Creativity Quote by Paul McCartney

McCartney’s casual shrug - “take pot or leave it” - is doing a lot of reputation management in very few words. Coming from a Beatle, any admission of drug use risks turning into either a morality play or a rock-star cliché. His solution is to frame cannabis not as rebellion or romance, but as a boring personal choice, the kind of habit that doesn’t even rise to the level of a “problem.” The punchline is almost bureaucratic: nine days without it, no withdrawal, nothing. That “nothing” is the point. He’s stripping the story of drama before anyone else can supply it.

The Japan detail is the real engine. It anchors the quote in consequences: not a hazy “back in the day,” but a specific place with famously strict drug laws, where a celebrity arrest becomes a public spectacle. McCartney uses that context to flip the script. Instead of letting the bust define him as reckless, he reframes it as an accidental experiment in self-control. If the setting is high-stakes, the takeaway is deliberately low-stakes.

There’s also a quiet cultural argument here. In a world that collapses all “drugs” into the same moral category, McCartney insists on gradations: cannabis as non-compulsive, non-destructive, not chemically clawing at the body. It’s a pop icon’s way of lobbying for normalization - not with policy, but with vibe: calm, measured, unbothered.