“I was in Turkey and these guys invited me into one of the coffee shops and passed the hookah around and I smoked it. What was in it, I don’t know, probably some hash. Same thing in India (and) China. I smoked all kinds of things.”
– Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, 1979
Elsie the Cow
“we arrived in the town of Guelph. Of course, local industry needs must be recognized, and so we found ourselves in a bull semen factory, where the product was extracted in ways still unknown to me and then shipped to lucky cows throughout North America.
This particular plant activity was the butt of much ribald humor by the 20 or so reporters along, but they had another thing on their minds that day. This surfaced at the daily tour press conference, which was fortuitously held in the boardroom of the factory.
That morning had arrived the long-awaited report of the Le Dain Commission on the non-medical use of drugs. Gerald Le Dain – a friend of the prime minister and eventually a Supreme Court judge – had recommended the decriminalization of marijuana, quite a bombshell in those days. Thus, the first question had little to do to do with rutting animals in the barnyard and everything to do with a young generation of humans sucking the smoke of “weed,” or “grass,” as the substance was commonly known in those days.
So here it came: “Mr. Prime Minister, what do you think of the Le Dain recommendation on marijuana?” Trudeau père was nothing if not quick, but his response startled even a long-time observer. He looked around the room and saw a blackboard. It was blank save for a permanent painting of Elsie the Cow, a well-known commercial image quite at home in this particular setting.
He walked over to the board, picked up a piece of chalk and drew a cartoonist’s speech balloon out of the cow’s mouth. Therein he wrote the following words: “I … like … grass.” And then said, “Next question.”
The room exploded in laughter. The prime minister was thought by many to be a secret smoker, though in many travels with him I saw not the slightest evidence of that. But the reply was hilariously consistent with the myth, in a way that could not be proven.”
-The Globe and Mail article quoting former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s assistant Gordon Gibson about a 1970 incident
Former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau smoking a hookah in 1980 during Pierre Trudeau trip to Saudi Arabia