Nobody grows up thinking, “One day I’ll win a million dollars on TV… and then get really into cannabis.”
But life has a funny way of rerouting even the cleanest, most straight-edge trajectories. Just ask Ethan Zohn and Tyson Apostol, two Survivor champions whose journeys into cannabis didn’t start in college dorm rooms or at music festivals, but much later.
They weren’t even casual adult users.
But somewhere between Survivor, real life, and a few thousand curveballs, both men ended up discovering that cannabis can be a companion in times of hardship.
This is the story of how two reality-TV icons became unexpected cannabis advocates, and why they’re far from alone.
The OG Survivor who discovered weed the hard way
Ethan Zohn didn’t smoke pot in high school, college, or his early professional years. As a serious athlete, he had a prejudice against the plant (and we now know there are cases where cannabis can actually improve performance).
“I never touched the stuff,” he says. “I was a pro athlete. I went to Vassar. All my friends smoked, just not me.”
Then life detonated.
At 35, the Survivor: Africa winner was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. The symptoms were full-body itching, night sweats, a swollen lymph node in his neck the size of a jawbreaker. A real nightmare.
When treatment began, the pharmaceutical list got large: Ativan for anxiety, Zofran for nausea, Percocet for pain, Ambien for sleep, “every pill imaginable,” he says.
Ethan Zohn receiving chemo
“And it just wasn’t good for me,” Ethan explains. “None of it made me feel human.”
That’s when someone said the obvious: you should try weed. It wasn’t a doctor or a nurse.
But this was 2009 in New York, and there were no …
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Author: Rolando García / High Times
