Before becoming Dana Scully and spending years investigating unexplained phenomena on The X-Files, Gillian Anderson found herself in a teenage episode that could easily have ended up in one of those files.

The actress recounted that, as a teenager, she was arrested after breaking into her school in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at night. As she recently revealed, she was under the influence of crystal meth. The story appeared in episode 412 of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, which aired on August 17, 2026. In the episode, Anderson reflected on a period of her teenage years she had previously described as quite chaotic. The arrest wasn’t entirely unknown to the public; what she did add this time was the detail of what she had taken.

And no, that isn’t the only drug experience from those years Anderson has recently talked about: while promoting her new movie, the actress recalled a terrible experience with marijuana and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that, she says, virtually kept her away from horror movies for decades.

Methamphetamine, High School, and a Failed Escape Attempt

The conversation with Conan O’Brien began with a rather prophetic detail: in high school, Anderson’s classmates had voted her “most likely to be arrested.” “And then you made good on that,” O’Brien remarked. Anderson confirmed it.

She said she and some others went to the school in the early hours of the morning with a peculiar plan: to glue the locks shut so the building couldn’t be opened the next day. O’Brien called the prank “aggressive.” Anderson replied that… yes. Basically, “that was kind of me at that time.”

It was her punk phase. Anderson wore pointed boots with buckles and a particularly thin sole, which had some decidedly unglamorous consequences when a guard began chasing her through downtown Grand Rapids and she stepped on a nail. Anderson said that was what stopped her and added that, had that not happened, she probably would have managed to escape.

Then came the revelation. “Let’s just say I was doing a little crystal meth at the time…” Anderson said on the podcast. She added that she was in a great mood and managed to get the charge reduced from breaking and entering to trespassing—from a charge related to forcibly entering a property without authorization to a lesser charge of unauthorized entry. 

The night just kept getting worse… Anderson said that her boyfriend at the time—whom she described as “considerably older”—went back to his apartment and continued smoking and drinking while she was in custody.

O’Brien summed up the situation: in jail, with a nail in her foot, and high on meth. “Yes,” was all Anderson could say. “Iconic,” hundreds of Instagram commenters wrote.

Weed, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and a Bad Trip That Lasted for Years

Meth isn’t the only substance that came up in the stories Anderson recently shared as she reminisced about her teenage years.

During an interview with Extra alongside Hannah Einbinder to promote their new movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Anderson said that one of her earliest experiences with horror movies happened after she had smoked some particularly potent weed. The movie was The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

“I saw it… after some very strong pot and it was not a fun experience,” she recalled. According to Anderson, she has hardly watched any horror movies since then.

In a separate interview with The Wall Street Journal, she offered more context. She said that, as a teenager, she had a really bad trip smoking weed at someone else’s house while they were watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; she felt as though she were trapped in a place she couldn’t leave, and that the experience ended up shaping her relationship with the genre for much of her life.

This period of her life isn’t entirely new to the public either. In a profile published by The New Yorker in 2024, the actress spoke of her teenage years as a period of rebellion and attention-seeking. She recalled that there was “a lot of alcohol” and “a lot of drugs” in her life back then and said she wasn’t proud of some of her destructive behaviors.

At age 21, as she recounted in that same interview, she stopped drinking and drastically changed her lifestyle. 

From ‘Most Likely to Be Arrested’ to Playing an FBI Agent

Anderson’s teenage arrest had already been reported before her conversation with Conan. Complex, citing a 1997 interview later unearthed by The Telegraph, notes that Anderson had said she didn’t receive a fine but did have to perform community service after the incident. The new detail revealed in 2026 is, therefore, much more specific: Anderson now says she used methamphetamine that night.

The contrast with what came next is quite striking. Anderson studied acting at DePaul University’s Theatre School, and a few years after her punk-rock teenage years, she landed the role that would change her career. In 1993, she made her debut as Dana Scully, the ultra-rational doctor and FBI agent on The X-Files, a role that made her an international star.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, Gillian Anderson recounts those stories about drugs and rebellion more as portraits of an earlier version of herself than as exploits to be celebrated. In fact, she had already acknowledged that some of that teenage behavior was destructive and that she wasn’t proud of it.

But there’s a biographical irony that’s hard to beat: the punk teenager voted “most likely to be arrested”—who ended up in custody after a chase, a nail, and hard drugs—went on to play, just a few years later, one of television’s most famous federal agents. Ironic, isn’t it? Or rather: iconic.

Cover photo: Alex Archambault, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons // Radspunk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The founder of Culinary & Cannabis didn’t wait for the industry to make room for her. She built her own.

For decades, cannabis was a weapon. A pretext for prejudice, a set of handcuffs dressed up as public safety, a battering ram through the front doors of Black and Brown homes.

The communities that got hit hardest by that weapon are the same ones the legal industry now courts with marketing budgets and influencer campaigns, while the damage done and the dollars chased exist in the same breath, with almost no reckoning in between.

Most people who understood what that weapon did stayed the hell away from anything connected to it, but Tamara Anderson walked straight toward it—RN badge and pastry knife in hand—and decided to turn the whole damn thing inside out.

Before she was running luxury cannabis wellness events across Southern California. Before shipping DIY topical kits to pandemic-locked strangers who needed something to do with their hands besides washing them in fear. Before commanding rooms at Grammy Week with CBD massages and trauma-informed healing conversations—

She was watching people get sick.

Not from cannabis. Sick from the medicine that was supposed to help them.

Eleven years on the administrative and financial side of healthcare before nursing school, watching insurance adjusters decide who got cared for and who deserved to rust on the wrong side of a deductible. Anderson watched, up close, what long-term pharmaceutical “treatments” actually did to a human body.

In some cases, that was liver damage or addiction, even changes in personality. The slow, grinding cost of being managed rather than healed.

“From the very start of my nursing career,” Anderson says, “it has been my mission to change the way we approach healthcare.”

She tried to change it from inside the system first. But she quickly realized, somewhere between the machinery and the bureaucracy, the human element got swallowed up whole. 

It always does. Systems aren’t built accidentally.

So Anderson did what you do when someone decides you’re not worthy of a seat at their table.

She built her own table. And made it beautiful enough that people cross state lines for a seat.

Luxury as a Political Act

Culinary & Cannabis isn’t a dispensary or a weed brand. It isn’t even an app, and everything is an app these days. Life is an app. Anderson calls Culinary & Cannabis an “all-sensory interactive cannabis event production company,” which, while accurate, doesn’t fully capture what it feels like to walk into one of her spaces.

“Like being inside a flower while it’s growing,” is how she puts it. “It’s one of the most relaxing environments you’ll ever experience… filled with options to explore.”

Every station is doing something different. Eucalyptus and cedar. Sound bowls humming through the floor. Someone receiving a CBD massage for the first time. Someone else asking a question they have never trusted a doctor with. You arrive guarded, skeptical, scared, or just curious. But when you’re done, you leave lighter.

Anderson engineered every inch of it.

“Clinical spaces can feel cold or intimidating, which shuts people down,” she says. “When you stage an event with luxury and beauty, it becomes a hug to the community. It creates a sense of safety where people feel comfortable asking the deep questions.”

Anderson carves out rooms where trauma-informed healing conversations for communities of color happen in the same breath as sound baths and bodywork, and people carrying centuries of generational weight could finally set some of it down.

We all deserve to breathe.

At a recent Grammy Week CannaSpa, more than 300 guests found that room to breathe—evidence of just how hungry people are for spaces built with care.

The Industry Was Never Progressive

Cannabis luxury spaces aren’t built for Black people by default. Hell, cannabis spaces, period, weren’t built for Black people. They were built on the prosecution of Black people. The War on Drugs used cannabis asone of the central tools of Black community destruction for fifty years.

Fifty years of documented policy, documented arrests, documented destruction. The receipts are everywhere.

The “legal industry” that followed moved ridiculously fast to extract record profits and painfully slow to address the damage it was built on.

Anderson knows all of this. It’s etched into her bones. And she builds against it in every detail.

When she launched Culinary & Cannabis, she didn’t show her face publicly until about a month before the first major event, because she knew what it would cost her if they saw her coming.

If they clocked her first.

“I didn’t want the industry’s internal biases to stop brands, chefs, or consumers from walking through the door.”

Read that again. 

A Black woman had to obscure her presence to give her own event a fair shot at success in an industry that markets itself as progressive. The sophistication required to navigate that without bitterness—to build when the industry is rooting for you to fail, to create something beautiful despite reality checking you at every turn—is a kind of emotional intelligence most people never have to develop.

Most people would have walked away bitter as hell. Anderson built a spa.

“As a woman of color, I know that in every room I enter, I have to bring a level of excellence that is undeniable just to be considered. That’s not just a challenge; for me, it’s a daily practice.”

No Blaming the Oven

Anderson came up as a pastry chef.

Baking is pure science. There is no “eyeballing it.” The chemistry either works or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t, the soufflé doesn’t rise. Cannabis infusion demands the same precision—specific measurements, controlled temperatures, exact dosing—and Anderson applies the same obsessive rigor to both. 

There’s no blaming the oven.

It gives her credibility in a space still lousy with people who treat cannabis cooking like a vibe.

It also shapes the way she teaches. When you’ve spent years understanding that the difference between a perfect result and a failed one is knowing the why behind every step—why the butter needs to be cold, why the temperature matters, why you can’t rush the process—you stop accepting “just try it and see what happens” as a teaching philosophy. 

Anderson doesn’t hand people cannabis and wish them luck. She builds the context first. The science. The history. The ritual. Then the experience.

Her target audience is the “canna-curious”, the person who hasn’t touched this plant, or hasn’t touched it since a bad experience in someone’s garage or basement twenty years ago. She calls Culinary & Cannabis “the re-entry event.” And the skin she wants people to shed when they walk out is the stoner stigma.

Lose the fear of losing control.

“I want them to replace those old assumptions with a personal relationship with the plant.”

The clinical world, the insurance world, the pharmaceutical world—none of them traffic in personal relationships. They traffic in protocols. Anderson’s model is the opposite. Completely, deliberately, the opposite. 

She meets people where they are, inside spaces that feel like smoke-wrapped gifts rather than sterile waiting rooms.

The Guest List Was Never Made for Her

On Black entrepreneurship in cannabis, she doesn’t mince words.

“My honest assessment is that we are still largely on the outskirts of the mainstream industry.”

Equity programs? A few are genuine. Most are press releases dressed up as penance. The gap between what those programs promise and what they deliver is where people like Anderson land. Into necessity. The only place where something real gets built.

Every equity program that substitutes a press photo for actual access should have to answer for that gap. Anderson didn’t wait around for any of them to figure it out.

What she built is, by her own design, intentionally inclusive—POC-centered, everyone welcome.

The hug you get when you walk through those doors was never something workshopped in a conference room by someone in a bad suit with an even worse toupee. It just exists, the way warmth exists in a room someone actually gave a damn about building.

The Woman the Industry Has to Reckon With

The nurse. The pastry chef. The educator who shipped supplies to strangers’ doorsteps during a pandemic because people needed to be doing more than just surviving. The event producer who built luxury healing spaces in an industry that has spent decades either ignoring or exploiting the communities she serves and platforms.

The recent CannaSpa Wellness Lounge also marked a personal milestone: it was Anderson’s first major event following her own battle with cancer, a chapter that sharpened her commitment to intentional self-care and community-centered healing.

All of it in service of the same mission she’s carried since before nursing school: change the way we approach care, and who gets it. Change what it feels like to receive it.

Culinary & Cannabis is growing fast—expanding into North America, the UK, Australia, Asia. People everywhere are tired of clinical apathy, tired of being managed by a system that was never designed to actually make them well, tired of existing inside machines that were architected, from the jump, to exclude them.

Tamara Anderson builds for those people.

The space exists. The door is open. The flower is growing. It’s up to us to feed it.

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