Former WNBA Superstar Credits Medical Marijuana for Pain Mangement

A lot of time and hard effort goes into being a professional athlete. You have to push your mind and body to extremes and constantly push your limits if you want to be outstanding. 

Competing is how and when injuries happen because athletes will need to raise the bar to beat their competition. Therefore, an injury can be self-inflicting when athletes try to push their bodies too much. 

Unfortunately, just about all pro athletes are familiar with having injuries at some point. There are only a select few amounts of athletes that have been able to play through a long and successful career without getting injured at least one time. 

It should come as no surprise that more and more athletes are looking for medicinal marijuana and CBD products to help them deal with the pain from the injuries. Some might use topicals, while other athletes have different cannabis supplies for consumption.

Rapper and cannabis icon, Snoop Dogg, said in an interview last summer that professional sports leagues should allow athletes to consume marijuana.

Currently, the most recent athlete to join the fight in spreading awareness about the advantages of marijuana is one of the best female basketball players of all time, Lauren Jackson. 

Jackson’s career achievements are pretty impressive, and her basketball resume is no easy feat. She is the first Australian basketball player to be voted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and she is a two-time WNBA champion while playing for the Seattle Storm. 

She is also a seven-time WNBA All-Star and was the number one pick overall in the 2011 WNBA draft. 

Jackson has also won four Olympic medals, including three silver and one bronze medal. The basketball player was on her way to getting a fifth Olympic medal when a degenerative knee injury, unfortunately, made her retire from the basketball game. 

For Jackson and most athletes forced to retire due to injury, she says that things did not end the way she wanted them to. 

Medical Marijuana In, Painkillers out

Jackson went through many surgeries during her long and successful career, during which she was forced to rely solely on painkillers. Even during her current retirement, she constantly deals with chronic knee, lower back, and hip pain.

“I’ve been open about my battle with prescription medication during my career, and when I retired, I went off everything because I wanted to raise my kids and just be the very best version of myself,” Jackson said.

Fortunately, when Jackson asked her doctor for an alternative pain management treatment, the doctor recommended medical marijuana.

The results have been incredible for Jackon, she says. Stating that medical marijuana has helped her get to the point she can train again even live a very active life with her two sons, as reported in Benzinga.

Now She Is Spreading The Message 

Lauren Jackson was so happy with the results that she decided to join the new Sports Advisory Board, which the Levin Group runs. The Levin Group is a sports medicine company based in Melbourne that produces pharmaceutical-level medical marijuana for concussions and chronic pain. 

She is not the only former athlete to venture into the cannabis industry. Former National Basketball Association player Chris Webber helped break ground on a Detroit Marijuana Facility last October.

Jackson plans to help lower the stigma connected to the plant by sharing her personal experiences with using it instead of painkillers. 

“It’s something that I believe in because of how my body has handled it. I just want to help get the message out there and hopefully help change people’s lives,” Jackson said.