Former pro-baller Al Harrington is continuing his mission to bring smoke out of the shadows in the NBA.
After 16 years bruising opponents in the paint and sinking threes for seven different NBA teams, Al Harrington was ready for a new challenge. For the past four years, Harrington has dedicated himself to cannabis, both personally and professionally. The former Golden State Warrior and Denver Nugget is now the proprietor of Viola Extracts, a Colorado-based extracts company, as well as a legalization activist and the basketball universe’s most vocal proponent of cannabis policy reform in the NBA.
In a new essay for the Players’ Tribune, “9 Reasons to End the War on Marijuana,” Harrington recounts childhood memories of America’s racially-charged War on Drugs hitting home in his Orange, New Jersey public housing projects, where police used weed to imprison friends and neighbors. Harrington also discusses avoiding the plant throughout his entire playing career, until injuries were too much to bare.
Since discovering the wonders of CBD and THC in the years after his NBA career ended in 2014, Harrington has turned his focus towards normalizing the all-natural medicine and…