Former NFL QB Jake Plummer has reinvented himself as an advocate for medical marijuana as a safe, effective treatment for the pain and depression that so many players find themselves faced with when they leave the league. (Plummer even ran QB camps to raise money for research.) So Plummer definitely doesn’t have time for any owners who won’t even admit the sport has a problem.
In March, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said it was “absurd” to think that a link between football and brain disease has been proven. While that research is still ongoing—if highly suggestive—many players saw Jones’s comments as being dismissive of a very real problem. In an interview with BSN Denver focusing on the benefits of marijuana, Plummer trashed Jones and the NFL for downplaying players’ health while denying them access to things that might help.
“Jerry Jones, who says it’s ‘absurd’ that there would be a link between brain trauma, football and CTE. Shame on him for saying that, that billionaire asshole. It’s the worst thing in the world for a guy like that to say. That’s where we’re sitting; grown-ass men are asked to go out there for millions of dollars—which, yeah, it’s a lot of money—bang themselves around and completely fuck their lives over for their 40s and 50s.
“So yeah, poor football players is what I say. If you’re a grown-ass man, you should be allowed to make grown-ass decisions. They should be able to say, ‘I’m going to have some CBD and puff on this fatty, relax after a football game and take the pain away.’ Not get tested for it like Josh Gordon, who now can’t play the game that he’s been playing since he was a kid because he smokes marijuana. It didn’t derail him or cause him to underachieve from what I witnessed. He dominated the league for two straight years, and now he’s out of the league because he chose an alternative form of medicine.”
Plummer, who says he takes daily doses of therapeutic CBD (Cannabidiol, a compound he says isn’t strong enough to get him high but would still cause someone to fail an NFL drug test), is a little tired of the fans, too. Not all of them, mind you; just the ones who think that because players earn good money they should shut up and stop complaining about their safety and their health.
“I have a hard time with it because everybody says, ‘Oh, poor NFL millionaires. Oh, you poor people.’ They don’t understand. Maybe they should have a little more to say about the owners that are billionaires, they’re not millionaires; they’re billionaires.”
If that’s not the mission statement of this very site, I can’t think of a better one.
Go read the whole interview, part one of a three-part series.