I was once drugged before my college intramural basketball championship game. I was given gummy bears that I thought were just regular old gummy treats until I literally almost shot on the wrong basket. To this day, I’ve never put on such a piss-poor display of athletic diarrhea in my 29 years on this planet. Truly pathetic.
But, different strokes for different folks, and as Chauncey Billups revealed Saturday on NBA Countdown, athletes at the highest level hit that whacky tobaccy before performing in front of thousands of people. The panel was having a conversation about a medical marijuana exception to the league’s pot ban–an exception Billups adamantly supports. Billups said that players don’t just use pot for the aches and pains that accompany the NBA grind, but for performance-enhancing reasons, even going so far as to say some players performed better when high because it helped them focus.
Billups said:
“I had teammates…I actually wanted them to smoke. They played better like that. It helped them focus in on the game plan…I needed them to do that. I would rather them [smoke] sometimes than drink.”
“For medicinal use, I think we absolutely need to have that conversation. The Players Association, they need to talk about that with the NBA, because there’s a lot of science behind it… because we’ve been through a ton of injuries. I’ve seen a piece on Jason Williams, who was the No. 2 pick in the draft, that talked about him being addicted to oxycontin and pain pills, and it would have been much better and much easier thing to have marijuana as a relief.”
Billups is far from the first marijuana advocate in the NBA–Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr recently said he tried using it to treat chronic back pain and Bill Walton was born with a pipe in his mouth. In May 2015, TMZ Sports polled 10 anonymous NBA players who were unanimously united in their support of medical marijuana legalization for players in the Association, according to Bleacher Report.