Former Super Bowl champion Jim McMahon says he wishes he smoked more weed when he played in the NFL.
The one-time Bears quarterback, speaking Thursday at the Cannabis World Congress and Business Expo at Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center, believes he would be healthier now if he had used marijuana instead of pills to combat pain. Marijuana, McMahon said, is not only an effective painkiller, but it is also far safer than the opioid painkillers that have destroyed thousands of American families.
“There’s so many uses to this plant,” says McMahon, who has been diagnosed with early onset dementia and struggles with severe headaches, memory loss and depression linked to the countless concussions he suffered during his career.
“Hundreds of thousands of people are dying from (painkillers) and there’s not one case of people dying from the hemp plant,” McMahon said.
McMahon is part of a growing group of NFL veterans urging the league to remove marijuana from the banned substance list. On top of the plant’s pain management benefits, the players cite the potential of cannabidiol, or CBD, an extract of the plant, to minimize the brain damage caused by concussions and smaller, repetitive hits.
Among current players, free agent tackle Eugene Monroe has been especially vocal about the issue — a reason, he believes, for the Ravens’ decision to recently cut him with three years and $20 million left on his contract. The Giants hope to sign him.
Marvin Washington, Brendon Ayanbadejo and Scott Fujita are three other NFL retirees advocating for the league to fund research on CBD’s effectiveness in treating injured brains.
Former Giants defensive end Leonard Marshall, who suffers from neurological disorders after his 12-season career, is also a vocal member of the NFL’s marijuana movement.
“My quality of life has improved because of this,” Marshall told a packed room at the convention center, before moderating a panel of former NFL pros that included McMahon, former Broncos tight end Nate Jackson, former Broncos wide receiver Charlie Adams and former Jaguars offensive tackle Eben Britton.
“Pain is a constant” in NFL life, says Britton, who endured shoulder injuries, a herniated disc in his spine, and sciatica for which NFL team doctors prescribed powerful opioid painkillers and anti-inflammatory drugs with debilitating side effects.
“Juxtaposing my experiences with pharmaceutical drugs like Vicodin and Percocet, that made me angry and irritable, frustrated, didn’t get rid of any of the pain, made it difficult to sleep, increased my heart rate and made me feel crazy,” he said, and “on the other side of that there’s cannabis that helped me sleep, put me into a healing state of being where I was relieved from stress and anxiety as well as feeling the pain relief.”
Jackson said the NFL, which faces massive liability from brain-injury litigation, would do well to embrace a substance that costs far less than the pharmaceuticals that current and former players consume to deal with long-term effects of football’s violence.
“The owners of these teams are, by and large, wealthy men who are older and do not understand that this is a pretty innocuous substance,” said Jackson, who believes smoking pot during his career may have protected him from brain injury and certainly enhanced his quality of life.
There’s scientific merit to pot’s health benefits, says Dr. Marcel Bonn Miller, the director and principal investigator at the Substance & Anxiety Intervention Laboratory of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“It’s been shown the effects of CBD on reducing inflammation, helping the pain as a neuro-protectant,” said Bonn Miller. “There has been some recent work that shows that it reduces depression to similar levels that we see in traditional antidepressant medication, and we see pretty strong effects in reducing anxiety.”
