Puff and past: New doc reveals how Woodstock legend Carlos Santana first smoked weed

nypost.com:

Carlos Santana was the O.G. hippie in the ’60s, think again.In fact, the 76-year-old guitar hero was once an anti-weed warrior as his namesake band was huffing — and puffing — to succeed in the San Francisco scene alongside groups such as the Grateful Dead.“I’d been around marijuana all my life since I was a child, but I never toked,” reveals Santana in the new documentary “Carlos,” which opens in theaters on Friday.Indeed, the “Smooth” operator was that guy who was a downer to the doobies — in part, to protect his own good name and reputation.“You’re building a band around me, and I noticed that they smoke weed.

And I don’t smoke weed,” he recalls in the film.“And every time that they smoke weed, they don’t play the same song twice. They play it differently, and they forget things.

I wish they wouldn’t smoke pot, man, so they could learn the damn song right and play it correctly.”But Santana’s then-managers put the pot pressure on their cannabis-averse client one day at the legendary Fillmore rock club.“They looked at me like, ‘Damn,’” he recalls. “So they rolled a [big] joint … and just left it there and said, ‘We’re gonna go get some lunch.

We’ll be right back. ‘”It was then that Santana finally sucked it up and gave in to the toking temptation.“I finally went, ‘OK,’” says Santana, who would eventually become such a marijuana aficionado that he launched his own brand, Mirayo, in 2019.That’s one of “Carlos” director Rudy Valdez’s favorite stories in the documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June before hitting theaters nationwide this weekend.“It was calling to him, and he finally smokes,” Valdez told The Post.