Interview with Ricky Williams, Eleven Year Veteran of the NFL and Heisman Trophy Winner Who Serves as a Cannabis and Wellness Advocate, with Executive Producer Shawna Vercher. Ricky and Shawna discuss cannabis as a social justice issue.
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– What point in time did you really realize that cannabis was also a social justice platform?
– You know, it took me a long time. It took me a long time to realize it was a social justice platform because, you know, even though I was consuming cannabis, right, there was a part of me that was trained during the 80s that I was doing something bad. And so, you know, first it was wrestling with my own conscience and trying to figure out, is this really bad or do these positive effects I see in my life override my training? And so that took a while.
And when I finally made peace with that and realized, okay, this isn’t a bad thing, right, it was just my training, and I started to see the bigger picture, it was impossible not to realize how big of a, of a social justice issue this was. And, you know, I coached, and it came close to me in my personal life when, you know, I coached college football for a year and one of my players was arrested because the cops, you know, harassed him and found a doobie in his car and booked him, and he had to go through all of these issues and all of this trouble, and it just dawned on me that this has been a tool used by law enforcement to oppress certain types of people. And what we’re coming to find out is that this plant actually has a lot of positive things to offer the world.
– Yeah, I’m getting to meet some fantastic people through this process, but one interview, I actually thought of you when I was having an interview because the guy is retired law enforcement. And he actually said on camera something to the effect of, he realized his entire career of drug arrests had been a waste, that he kind of had that moment, like we’ve been lied to kind of, and the thing that did it for him, that I did not realize until this interview is that in many states, there is a statutory mandate that drug tests get processed before any other tests, including rape kits and DNA kits having to do with violent crimes.
So that’s why you have the backup of all of these kits and testing, and people don’t get prosecuted. So not only are you harassing and victimizing cannabis users in the cannabis community, but you’re also, people are disrupting our actual justice system, and people are failing to see justice with other crimes. And it never occurred to me in that framework, but I thought of you because you have been talking about just how the law enforcement system and the viewpoint of cannabis is so broken.
– No, I had a personal experience, and it’s quite ironic that, you know, during times in my career where, you know, getting arrested for cannabis would have, you know, would have been a nightmare that I somehow stayed safe. But a couple of years ago, I was driving in Texas, and I was in Houston with a friend, and we had just stopped by, and, you know, I got some cannabis for the ride home, and it was in the passenger seat. My friend was driving. And I know that in Harris County, which is where Houston is, that cannabis is decriminalized, but we’d left. And we were in the next adjoining county.
And so we got pulled over because she was speeding. And the police officer like walked around the car, and he kind of looked on the ground, and he saw a plastic bag, and he picked it up and he said, you know, “Who does this belong to?” You know, it’s mine, and he arrested me, you know, and he arrested me, and he put me in the car. And as soon as he figured out who I was, you know, he felt bad as if I, if he would have realized that I wasn’t just another black guy, that he would, you know, it would have been a different situation.
And so, but, you know, and so I had a personal experience, and – it wasn’t 31 years – but I was detained for five hours. It was horrible. And so having that personal experience and being able to go through it, like I have the taste in my mouth, how corrupt the system is and how cannabis has been used to, again, to put people in a system that becomes very difficult to get out of.
