“I practiced under the influence. I played games under the influence. … I am not ashamed of what I did.” https://t.co/jVdAVNeSdK
— Coloradoan (@coloradoan) September 12, 2016
If there is one story you’re going to read about marijuana today, make it the Ft. Collins Coloradoan’s wonderful, in-depth profile on Treyous Jarrells, a former Colorado State University running back. Jarrells dropped his scholarship with the CSU Rams to focus on his hobby, marijuana. After using weed to treat his chronic pain from 16 years of playing football, now has license to grow medicinal marijuana. This is after years of defying the NCAA’s ban against cannabis use while under scholarship on the Rams, which resulted in complex web of lies and deceit. Here’s a snippet:
Jarrells, 23, left the Colorado State University football team early in the 2015 season due to concerns he’d fail a drug test and risk losing his financial aid.
But Jarrells’ use of marijuana, which he smokes to relieve chronic pain caused by playing football for 16 years, conflicts with NCAA and CSU’s list of banned substances. It’s a thorny issue that’s further complicated by the fact that the rampant use of university-administered opiates can have severe side effects. Jarrells says cannabinoids treat his pain in a safer way.
“I practiced under the influence. I played games under the influence. This is my medicine,” Jarrells said. “I’ve seen players at CSU pop five, 10 ibuprofens before practice. Daily. You think that’s good? Over the course of two, three years, that’s eating your liver away.”
“I am not ashamed of what I did.”
Instead of playing pro football as he dreamed, he quit the team before earning a starting position to concentrate on treating his chronic pain with marijuana and building a legal growhouse in his basement apartment. Via:
He leads us through the front door and downstairs to his basement apartment. His laundry is zipped in temporary closets to protect his clothes from the smell, and the carpet — littered with stems — doesn’t look like it’s ever been vacuumed.
He continues the tour, and we enter an unfinished room with ventilation tubing, gardening supplies and barely recognizable hemp plants in tiny planters scattered across the floor.
“Those are the clones,” he says. “Just wait.”
Before unzipping the curtain into the final room, he straps on a pair of white painter’s overalls, throws on his yellow, marijuana-themed shades and reveals his most prized possessions. Rows of Pineapple Express and Blue Haze cannabis stretch from wall to wall, in a 10-by-10 grow room set at 83 degrees. The tallest, which Jarrells named K. Michelle (because “she’s tall and thick”), towers at more than 6 feet.
Given the boom in legal weed, he believes he’ll still be a millionaire, just in a complete different kind of business, via:
Jarrells will never make millions playing football like he dreamed as a child. He believes that if he had wanted to play out his senior season this fall, he’d have punched his ticket to the NFL. Maybe that’s true.
He still plans on becoming a millionaire. He’s bottling and selling his own “million-dollar spray” to help cannabis and other plants flourish.
Regardless of if those financial goals are reached, he’s happy. Happy waking up at 5 a.m. to tend to his plants and smoke with them in the afternoon. He’s happy even though he rarely leaves the house. He’s happy with a life that, from the outside, appears mundane.
And Jarrells understands how he looks. He looks like the athlete who dropped out of football to smoke marijuana. His May arrest for suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs not helping that perception.
He looks like a pothead.