He once attributed his issues with short-term memory to his prodigious marijuana smoking.
But that doesn’t seem to have stopped Michael Douglas from giving up weed, as he was spotted making a short visit to a marijuana dispensary in his former home town of Santa Barbara, California, on Wednesday.
The 78-year-old, who got his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, was seen leaving the Coastal Premium Cannabis Dispensary with a small black bag full of his purchases.
The actor, who didn’t appear to be joined by his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones for the pit stop, looked casual in a nondescript dark ensemble.
He rocked a charcoal Aviator Nation sweatshirt with a black lightning bolt over the chest that sells on the brand’s website for around $165.
Douglas paired it with a set of relaxed black jeans and muted black-and-gray trainers.
The Wall Street star covered up his shaggy white hair with a black baseball cap, and he wore his angular dark sunglasses perched atop the hat bill.
He dropped by the dispensary in downtown Santa Barbara for about 20 minutes before heading out with his supplies.
Michael’s love of pot goes back decades, as he revealed in a 2018 profile of his longtime friend and regular costar Danny DeVito for Cigar Aficionado.
The two, who were roommates early in their career before a string of collaborations in the 1970s and ’80s, bonded over their shared love of marijuana in the 1960s.
‘I was on the beach, looking out at the Long Island Sound and this guy walks up to me, with this long head of hair, if you can imagine,’ Douglas recalled. ‘He says, “You get high?” We were both 1967 potheads, so we smoked a joint and that was a beginning of a long, long friendship.’
In 2021, while speaking with AARP Magazine, Douglas noted that he had been having problems with his short-term memory during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
Although he once assumed it was a common symptom of heavy marijuana use, he admitted that he feared it was something else.
‘My long-term memory is fine, but my short-term memory is not. I used to blame it on pot. But I’ve got some friends who’ve been smoking as long as I have and have fabulous memories, so I don’t think that’s the issue. I’m researching it,’ he said.
It wasn’t clear why Douglas was visiting Santa Barbara, but he has lived in the coastal California city for significant chunks of his life.
His father, the late acting icon Kirk Douglas, spend plenty of time in Santa Barbara, and Michael lived in the picturesque area while married to his first wife Diandra Luker Douglas.
In 1996, Michael donated $600,000 of a $3.6 million total to help the city purchase a 70-acre coastal property, which was renamed the Douglas Family Preserve.
Although Michael has California roots, he spends much of his time living in New York with his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones. (Full Story)