Former NBAer Stephen Jackson won a championship in 2003 with the San Antonio Spurs. Jackson’s career spanned 14 years with eight teams. He’s a vet, and he’s dealt with the rules of the NBA for some time.
But that apparently didn’t stop Jackson from smoking a bit of marijuana after games, despite a league ban against the controlled substance.
Jackson recently told TMZ that he smoked marijuana his entire career, and that he felt the NBA should remove the drug from their banned substances list.
In a video posted to TMZ, Jackson told a videographer following him through an airport that marijuana was helpful in helping him come down after the game.
“Nobody can play high, especially in the NBA -- it’s a high-level of competition, and guys are great, so nobody can play high,” said Jackson.
Stack Jack was adamant that nobody should be smoking weed before playing in an NBA game, but that it was only for coming down afterward.
“If anybody says they need to be high during the games they don’t know what the f--k they’re talking about,” said Jackson.
NBA players’ schedules are known to be odd. Guys are up until all hours of the night thanks to flight schedules and the fact that they often don’t get done with the heart-racing activity of playing an NBA game until 9 or 10 p.m.
This, coincidentally, is the reason that you see NBA players on Twitter answering fan questions at 2 a.m. or out at local clubs, since they are often the only thing open when they are wide awake.
It seems unlikely that the NBA takes weed off the banned substances list before the federal government removes it from Schedule I. What this really brings into question is how guys like Jackson were able to circumvent NBA drug testing.
Perhaps we’ll never know.