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
