Former NFL Star Ricky Williams: Players Have Been Using Cannabis To Treat Pain For Decades

As the stigma around cannabis steadily fades, more and more professional athletes are opening up about its use cases, specifically as a natural remedy for pain management. Some of these athletes became cannabis entrepreneurs themselves.

Among them is former National Football League (NFL) running back Ricky Williams, who was a top draft pick after winning the Heisman Trophy back in 1988. In 2004, he left his career as a professional football player because he violated the league’s substance-abuse policy (testing positive for cannabis several times). Williams tried returning the next year and ended up missing the 2006 season over the repeating issue.

Last year, Williams launched his own cannabis brand — Highsman.  

In a new interview with Mackenzie Salmon on USA Today’s weekly show Sports Seriously, Williams said that it wasn’t NFL’s strict policies on cannabis use that made him leave football. Otherwise, he would've kept on playing and breaking records. However, marijuana did play a role in his new career as it helped him realize he had other interests than football.

“Cannabis helped me realize that other interests and gave me the courage to pursue those 

other interests,” Williams said.

For Williams, using cannabis was about a different lifestyle. He was also doing yoga, meditating and eating differently. Now, he says, football gave him a platform to tell this story, and share his experience.

Players Have Been Using It For A Long Time

During the interview, Williams unexpectedly shared two stories from his career revealing NFL players have been using marijuana to deal with pain for a very long time. The first one he recalls is from the start of his career.

“My rookie year, a Hall of Fame player on the team — he’s in the Hall of Fame now — invited me over to his house and he gave me the speech about how to take care of yourself in the NFL,” William said. “And he pulled out some cannabis, crushed it up, split a blunt, opened it up, put the cannabis in there, took a Vicodin, crushed it up, sprinkled the Vicodin there, rolled up the blunt, and passed it to me. That was a vet, teaching me as a rookie, how to take care of myself in the NFL.”

The other anecdote was from his last year in NFL, when he played for the Baltimore Ravens in 2011.

“At one point we were in the playoffs and I was leaving the facility and there were guys coming in with a plate full of ‘brownies.’ They [were] going to go watch film, so yeah…”

Over the years NFL's stance on marijuana use has more than softened. Last year, for the first time the NFL changed its drug policy to exclude marijuana testing during the offseason. In February, the league invested $1 million in marijuana research. It gave the money to UC San Diego to study if cannabis can be used to help athletes manage pain from injuries and recover more quickly.

Williams says the NFL is moving in the right direction by backing the cannabis study, and that in the future players would be allowed to use weed during the season as well.

“I think in the future, teams are going to be supplying cannabis for the players because they’ve realized it’s a healthy alternative [to] pharmaceuticals.”

Photo: Courtesy of I Mertex I  via Wikimedia Commons