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Alex Trebek Says Eating Six Pot Brownies Was a Bad Idea

Here's everything you need to know about that time the 'Jeopardy!' host got helllaaaaaaa stoned for three straight days.
Photos via Flickr users Karen and Peabody Awards / Composite by Hilary Pollack

Alex Trebek, that stone cold legend of both game shows and silver foxiness, seems to be a man with no known weaknesses. He's survived two heart attacks, a torn Achilles tendon from chasing a hotel burglar, and more than three decades' worth of tedious stories from Jeopardy! contestants. But if you're trying to slow the 77-year-old down, you might want to give him a bite of your weed brownie. That's the only thing that the self-described "chocoholic" says has ever knocked him on his elegantly dressed ass.

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In a delightful interview with The Daily Beast, Trebek again recounts his one-and-only experience with pot brownies, and swears that he learned his lesson the first time.

"I had just arrived in California [in the 1970s] and went to a friend's house for dinner and there were brownies," he said. "I love brownies, and I didn't realize they were hash brownies. And…whoa." Trebek said that, unaware of what he was inhaling, he ate a half-dozen.

"The dinner party was on a Friday and I was not able to leave that house until Sunday afternoon," he said. "I spent the next day-and-a-half in bed. It was not a good trip and I have not done any of that stuff since."


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If you are well-versed in Trebekiana—and as a former Jeopardy! contestant, I am—you'll remember that he's shared this particular story before. In May 2015, he told Howard Stern that his naive younger self polished off "four or five" of the brownies at the party on Friday night and, in this version of the tale, "didn't leave their home until Monday morning." He also admitted to smoking pot as a potential cure for arthritis in his shoulder and confessed that he tried cocaine once, at a party he went to with his accountant. (Alex, you are one mad lad).

That's not to say that Canada's most flawless export is without an appropriate number of vices. His longtime go-to breakfast was a Snickers and a Diet Pepsi, until he started working with a nutritionist. "So I changed," he said. "I stopped eating Snickers and Diet Pepsi and I replaced them with Milky Ways and Diet Cokes."

READ MORE: Beyond the Brownie - The State of Marijuana Edibles in America

Trebek also enjoys good wine, although he'd put it less euphemistically. "I'm not a true wine connoisseur," he once quipped. "I'm just a drinker." He's also joked about being a career insomniac who has a drink before taping episodes of Jeopardy! (I mean, wouldn't you?)

"Yesterday, for instance, I woke up at two o'clock and was awake until 5:15 [AM] and then my alarm went off at 5:25," he told New Republic. "Today I woke up at 3:00 and was awake until 5:20… I'm of the old school, which says, 'It's five o'clock somewhere, so why not now?!'"

Trebek. So saucy.