Members of Outlawz have said for years that they mixed some of Tupac Shakur’s ashes with weed and smoked them after his death, claiming the ritual reflected a real conversation and a lyric in “Black Jesuz.” Suge Knight later offered a similar account while saying he personally did not participate, though conflicting versions remain over whether Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, knew about or approved the ritual.

When you finally go, what would you want to happen to your body? Actually, screw the polite version: if you were cremated, would you want your friends to smoke you?

For Tupac Shakur, the legendary American rapper who died at just 25 back in ’96, the idea apparently intrigued him enough to talk it through seriously with his friends, turn it into a lyric, and ultimately have some of them carry it out post-mortem. Yes. Literally.

For years, the story floated around as one of those too-good-to-be-true legends surrounding a figure already wrapped in mythology. But in 2011, two members of Outlawz, the hip-hop collective founded by Tupac, publicly said that, yes, it was true.

In an interview with VladTV, Young Noble and E.D.I. Mean said that some of Tupac’s ashes were mixed with weed and smoked during a farewell held after his death.

According to Noble, they held a small memorial alongside his family and brought a bunch of Pac’s favorite things to the beach.

“Yes, it’s definitely true,” he said. “Had a little memorial for him with his mum and his family. We had hit the beach, threw [in] a lot of shit he liked at the beach. Some weed, some chicken wings, he loved orange soda… Pac loved that kind of shit, so we were giving him our own farewell.”

And then came the part people are still talking about three decades later.

“We twisted up some of that great Granddaddy California Kush and mixed the big homie with it,” Noble recalled. “So you know, he flowin’ through our system.”

Miami New Times summed up the whole thing with an image that’s pretty hard to beat: an “ashy Makaveli joint.” Makaveli, of course, was one of Tupac’s aliases.

The Song Where Tupac Asked His Friends to Smoke His Ashes With Weed

This apparently wasn’t just something his friends came up with on the spot at the memorial. Tupac had left a pretty explicit clue in Black Jesuz, a song recorded with Outlawz and released posthumously:

“Cremated, last wish is niggas smoke my ashes.”

Pretty self-explanatory.

E.D.I. Mean explained in 2011 that he was the one who suggested they actually follow through on the line. “That was a request that he had,” he recalled. “Now, how serious he was about it? We took it serious.”

Years later, though, he added a detail that makes the whole thing much more interesting than a bunch of friends taking one lyric way too literally.

In a 2020 interview with XXL, E.D.I. said the conversation about smoking the ashes of any member of the group who died had actually taken place before Tupac wrote that line.

“The conversation was a real conversation,” he explained. According to E.D.I., Tupac had told them where the idea came from, what he had learned about it, and why he found it interesting. The basic premise was: if one of them died, wouldn’t it be wild to do something like that so whoever died could literally remain part of the others?

“Shit you talk about when you young and you high,” E.D.I. summed it up.

According to the rapper, Tupac had heard about the idea from Native American friends he had gone to school with. For E.D.I., conversations like that were exactly the kind of thing that would later find their way into Pac’s music.

So the Black Jesuz bar apparently didn’t create the idea. If anything, the song preserved a conversation they had already had. And when Tupac died, his friends decided it was time to find out just how serious he had been.

Except there’s a wrinkle.

When the Outlawz made the story public in 2011, a spokesperson for the Shakur family denied that Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mother, had taken part in the ritual. According to that version, she had never agreed to smoke her son’s remains, and the rappers would have had to get hold of the ashes without the knowledge of the family member entrusted with them at the memorial.

A decade and a half later, though, a very different version emerged.

The One Guy Who Did Not Smoke Tupac

Suge Knight, co-founder and former CEO of Death Row Records, was driving the BMW Tupac was riding in when the rapper was shot on September 7, 1996. Tupac died from his injuries six days later.

Today, Knight is serving a 28-year prison sentence for voluntary manslaughter after pleading no contest in connection with a 2015 hit-and-run that killed Terry Carter. From a California prison cell in 2025, the former Death Row boss gave his own account of what happened to Tupac’s remains.

And buried inside this pretty macabre story is one genuinely funny detail: according to Knight, he was basically the only one in the group who didn’t smoke Tupac.

“I was so happy to say I was on probation—I couldn’t smoke,” he told People. Knight said he explained to Tupac’s mother that he would have loved to join in, but he could not.

“Moms, I’d love to, but if I hit that, I’ll get in trouble,” he says he told Afeni Shakur, which would seem to suggest she did know what was going on… though at this point, we may never know.

“I was probably the only one who didn’t hit him,” Knight recalled, laughing.

According to Knight, Afeni wanted her son cremated immediately, with no funeral. Knight allegedly tried to arrange it that very night, but someone at a funeral home he managed to reach told him he wouldn’t be able to do it for several days.

But money talks, right? In a more detailed account Knight gave TMZ in August 2026, he claimed he went to the man’s house carrying two bags of cash: one with $200,000, the other with $1 million.

First, he offered the $200K. The man said no. Then, according to Knight, he put $1.2 million on the table. Deal. Tupac, Knight says, was cremated that same night.

Knight had already given People a less detailed version of the story the year before. According to him, after the cremation, a bag containing Tupac’s ashes was passed around and some of his friends mixed them with weed. “His homies rolled him up. They smoked him,” he said.

To Knight, it wasn’t just some outrageous stunt. “You gotta understand, that’s what made sense,” he explained. “It was symbolic. It’s like… you keep part of him.”

The whole thing is pretty messy, and the accounts don’t line up perfectly. Young Noble remembers a memorial on the beach; Knight talks about friends and family gathering after the cremation and, in his latest telling, a chain of events that unfolded almost immediately.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the stories are false. There could have been different moments, different portions of the ashes, and different people involved. Three decades later, with all the mythology still surrounding Tupac Shakur’s life and death, pinning down every detail is basically impossible.

What does seem clear is this: for fifteen years, members of Outlawz have publicly maintained that they smoked Tupac’s ashes mixed with weed. One of them says Pac had talked about doing it before he died. Tupac put the idea into a song. And now Suge Knight says he watched part of that wish become reality.

There are more conventional last wishes, but maybe none quite as Tupac as ending up, literally, flowing through your friends’ systems.

Cover photo: Чигот, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons // State of California DMV, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons // Edited with Gemini

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Before cannabis, Stacey Rusch spent years learning how to hold an audience, whether the room contained yoga students, morning-news viewers, QVC shoppers, or a table full of Real Housewives.

There is a 2021 résumé still circulating online that explains Stacey Rusch better than most reality-TV biographies ever could.

It is from years before SHAYO and before The Real Housewives of Potomac turned her particular cadence, optimism, and pearl-clutching composure into Bravo fodder. Under “Skills,” Rusch lists sales experience, improvisation, storytelling, live performance, health and wellness, and the ability to make guests comfortable on air. Her work history jumps from Washington television to QVC to yoga instruction. Among her former yoga clients: the White House Athletic Center, American University, the CIA, and NASA.

Read five years later, it feels less like an old TV résumé than a blueprint. Rusch has spent years learning how people connect to a person, a product, and a story. Now she has brought those skills somewhere considerably messier than a television studio: cannabis.

“The joy of connection!” Rusch tells High Times when asked what connects the various versions of her career. Later in the same answer, she puts it another way: “my passion is and always will be making a positive connection.”

That may sound relentlessly sunny. With Rusch, relentless sunniness appears to be part of the point.

Before the Housewives, There Was the Pitch

Selling something on live television is a strange art. There is no edit to save you, no dead air to disappear in post, and no room to suddenly discover that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Rusch’s résumé says her QVC work was live and unscripted, requiring detailed product knowledge and the ability to improvise.

In a 2025 interview with Vulture, Rusch described the machinery behind that ease: hours spent learning brands and products before going live, then drawing on her own life to make whatever was on the table feel familiar. It is easy to joke about QVC. It is harder to deny the training.

Before Rusch ever had a cannabis company, she had learned how to translate products for people who might know nothing about them. Before reality TV, she knew how to speak directly into a camera without a script. Before either, she taught yoga.

The yoga chapter matters because few words in commercial cannabis have been stretched thinner than “wellness.” Plenty of brands discover it at roughly the same moment they discover a market segment.

Rusch has a stronger claim to the territory. Her yoga work predates SHAYO by years, and her old résumé identifies her as a health and wellness expert while listing teaching work with institutions ranging from American University to NASA and the CIA.

“My intention was to start a wellness company,” she says. “As a former yoga teacher, I wanted to develop products that help people live a fuller, more joyful life.”

SHAYO centers on two rosin-infused fruit chews: Rise, a Blood Orange Pomegranate chew with a 1:2 THC-to-CBG ratio, and Rest, a Berry Vanilla chew with a 1:2 THC-to-CBN ratio. The brand’s current lineup also includes one-gram all-in-one vapes under the Rise and Rest names.

The more interesting question isn’t whether cannabis needs another wellness brand. It’s why Rusch believed her own history gave her a credible reason to build one.

Stacey Rusch Is Very Good at Being Stacey Rusch

Reality television introduced a different problem. On QVC, polish is competence. On Housewives, polish can become evidence against you. Rusch’s unusually formal delivery and relentlessly composed personality quickly became part of her character on Potomac. Her castmates have repeatedly questioned whether the Stacey they see on camera is a performance, extending that suspicion to her relationships and even the timeline of her cannabis business.

Her professional history makes that tension easier to understand. Rusch has worked in professions where controlling the message is not deception. It is literally the job. Journalism rewards preparation. QVC rewards fluency. Yoga rewards calm. Reality television rewards the moment when somebody loses all three. Rusch sees the distinction.

“Reality TV is different in that you have to let go of telling a story and live the story,” she says. “You cannot be prepared. There are no scripts or teleprompters. It’s organic in a way that’s both exciting and terrifying.”

That might be the most revealing thing she told High Times. For someone whose career has involved communicating with intention, Housewives asks her to surrender control and then turns that surrender into entertainment. Cannabis puts her back on more familiar ground. Here, she gets to decide what the story is.

Weed, Without the Apology

Cannabis still carries stigma, particularly for women whose public identities sit somewhere between family, television, and wellness. We asked whether there was anyone she worried about disappointing when she entered the industry.

“No.”

That was the entire answer. It lands harder than a paragraph about empowerment ever could. Rusch doesn’t present entering cannabis as rebellion. She doesn’t need a story about secretly smoking weed for decades to establish credibility, and she doesn’t perform an edgy reinvention now that cannabis is commercially useful. Her stated interest is much more consistent with the career she already had: wellness, connection, and women.

But SHAYO also places her inside a cannabis industry where access and ownership are much more complicated than celebrity entrepreneurship can make them appear.

Jushi Holdings launched SHAYO with Rusch in 2025, initially bringing its rosin-infused fruit chews into Virginia’s medical market before expanding the brand into Nevada’s adult-use market later that year. Jushi describes SHAYO as a brand “co-created” with Rusch. Rusch describes the relationship enthusiastically.

“In partnering with JUSHI I was able to do just that with the best quality of products and expert guidance in this ever changing industry,” she says.

That partnership matters because Virginia is no California. Non-medical cannabis sales remain illegal in the state, with regulated adult-use retail scheduled to begin July 1, 2027. Virginia’s medical cannabis system is divided among five geographic health service areas, each with a licensed pharmaceutical processor. Jushi holds the processor license for Northern Virginia, and those pharmaceutical processors are currently the only authorized growers and dispensaries of medical cannabis in the state.

SHAYO, in other words, wasn’t born in an open marketplace where anybody with a clever logo could rent a storefront and start moving gummies. It entered through one of the few existing gates. That context makes Rusch’s next ambition much more interesting.

What Does Ownership Mean When the Gates Are This Narrow?

“I made history as the first Black woman to own her own brand in Virginia,” Rusch tells High Times, “and now my duty is to continue to shape history by helping other entrepreneurs enter this space and thrive.”

Rusch, for her part, is increasingly interested in the structural side of the business. She says she is a member of the U.S. Cannabis Roundtable and has participated in two congressional briefings about her experience as an owner and advocate for women’s wellness.

“I’ve found solidarity in the excitement for change,” she says. “This is a pivotal time in the industry.”

For Virginia, that is literally true. The state is now building the rules for a recreational market scheduled to open next year, including licenses for retail stores, cultivation facilities, processors, delivery operators, and microbusinesses.

The next version of Virginia cannabis will have more doors. The harder question is who will be able to walk through them.

Joy Is Not the Same Thing as Naivety

Spend enough time with the language surrounding Rusch and eventually the word “joy” starts appearing everywhere. Rusch uses it. SHAYO uses it. Her professional history uses it. Even when asked what joy means when life decidedly does not cooperate, she refuses to abandon the premise.

“When life isn’t joyful, I find comfort in gratitude,” she says. “No matter your circumstance, you can always find something to be thankful for. I find solace in my faith.”

Then comes the line that could only belong to someone who agreed to join The Real Housewives:

“I know that God will always lead me back to who I am inherently – delusionally optimistic!”

There it is. The useful mistake would be to confuse optimism with softness. When asked what viewers misunderstand about her, Rusch describes a life far quieter than her television job suggests.

“I’m a Brave Housewife but I’m so lowkey,” she says. “Outside of the blessings of glitz and glamour that come with being on TV, I live in a small community of the best people. My weekends are filled with swim meets and sleepovers.”

That version of Stacey Rusch can coexist with the woman who mastered live television, volunteered her private life to Bravo, entered one of the most regulated industries in America, and now wants a seat in cannabis policy conversations.

Maybe that is the throughline. Not wellness. Not television. Not even cannabis. Rusch has made a profession out of walking into rooms where attention is currency and figuring out how to hold it.

The Next Thing She Wants to Sell Is Possibility

Celebrity cannabis has had enough famous faces dropped onto packaging. Rusch is more interesting when SHAYO is treated as another stop in a longer career rather than its culmination.

She was teaching yoga before wellness became a cannabis marketing category. She learned sales before influencers learned to call affiliate links entrepreneurship. She learned television before Bravo made the question of whether she was “performing” into part of her television persona.

Cannabis brings all of those histories together, but it also gives her something television never really could: the chance to build an asset that exists when the camera turns off. That appears to be the part she most wants to matter.

“I hope that my story of entrepreneurship will inspire more people to feel empowered to build brands,” Rusch says. “Especially people like me.”

Then she leaves very little ambiguity about how she sees the work ahead.

“I want to utilize my work, brand, and voice to change that.”

“And I will.”

Images courtesy of Stacey Rusch and SHAYO.

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