ISS. Fire experiments have been performed in space, though this is obviously a little more controlled than lighting up a cigarette, and free of most of the contaminants that cigarette smoke produces. 

Nevertheless, there are credible (if not entirely confirmed) reports of Russian cosmonauts smoking cigarettes on space station Mir, as well as drinking hard liquor. During a joint Russian-US mission in 1995, US astronauts supposedly found that cosmonauts had a much more interesting selection of supplies.

“Peggy Whitson, the NASA scientist who supervised the American science program for Norm Thagard’s mission to Mir in 1995, was dismayed to find that the cosmonauts actually smoked cigarettes and drank vodka aboard the station,” Bryan Burrough explained in the 1998 book Dragonfly : NASA and the crisis aboard MIR.

“The vodka, she discovered, was stored inside half-liter ‘drink bags’ that were sent up on Progress supply ships under the guise of ‘psychological support’ materials. At one point, Whitson watched an American technician jokingly show off one of the vodka bags. ‘I said, “It’s not a joke,”‘ she remembers. “If Safety knew, it would have a cow.” Whitson was equally concerned that drinking vodka, a diuretic, would ruin American science data on the cosmonauts’ diet.”

Has anybody ever smoked weed in space?

Unfortunately, for anybody picturing how cool it would be to get high in space, there is no credible evidence of anybody lighting up a blunt in zero-g. The problem, like with alcohol, is that you don’t really want anybody to be impaired up there, as well as all the issues around smoke contamination.

“The problem is, in space now, many things will kill you. So if you do anything to alter your understanding of what is reality, that’s not in the interest of your health,” Neil deGrasse Tyson explained in an interview with TMZ on the topic. “If you want to get high in space, lock yourself in your cabin and don’t come out. ‘Cause you could break stuff… inadvertently.” 

There have been plans to send hemp seeds to the ISS to see how they mutate, but even if this is eventually studied, don’t expect astronauts to be getting high on the resulting plant.