‘Survivor’ Didn’t Break Them. Real Life Did. Then They Found Weed.

Nobody grows up thinking, “One day I’ll win a million dollars on TV… and then get really into cannabis.”

But life has a funny way of rerouting even the cleanest, most straight-edge trajectories. Just ask Ethan Zohn and Tyson Apostol, two Survivor champions whose journeys into cannabis didn’t start in college dorm rooms or at music festivals, but much later.

They weren’t even casual adult users.

But somewhere between Survivor, real life, and a few thousand curveballs, both men ended up discovering that cannabis can be a companion in times of hardship.

This is the story of how two reality-TV icons became unexpected cannabis advocates, and why they’re far from alone.

The OG Survivor who discovered weed the hard way

Ethan Zohn didn’t smoke pot in high school, college, or his early professional years. As a serious athlete, he had a prejudice against the plant (and we now know there are cases where cannabis can actually improve performance).

“I never touched the stuff,” he says. “I was a pro athlete. I went to Vassar. All my friends smoked, just not me.”

Then life detonated.

At 35, the Survivor: Africa winner was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer. The symptoms were full-body itching, night sweats, a swollen lymph node in his neck the size of a jawbreaker. A real nightmare.

When treatment began, the pharmaceutical list got large: Ativan for anxiety, Zofran for nausea, Percocet for pain, Ambien for sleep, “every pill imaginable,” he says.

“And it just wasn’t good for me,” Ethan explains. “None of it made me feel human.”

That’s when someone said the obvious: you should try weed. It wasn’t a doctor or a nurse.

But this was 2009 in New York, and there were no legal dispensaries, almost no physician guidance, and no dosing charts.

“So there I was,” he says, “bald, on chemo, wearing gloves and a mask, talking to a drug dealer who sold coke and ecstasy. I was buying weed just to feel better.”

That’s the moment a future cannabis advocate is born, standing on a sidewalk, planning chemotherapy.

“There wasn’t one oncologist, nurse, or doctor who could tell me how to use cannabis while going through cancer,” he says.

“So it was a guessing game.”

He hired a cannabis educator he found online, and learned tinctures, oils, dosages, safety, vaporizing. “Don’t smoke it” was the only official guidance he got. He figured out how to incorporate cannabis into the daily storm of cancer treatment, and he noticed something:

Cannabis didn’t cure anything.
But it made everything else survivable.

“I couldn’t control the disease,” Ethan says. “But I could control my food, my exercise, my sleep, my cannabis. It tricked my brain into thinking I had a little bit of control.”

And sometimes a little control is the difference between surviving and giving up.

In his cancer support group, nine people, all in their late 20s and 30s, were being treated the exact same way.

“Out of the nine of us,” Ethan says quietly, “there’s only two left. Me and another girl. And she uses cannabis too. I’m not saying it’s science. But it makes you think.”

Ethan used cannabis as a gateway to a better life, and that helped him in his treatment and during the recurrence.

The first publicly medicated Boston Marathon runner

The Ethan of today isn’t an underground patient sneaking product through TSA.

He’s a public advocate. He works with Trulieve. He’s involved with EO Care, which provides physician-guided cannabis plans for patients who don’t want to play the guessing game he did. He uses tinctures, live rosin products (“least processed, that’s important to me”), and occasionally a vape when anxiety spikes.

“I became the first publicly medicated person to run the Boston Marathon,” he says, grinning.
That was 2022, ten years into remission, with a few carefully timed 5 mg gummies powering the final miles.

He laughs. “I’m not a ‘stoner culture’ guy. I’m a health-nerd-with-weed guy.”

The Mormon pickleballer

If Ethan is the OG Survivor stoner, Tyson Apostol is the late bloomer.

“I grew up Mormon in Utah,” he says. “So yeah, weed wasn’t exactly part of the program.”

Tyson didn’t touch cannabis until he was well into adulthood, after appearing on Survivor four times, after winning Blood vs. Water, finishing his pro-cycling years, and learning firsthand that fatherhood is basically a full-contact sport.

“The worst thing for a man’s back is pulling babies out of cribs,” he laughs. “After two kids, my back gave out.”

What started as occasional pain became constant.

“I was taking 800 milligrams of Tylenol a day,” he says.

Then he tried a cannabis gummy and everything clicked.

“A gummy did the same thing and didn’t wreck my liver.”

That’s how the second Survivor winner began his cannabis chapter.

These days, Tyson uses cannabis “a couple times a week,” mostly for sleep, stiffness, and something he calls “functional flow.”

“If I’m up at five to play pickleball, a couple milligrams helps me loosen up. It’s not about getting high. It’s about getting moving,” he says.

He’s honest about how it affects his game.

“If you use the right amount,” he says, “it helps you not be so much in your head. You stop overthinking. You just play.”

Tyson also works with Trulieve, where Ethan helped bring him in. “He’s late to the weed game,” Ethan jokes. “But he’s learning.”

The show’s weed policy

“I asked if I could bring my medical cannabis… They said I was the first to ask.”

Both men agree that cannabis would have changed Survivor in hilarious ways.

When Ethan returned for Survivor: Winners at War, he asked production if he could bring his medical cannabis.

“They ran it up the ladder,” he says.

“They told me, ‘It’s not legal in Fiji, so you can’t take it. But you’re the first person to ask.’”

And Ethan and Tyson? They’re part of that wave of real people with real bodies who have nothing to prove anymore.

Why are athletes suddenly so open about weed? Because the culture caught up to them.

Elite athletes across sports now publicly embrace cannabis: Ricky Williams (NFL), founded Highsman, a cannabis brand; Megan Rapinoe (USWNT), partner in CBD brand Mendi; Conor McGregor, partnered with TIDL, a THC-free cannabis recovery product; Calvin Johnson (NFL), co-founder of cannabis company Primitiv. Ultramarathoners and endurance athletes increasingly use cannabis for recovery, sleep, and anxiety management.

A Men’s Health article notes that many athletes who use cannabis “notice improvements in recovery and enjoyment.” A Frontiers in Public Health study found that 80% of cannabis users who exercise say it enhances recovery. A University of Colorado study found that cannabis makes workouts more enjoyable, even if it doesn’t enhance performance.

The secret stoner Survivor tribe

Tyson offers his own take on what a weed-friendly season might look like:

“I’d use it to sleep,” he says. “You never sleep out there. Maybe there’d be fewer arguments about how to build the shelter. The blindsides would still happen, they’d just be friendlier.”