MUMBAI: Former NBA commissioner David Stern has reversed his earlier stance on marijuna, saying it “probably should be removed from the banned substance list.
Stern, who tightened up the league’s policy on marijuana during his tenure from 1984 until 2014, told former NBA star Al Harrington in an interview, that he believed that he made right choice during the decades in which he ran the NBA however.
“Some of our players came to us and said some of these guys, they’re high coming into the game,” Stern recalled. “At that time, people generally accepted that marijuana was a gateway drug and if you start smoking you’re liable to go on to bigger and better stuff.”
Stern agreed with Harrington, however, and said times have changed. “It’s a completely different perception [of marijuana],” Stern said, crediting a 2013 CNN documentary on the subject hosted by Sanjay Gupta with helping to change his mind. “I think there’s universal agreement that marijuana for medical purposes should be completely legal.”
Like Harrington, who now works in the cannabis industry, Stern eschews the wide use of painkillers, specifically those that are addictive such as oxycodone and other opioids. Unlike Harrington, however, Stern has not tried medical marijuana himself.
Harrington got into the marijuana industry after retiring from the NBA because of complications with his knees. Since then, he has been a proponent of the cannabis products, even turning his grandmother onto marijuana to treat glaucoma and other ailments, says a Washington Post report.
“At that point, I just started looking at this as just medicine,” Harrington said in the documentary. “It’s not just about rolling a joint. It’s bigger than that.”
Several former NFL players have credited the drug with saving their lives, including ex-Baltimore Ravens lineman Eugene Monroe, who was released in June 2016, just three weeks after becoming the first active NFL player to call on the league to allow medical marijuana, the report adds.
