Here Is A Delightful Stephen Jackson Story About Smoking Weed Before Games

Former NBA player and current  good opinion-haver Stephen Jackson has not been shy about his support for laxer weed restrictions in the NBA. Back in May, he went on The Jump and spoke about drug testing and how much it’s changed from the time when he entered the NBA and there was just one test at the start of the year.

Last week, he was a guest on  Michael Rapaport’s podcast and shared a handful of anecdotes about smoking weed while in the NBA. I mean “while” quite literally, as Jackson said that he used to play high, with decidedly mixed results (transcription via Dime):

I can’t speak for nobody else. Me personally, I’ve done a lot of shit before games sometimes and still was able to go out there and be productive. I just gotta be real, you know, it’s been a couple games where I smoked before games and had great games. It’s been some games where I smoked before the game and was on the bench after three minutes sitting on the sideline, ‘please calm down, this high has to calm down,’ I done shot three shots that went over the backboard, like, I’m going to be honest, like ‘ahh, I gotta calm down.’

Jackson told a pair of stories about the friendship he, Baron Davis, and former Warriors coach Don Nelson all shared, one of which was about them getting drunk on Scotch the night before the first game of the season, and the other involved Nelson celebrating the last drug test of the season with Jackson and Davis:

Nobody knows this story, so this is the first time somebody is hearing this. We’re in Utah and the drug test people are around, you know, to get our last drug test so we can smoke, right? Don Nelson, we talked about weed all the time, he was cool with talking about weed. We got our last test in Utah, right? So me and Baron are coming out the locker room just screaming, excited with our last pink slip saying we could smoke for the rest of the season and Don Nelson hauls ass down there giving us hi-fives like, “yeah, we can smoke now!” It was cool, the fact that he knows what’s going on off the court with his players, which was great man. We enjoyed it. That’s why we were a great team.

Too bad his would-be comeback didn’t work out, but at least Jackson has more time to tell great old stories.