Martellus Bennett Says 89% of NFL Players Use Weed
Source – Estimates on the percentage of NFL players who use marijuana have been made, but recently retired tight end Martellus Bennett pinned the number pretty high.
“I want to say about 89%,” Bennett said on a Bleacher Report podcast hosted by Chris Simms and Adam Lefkoe. …
Bennett explained NFL players use it for reasons other than getting high, reasons which have been behind the push by many to allow the use of medical marijuana as an alternative to opioid painkillers and other prescription drugs.
“There are times of the year where your body just hurts so bad,” Bennett said. “You don’t want to be popping pills all the time. There are anti-inflammatory drugs you take so long that they start to eat at your liver, kidneys and things like that. A human made that. God made weed.”
The least surprising part of this discussion is that 100 percent of the Martellus Bennett population smokes weed. You don’t come up with shit like The Imagination Agency and comic books like Towel Boy without being under the influence of something. And that last bit about pointing out that God made weed is Pothead 101. The kind of thing they were saying for so long I became all for legalization just to give them nothing to talk about.
I’ll just interject here to say I am sincerely pro-pot. Not for me. But for anyone who wants it, but especially for people treating pain. When I was at WEEI I shot a video at the Cannabis Convention in Boston and met the coolest, most relateable people in the world. Not the least of which was a guy in his 50s who suffered from a terrible palsy shake so bad he couldn’t take a piss without it going all over the bathroom. And his doctors pumped him full of prescriptions meds like a lab rat and all they did was give him side effects like Bennett is suggesting. Cannabis cured him. You’d have to be a Grade A asshole to hear his story and still argue against legalization just because you’re worried your teenager will have a Reefer Madness-like freakout and start listening to Phish.
That said, 89 percent? Eighty freaking nine? I have a tremendously hard time thinking it could possibly be that high or anywhere close to it. I mean, think about that number. There aren’t 89 percent of anybody doing anything. There aren’t 89 percent of people getting high at a Snoop concert outdoors. You won’t find 89 percent of college kids drinking. You can’t get 89 percent of rich, old Boston Brahmins to hate the Irish. And unlike the NFL, no one is testing for those things and you don’t lose a quarter of your salary for getting caught.
I admit I don’t know. Martysaurus has been on an NFL roster and, while you might find this shocking, I haven’t. What I do know is that I’ve talked repeatedly on Laces Out to AJ Hawk and Pat McAfee about this, and they insist that between the PED testing and the drug testing, the NFL will catch you. AJ is too straight an arrow to have been interested. And Pat sounds like he couldn’t wait to retire to have the freedom to finally do what he wants. Besides, all you have to do is randomly run down any NFL roster and count the deeply religious guys, the hyper-focused athletes and the ones simply not cool enough to smoke reefer (like me) and you cut Bennett’s number by half. But then again, I remember a recently retired Jose Canseco being treated like a national joke for saying 80 percent of ballplayers were on PEDs in the early 2000s. And who’s laughing about that now? All we do know for sure is after this, Bennett’s retirement is now completely official. Teams would rather sign Colin Kapernick than a guy who’s shooting his mouth off like this.