Former NFL player Eben Britton says he was smoking pot while in the NFL, sometimes before games, and often played better while high.
“NFL games I played stoned were some of the best games I ever played. Cannabis cements your surroundings,” Britton told the New York Post. “A lot of people say they’re useless when they smoke weed. But hell, I played NFL games [while stoned], dude. My performances were solid and I felt really good after.”
Although the NFL does test players for marijuana, most players are tested only once a year and know approximately when in the year they’ll be tested. So many players use marijuana during most of the year and stop only long enough to get it out of their systems to pass their annual tests. (Tests for performance-enhancing drugs are much more frequent and harder to predict.)
Britton said the majority of NFL players smoke pot, estimating “it’s over 50 percent and it could be as high as 75 percent.”
A second-round draft pick of the Jaguars in 2009, Britton played four years in Jacksonville and two in Chicago. He was suspended by the NFL in the 2015 offseason and has been out of the league since.