Shola Lee
Former NFL running back Ricky Williams has shared how he thinks the league should treat pain.
Ricky won the Heisman Trophy back in college before he started his professional career with the New Orleans Saints way back in 1999. From there, he played for the Miami Dolphins and Baltimore Ravens before retiring in 2011.
He's had a long, illustrious career, but now he's making headlines for a different kind of career - a cannabis brand called 'Highsman'.
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Ricky has long been an advocate of using cannabis as a pain management method in professional sports.
"I think in the future, teams are gonna be supplying cannabis for the players because they've realised it's a healthy alternative [to] pharmaceuticals," he told USA Today's Mackenzie Salmon.
Ricky has been determined to see things change from when he was first a rookie in the NFL.
As he told Mackenzie, his start as a professional was sobering, figuratively speaking at least: "I played a long time ago and I played for a long time. So things have changed a lot since I first got into the league.
"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 a speech about how to take care of yourself in the NFL.
"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 Vico in 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."
As Ricky's career progressed, he saw cannabis more overtly used as a method of pain treatment.
"I was playing for the Ravens. And 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.'"
If cannabis is 'more legal' elsewhere in the states, Ricky argues, why can't it be used in the NFL? Well, the league's policy has changed a little in recent years.
You see, the NFL has a random drug test window from 20 April to 9 August that they open each year; they used to test for THC (the psychoactive component in cannabis) but now, under the 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement, players don't get tested for it.
What's more is that in the agreement, the Join Pain Management Committee also pledged to 'conduct joint research into pain management, addiction, personalised medicine and alternative therapies, including marijuana and THC based therapies, to include the impact on athletic performance, if any, from use of such substances.'
So, there you have it, maybe Ricky's right about the NFL's policy on pain management changing, and the hilariously named Joint Research Committee might have everything to do with it.
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