Ex-NBA Commissioner David Stern Ready to Legalize Weed

When you’re a wealthy business owner you want to stay wealthy. So when the workforce you hire typically has a proclivity to enjoy pot you’ll have to look the other way when it comes to weed if you want to stay in business. Remember when the FBI tried to hire hackers for homeland security but the majority couldn’t pass the pot drug test? The NBA is having the same problem. While you may be quick to point fingers at obvious individuals who enjoy cannabis like J.R. Smith, it’s not isolated to just his type of overly tattooed “do whatever I want” kind of player. Just being young and rich is enough to make players like Kristaps Porzingis partake in the puff puff pass. David Stern recently opened up about removing medical marijuana from the banned list for players in the NBA. 

David Stern thinks it’s time for a change…in a recent documentary on UNINTERRUPTED Harrington talked to Stern about his tenure as commissioner, his handling of the drug’s use among players and how his perception has changed.

“I’m now at the point where personally I think it should be removed from the banned list,” Stern told Harrington. 

“It was generally known at some point, until we tightened the rules, that a lot of our players were smoking a lot of marijuana,” Stern said in the interview. “In fact, some of our players came to us and said, ‘Some of these guys are high coming into the game.’ But we began tightening it up, and at that time people accepted the generally held wisdom that marijuana was a gateway drug and that if you start smoking, you’re liable to go on to bigger and better stuff.”

The world’s perspective of weed is changing. It’s difficult to demonize a substance that wants to make you stay inside and eat too many cookies while alcohol can destroy your liver when abused. You only get one of those. You can’t overdose from too many joints. Worst case scenario is you watch way too much TV while the world moves forward without you. But most people do that now already without the help of getting high so I don’t see the crime. While the current commissioner, Adam Silver, still has a hard stance on marijuana for recreational use, allowing it for medicinal purposes is the open window the players needed. Scoring a medical marijuana card is already a breeze if you’re not in the NBA. I could just imagine how easy it is for someone who’s torn their ACL. Pounds of pot will always make the pain go away.