Janet Yellen on Having ‘Ever Inhaled’: ‘Well, I Think the Answer Is Yes’

COLBERT: “Hey, everybody, we are back with Treasury secretary Janet Yellen. A couple of fun things to hit before we let you go. This was a fantastic headline from your time in office. This is from Fox Business, it says, ‘Treasury secretary Janet Yellen admits to eating hallucinogenic mushrooms during China visit: ‘Delicious.” Secretary, legally I’m required to ask you, are you high right now? Do I have a wolf head and a spider body? What’s going on? Tracers?”
Yellen: “Well, I asked for some hallucinogenic mushrooms before coming on, but I haven’t had them, so you’re safe. They were delicious. We landed in Beijing for very high-stakes meetings, the first really senior economic meetings in several years. Went out to dinner arranged by our attache at the U.S. Embassy. He speaks mandarin. He ordered. We went to a restaurant that serves Yunnanese food. And what I later discovered, after having some very delicious mushrooms, is that — this appeared the next day in Chinese social media and became quite a tweet-storm. These particular mushrooms, if they’re not cooked correctly, are hallucinogenic. Well, it was a great restaurant. They were cooked properly. We had no idea that there was anything about these mushrooms until we realized this had become a media frenzy. But they were delicious and I recommend it.”
COLBERT: “Okay, totally innocent. Okay, good.
(Applause)
Just while I’ve got you, you ever partake for real? I mean, have you ever... you’re leaving office. You’re not running for anything. Have you ever inhaled, is what I’m asking?”
Yellen: “Well, I think the answer is yes.
(Cheering and Applause)
I mean, it’s been a long time. I did have an opportunity to smoke pot when I was in college.”
COLBERT: “Okay.”
Yellen: “And the thing that happened is, I had never smoked.”
COLBERT: “Smoked at all?”
Yellen: “At all. I never had a cigarette. And here I just graduated from college. I had this opportunity. I was really looking forward to it. People said really, to get the impacts, to feel it, you need to inhale. Well, I had never even smoked a cigarette. So, you know, I’m the kind of person, I like to be prepared. I always prepare when I can. I thought, what can I do to prepare for this? I realized I should just go out and buy some cigarettes and try to learn to inhale. And so I did. The first time I smoked these cigarettes, it was awful. I’m coughing, I was terrible. I couldn’t imagine how anybody could inhale. I thought, well, I got a couple weeks, I can practice. I bought a lot of cigarettes. I smoked them. I learned to inhale. Well, so, we smoked pot. It was okay, you know, neither here nor there. You know, I didn’t really do it again for the rest of my life. But within six months, I was smoking three packs a day.”
COLBERT: “Oh, wow. How long did that go on?”
Yellen: “For a decade. And then I quit cold Turkey.”
COLBERT: “Wow. Good for you.”