Freakonomics Radio - 663. Is Weed a Performance-Enhancing Drug?

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

The science says no, at least not in the athletic sense. But the psychic benefits can be large — just ask former N.F.L. star Ricky Williams. He says athletes should consider cannabis a healing drug, not a party drug. Even the N.F.L. is starting to agree. (Part two of a two-part series.) SOURCES:Angela Bryan, professor, associate chair for faculty development in the department of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder.Ricky Williams, former N.F.L. running back, founder of Highsman. RESOURCES:"Using A Lab On Wheels To Study Weed From Dispensaries," by Science Friday (2024)."Exercise-induced euphoria and anxiolysis do not depend on endogenous opioids in humans," by Michael Siebers, Sarah Biedermann, Laura Bindila, Beat Lutz, and Johannes Fuss (Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2021)."Endocannabinoids mediate runner’s high," by Sudhakaran Prabakaran (Science Signaling, 2015)."Cannabis and Exercise Science: A Commentary on Existing Studies and Suggestions for Future Directions," by Angela Bryan, Arielle Gilman, and Kent Hutchison (Sports Medicine, 2015).Run Ricky Run, documentary (2010). EXTRAS:"Is America Switching from Booze to Weed?" series by Freakonomics Radio (2024). Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Last week, we heard from the cyclist Floyd Landis. He won the Tour de France in 2006, but was busted almost immediately after for doping. This is going to sound stupid out of context, but it just felt unfair. Like, I'm one of everyone else doing what we do. Within the game we were playing, I was not breaking the rules. We also heard from the founder of the enhanced games. That is an upcoming competition. We're doping, or at least what we have historically called,

doping is encouraged. Are we going to say, oh, you know, what? We will limit ourselves to being humans 1.0 and never try and progress. We started down this path because of an email I got from a company called Athletic. It's spelled A-T-H-L-E-T-H-C. In case you're not familiar, THC is the main psychoactive component of cannabis. The company sells what they call ridiculously-tasty, microdose THC mince. They're supposed to help athletes with everything from power to recovery.

Their website includes a quote from basketball great Kevin Durant, saying how cannabis helps him get into that flow state where everything just clicks. There's another quote from UFC fighter Nate Diaz, extolling the benefits of cannabis for mental focus and relaxation. These are not testimonials for athletic, by the way. They're just quotes from elsewhere that the company is using. but the whole pitch got my attention because until now, I had not heard any claims that cannabis is a performance-enhancing drug for athletes. In fact, quite the opposite. You're imagining someone with a bong, sitting on a couch, eating Doritos. You're not thinking of someone eating healthy and exercising.

So it made me wonder, well, it made me wonder a lot of things. For starters, is cannabis a performance enhancer? And if so, on what dimensions? But also, how did we get here? It was only five years ago that the American sprinter Shakari Richardson was banned from the Tokyo Olympics for testing positive for THC. Many other athletes have been penalized over the years. This is Ricky Williams. It's like I turned into a criminal and a drug addict.

Something that I found was beneficial to me and help me perform and make everyone money and make everyone happy. It was something that I hid. Today, on Freakonomics Radio, the legendary NFL. running back, Ricky Williams tells his whole story, which is fascinating, and we will answer the performance enhancing questions, too. This is part two of a two-part series about performing at a high level, and it starts now. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner. When I say performance-enhancing drugs, a few images probably come to mind.

syringes maybe, IV bags, blood transfusions. Okay. Now what do you picture when I say cannabis? Here again is the person we heard from earlier. You're imagining someone with a bong, sitting on a couch, eating burritos. This is Angela Ryan. I'm a professor and associate chair for faculty development and the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

How would you describe the main thrust of, of your research? What my lab studies is a transdisciplinary approach to the study of health and risk behavior. And what that means is we're interested in helping people to engage in more healthy behavior and helping them to reduce their engagement in risk behavior. And in order to do that, we look at everything from neuroscience to molecular biology to physiology to health psychology and clinical psychology. Can you name something that you, Angela, have done some habit, some practice, some substance that you've either started using, started doing, or stopped using, stop doing as a result of your own research? The first would be physical activity. You stopped

exercising as a result of your research? Stopped? No, no, no. No, I was just kidding. Yeah, no, I was a pretty lazy kid and a lazy teenager as well, as I think many of us are. As I learned more about the physiological benefits and the mental health benefits of physical activity, the more I did, the better I felt. I started running at the same time I started studying exercise. And so I now have this low-key belief that exercise is a cure for anything. It's not, but it doesn't hurt. The other one, I'm a breast cancer survivor. And when I got diagnosed, ironically, I had just started a project on the use of cannabis among cancer patients. That's one place where we have some pretty good evidence that it's helpful across a range of different issues.

When I started going through cancer treatment and looked at some of the medications that I was being given, I thought, I don't want to take that. The side effects look terrible. Let's see if we can do pain control a different way. My doctors were happy to have me try it, but they didn't know what to tell me. Try it, meaning cannabis. Yeah, with some trial and error. You know, I found a system that worked for me, and I managed to make it through the entirety of my cancer treatment without ever taking an opiate. Wow.

That's just me. I'm scared of opiates. I'm not saying that that would work for everyone, but certainly my work informed me trying that avenue. How are you feeling or doing now? I'm 10 years out almost, so I'm good now. That's really good to hear. What form or formats of cannabis were you using and what sort of effects did it have? So I used edibles, gummies, and this is just to sort of link to a couple of our projects. With older adults, with cancer patients, this is a really popular form of cannabis to use. And there's a couple of reasons for it. Oftentimes, older adults, cancer patients, what they're looking for is longer term pain control, help with sleep, and an edible product, because it comes.

goes through first-pass metabolism. It takes longer to take effect, but it lasts a lot longer. That's one reason that edibles tend to work really well in some medical contexts, not so much for acute pain. Smoked or vaporized forms are much better acutely. What about now? Do you use cannabis for any of those benefits or just for fun or anything? No, I think because I have a pretty high sensitivity to THC, it makes me very sleepy. So if I'm going to relax at the end of the day, I'll pour myself a glass of wine. That issue of individual differences in responsiveness to cannabinoids is something that we have done almost nothing on because the first question of what does it work for and what's a good ratio of THC to CBD. We haven't even gotten to the individual difference question.

Has the entire endocannabinoid system been mapped out, at least? Yeah. I mean, we know where all of our endocannabinoid receptors are. We know that they're concentrated in the central nervous system, but that they exist all over the periphery. So we have cannabinoid receptors all over our bodies. It's one of the reasons that cannabis works so well because we already have this system that is like a lock waiting for that key to come in from the outside.

We also know that the end of cannabinoid system changes over the lifespan. So we have fewer cannabinoid receptors as we age. That might be one of the reasons that older adults can use a little bit more of the product without having negative impacts. But yeah, those are the kinds of. things that we're really just learning. If there are these receptors throughout our bodies in just about every human ever born, I assume, why do they need a foreign object to unlock them?

They don't. We also have endogenous cannabinoids. AEA, 2AG, these are molecules that we make in our bodies that are cannabinoids. When we exercise, these endogenous cannabinoids are released in the body. In fact, we now believe that it is those cannabinoids, not endogenous opiates, that are responsible for things like the Runner's High, that feeling of euphoria that we get with physical exertion. The Runner's High has been of interest to exercise physiologists and psychologists forever. The idea is, well, gosh, if we can make exercise feel like this for everybody, that would be great. And so for a long time, we thought, well, if it's giving us a sense of euphoria, then it must be the endogenous opioid system. But decades of research, including things like fMRI with people who had just finished a marathon, including blocking opiate receptors, none of that showed much support for the idea that it was an opiate-mediated effect. Then we started looking at the endogenous cannabinoid system and found out, oh, when we're physically active, we release a bunch of these endogenous cannabinoids and they lock into those receptors that are concentrated in the central nervous system. and in the dopamine system.

So there's a lot more evidence now that it's the cannabinoid system that's responsible for the runner's high, which is one of the reasons we think that it feels pretty good to exercise when you've got exogenous cannabinoids on board. What are the realistic, practical, or even intellectual ramifications of that?

Why does that matter? It helps us to understand why we keep seeing this connection between cannabis and exercise. Ah, okay. We had all been studying cannabis from a harm reduction perspective, right? So when legalization happened, we all started thinking about both sides of the equation. Now, in addition to harms, we need to think about people who are going to be

using this for benefits. What we found was kind of surprising. The evidence suggested that cannabis users exercised more than non-users. Digging into some of the epidemiology, cannabis users have lower rates of type 2 diabetes. They have lower BMI. They have better waste to hip ratio. The non-users, all of this runs completely contrary to the stoner, you know, with the bong on the couch eating Doritos. And what was your response when you started digging into this data and doing some of this research on your own? When we first started digging into the data, the two lines of research that we saw were these

very old exercise physiology studies from the 70s, where they gave people very, very low THC, and they were particularly interested in performance. So they would put people on an exercise bike. and when they were using THC, their power was lower. Their ability to utilize oxygen was lower. Short conclusion there would be that cannabis is not a performance enhancer, at least in that realm, yeah? Definitely not. I'm not going to jump higher.

I'm not going to swim faster, et cetera. No. The one thing I would say is that our studies with running have shown that people definitely feel better when they're running under the influence of cannabis. But interestingly, they go slow. and it feels harder. Okay. How can that be? Because when you're asking someone, how do you feel, you're asking about their emotional state. Do you feel good or bad? When you're asking about exertion, how hard are you breathing? How hard is your heart beating? Certainly, exertion and affect are negatively correlated. The harder you're working, the less good it feels. But what we've seen is that

With cannabis on board, people are having more fun. They're experiencing that sense of euphoria and runners high more when they're under the influence than when they're not, even though it's a little bit harder to run the same speed. Long before I did any cannabis and exercise research, I just did exercise research. And one of the things that we know, and this is not rocket science, if something feels good, you want to do it again, right? We ask people, cannabis users, why? Why? Why? do you use cannabis when you exercise? Some people use it for recovery. Some people use it for pain control during exercise. But the most common was because it makes exercise more enjoyable. The other one was motivation. I think those two things are definitely linked. If you're doing it in a way that makes it

fun, that makes it feel good, that gives you a little burst of joy while you're doing it, you're going to be motivated to do it again. I understand that as part of your research, you have some kind of weed mobile that you drive around Boulder? It's a mobile pharmacology laboratory. It's the can of van. We drive that laboratory to people's houses and then they use their product in their house and we do all our testing in the van. Do you provide the product or they provide the product? No, we're not allowed to provide the product. We work with partner dispensaries so that we have specific lots set aside that we hope our participants will buy, but we can't even force them to do that. And you do that because you want them to know exactly the dose and type, yes? Well, we would

prefer that they didn't actually. We'd prefer to do double-blind placebo-controlled trials, but legally we're not allowed to. There's a pretty robust research community doing this work, but we're all going at it a little bit differently. There are some people who do what's called ecological momentary assessment where they'll have an app on their phone that says, okay, every time you use cannabis, open up your app and answer these questions, or every day input how much you used and how you feel and whatever your symptoms are that you're working on. Other people have done Zoom studies where they can watch the person use, but the person's actually using in their own house, and then they do questionnaire assessments. There's also the really careful pharmacokinetic research where someone takes a substance

and you look at how the amount of the substance in their blood changes over time. That's not something we can do out in the field. You have to do that in the lab. I would imagine that that degree of variability is a concern to a researcher like you because you can't index your work specifically to someone else's work. It makes it more challenging for sure. There's all these different ways of doing the science. What I actually like is it really allows us to triangulate. And if we do find things that are consistent across different modalities, in some ways it gives me more confidence. It's not all expectancy effects. There's multiple studies now showing that there are some potentially good beneficial effects of cannabis. The jury's a little bit out over what

THC versus CBD do, but in terms of sleep, there's good evidence that it's helpful for pain, both chronic pain and acute pain. There's good evidence that it's helpful for anxiety. I think we are amassing an evidence base, but it's coming at us from all different angles. The federal legal status does not help. It's fine that it's legal in Colorado, but it's still a Schedule 1 narcotic, according to the federal government. Since we interviewed Angela Bryant, Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Justice Department to accelerate the rescheduling of cannabis from a Schedule 1 drug to Schedule 3. Schedule 1 drugs have no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.

These include heroin and LSD. Schedule 3 drugs, which include opioids and steroids, do have an accepted medical use and a lower risk for abuse. So how would changing cannabis from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3 change cannabis research? Here's what Angela Bryan told us by email. There is a misperception including by the president that this will somehow open up a world of opportunity for cannabis research. The reality, Brian says, is that the legal and regulatory hurdles for cannabis research will remain high until the drug is federally legalized. Right now, many states, States have legalized cannabis, but the federal government has not. In the meantime, researchers are doing what they can. I have a postdoctoral colleague who just wrote a grant to look at the interpersonal impacts of cannabis use and how it influences conflict.

I have a graduate student who looked at cannabis use in relationships and how the use by one partner or the other or both influences relationship function and satisfaction. We and others have shown that cannabis use, particularly cannabis with a heavy CBD content, seems to be anxiolytic or seems to be helpful for reducing anxiety. One of the things that we know about THC is that it has hallucinogenic properties. It's not the only thing that it does, but it definitely has those properties. And what we're learning more and more is that substances with hallucinogenic properties, things like MDMA, psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, ketamine, like a lot of these things that really alter the way that the brain is processing information. They seem to potentially have these effects on mental health that we don't totally understand yet. They seem to be really helping people to overcome trauma, to overcome difficulties.

Many hallucinogens seem to help us kind of reset and rewire. If that's the case, then it sounds like you may want to. want to call cannabis a performance enhancing drug after all. It just enhances performance indirectly. I would say indirectly for sure. Like if you wanted to look at it that way, something like ibuprofen is also a performance enhancing drug because it helps people to recover after a hard workout. In terms of indirect assistance, helping to motivate people to exercise the next time, to recover. Yeah, absolutely. I would say it's a healing thing. That is Ricky Williams. He was one of the best running backs ever in college football, playing for the Texas Longhorns. He was a two-time

All-American, and he won the Heisman. Then he was drafted into the NFL, and there too, over a long career, he was a champion Russia. So how did he get so good? I will say I'm very coachable. Any good football coach, the first thing that they have to instill at us is the ability to perform in game time. Coaches will say we make practice hard so the games are easy. As time went on, I got better and better and better at it because that's what coaches are saying, good coaches. Every day, all day, embedded in their message is things are going to go wrong and your ability to show up and do your job, do what your training to do in those times, is going to be whether we win or lose. I've realized that being able to perform was how I justified my existence. My attitude towards training was every day, what can I get better at?

If your attitude is aimed at improving, everything that happens becomes fodder for the improvement. Coaches must have loved you. Yes. That's why I was able to fail so many drug tests and still I always had a place. And that gets us to the bigger Ricky Williams story. My whole life flashed in front of me and I saw that pretty much everything that I was at that moment was because of football. And it was like on the brink. That's coming up.

After the break, I'm Stephen Dubner and this is freaking off. If you know only one thing about the former NFL running back, Ricky Williams, it probably has to do with his affinity for cannabis. So where does that story start? I first was introduced to Bob Marley when I was 12 or 13. I started growing dreads and every day I was wearing green, gold, and red. And I was in Southern California. People would have assumed it I was smoking, but I wasn't. And why weren't you at that time? I was already a jock. The part of Bob Marley that resonated with me was the music and the message. But because I was a jock, the cannabis part didn't connect. It just didn't appeal to me.

I remember the smartest kid in school, Ben Kotnik. One day in the 11th grade, he assumed that I smoked and I was trying to be cool. He said, well, don't you come to my house at lunch and, you know, we'll hit my sister's bong. And that was my first time smoking. I hit the bong and a coughed cough right out of syndrome past you. I remember I had physics, and I was sitting in physics, just daydreaming and thinking, I don't understand why people do this. That was my first experience with cannabis. Fast forward, I get into college. And my roommate, he was a football player who was a guy I respected a lot. He smoked every Friday. I was invited to hang out with the upperclassmen and shoot dice with them. And when they passed the blunt, then I would hit it. But to me, it was more the intoxication of being to hang out with the upperclassmen. That's where it became comfortable.

with it, but still not using it. It wasn't until my senior year. I could have gone to the NFL as a junior and become a first round draft pick, but something about college football that I just loved. And I had an opportunity to break a bunch of records and win the Heisman trophy. I put all my eggs in one basket and I came back from my senior year. My senior year starts and my girlfriend at the time who I'm convinced I'm going to marry, we break up. As soon as we break up, she's in a relationship with our quarterback. Oh boy. That doesn't feel great. the constant reminder every day. And the season starts, we play okay,

but I have a couple of bad games, and I have an injury. I'm obsessing about the girl. I'm thinking I wasted my opportunity. I'm not going to win the Hizman. I'm hurt, and we're going to suck again. I was going to a really dark place. And my roommate was a smoker, my best friend, Chad.

You grabbed the bong, and he slid it over, and he said, dude, you just need to chill. I took a couple hits, and I remember walking upstairs and laying in the bed. And as I was sitting there, I noticed it was the first time in weeks that I wasn't obsessing about the girl and I wasn't obsessing about how poorly I was playing. I noticed it in that space I started to imagine myself playing better.

I started thinking, okay, what are the things that I can do in practice this week to improve? It just shifted my focus. The next two games, I had back-to-back 300-yard rushing games, which is still a record. That was the first time I saw, okay, maybe this could help. How would you describe the benefits? I wouldn't try to describe or try to jump up a conversation about what are some of the biggest challenges or most painful experiences in someone's life. And I'll tell you why, because I started doing a survey and just asking people, when was not the first time you consumed cannabis, but when was the first time that it said something to you?

80% of them said it was a healing kind of thing. But the way it's presented to us is as a party sort of thing. And so my relationship with cannabis was that I'm breaking a rule and I'm partying and I'm doing something I shouldn't. But my actual experience didn't match up. So you wound up having a great senior season. We can agree on that. Yes. How much did cannabis help you reach that level?

It wasn't like after that I became an everyday smoker. Maybe once or twice the rest of the season. But it was just that one moment where I was locked up. that it opened up something, and then I was good. Six months after that had experience, I was in Southern California, and I had money, and I was staying on the beach. And it just felt, like, after I work out,

nice to go home and smoke a blunt and relax on the beach. So I bought my first ounce. That ounce, I didn't smoke the whole thing. I gave most of it away. But it was just having it available. It was the beginning of the relationship. And then I was drafted by the Saints. The New Orleans Saints under head coach Mike Ditka drafted Ricky Williams in 1999.

Ditka had wanted Williams so badly that he traded away eight more draft picks to get him. When it came time to negotiate his contract, Williams went for the minimum guaranteed money with big performance bonuses. His rookie year was okay, not great because of injuries, he played in only 12 games. He rushed for less than 900 yards with just two touchdowns and he missed out on a lot of bonus money. The Saints went 3 and 13 that season, and Coach Ditka was fired. The time in New Orleans was kind of bumpy, so it was more of like helping me just deal with it, helping me manage. I didn't really start to become a smoker until my second year in New Orleans, and I got hurt. I had a lot of downtime.

My roommates both smoked. And so it just became a thing that when we got home from a hard day of work, it's like telly, roll up, play video games and smoke, decompress, get up in the morning and then go do it again. And then after my third year, I was traded to the dolphins. There I was. I had a condo right on the beach. Training. It's kind of that thing where I'm about another ounce. So great after training to go on the balcony, smoke a blunt, see the ocean, and get ready to do it again.

So the season rolled around, and Miami was nice. I led the NFL in rushing. That's when I found my rhythm between using cannabis and using it to help me perform. Back then, we got drug tested once a year. When I was in New Orleans, that once a year drug test was in training camp. It never really was an issue. I got traded to Miami and I started smoking in the off season. No one told me, but Miami's drug test is in the middle of the off season.

So I came to work one day for training. And the piss test, I had the note on my locker and says it's your annual test. And I had smoked the day before. So I got popped. I fell the drug test. When you fell the first drug test, the NFL sends you to Atlanta to talk to a bunch of therapists to establish that you have a drug problem. and then it's a two-year program.

The big difference in the two-year program is you talk to a therapist once a week, but I was now drug tested, not once a year, but nine times a month, almost every other day. And at first, I'm an optimistic guy, so I was like, it can't hurt to have someone to talk to. It's no big deal. I don't have to smoke. I was fine. For a couple of weeks, stopped, and I was thinking, I don't know if I can do this, if I don't have a way to take care of myself. So I started to play to see.

If I got tested on Tuesday, it means I probably won't get tested again until Friday. If I can take two hits, maybe smoke one joint. And then I found this drink that if you follow the instructions, your urine is clean for five hours. What was the drink? It was called Extra Clean. Did you think about buying somebody else's urine? No. People did that, right?

They did, but the NFL is good. When you piss for the NFL, you got to drop your draws to your knees, and the guys are standing right there. I was willing to experiment and see if there's ways. that I could pass the test and still play. And I figured it out for almost two years. It was two months before the two years, Monday night. We played against the Eagles. I had over 100 yards, hurt my shoulder. We lost that game at the very end, and we were eliminated from the playoffs. I was out late that night, kind of bummed about it, and I had a drug test like at 6 o'clock in the morning. I sent my alarm, and I got up, I drank my extra clean. The instructions for extra clean is you drink

the bottle, you wait 15 minutes, you drink water, 15 minutes drink water, and then your peas clean. I drank the first bottle. I was so tired, I fell back asleep. I didn't wake up until the drug guy was ringing the doorbell, and I'm sure I could have weaseled my way out of it, but I was like, whatever. So I peed in the cup. A week later, I get a FedEx from the NFL saying you failed a drug test, and you're advancing to the next stage of the drug program. So this is your second fail? This was my second fail, yep. How much more serious does it get now? It gets serious for two reasons. One of them I didn't care about, the other one I did care about.

The first reason it gets serious is because you failed the second test, it's four 17th of your salary. So four game checks. Four game checks. And to me, I was like, whatever. Once you get to this point, now the team knows. The first fail, they didn't? They didn't. Yeah, it's confidential.

Some guys don't care and they just get drug tested at the facility. No one knew I was in the drug program because he would just come to my house. And so that was the thing that really started to shake my foundation. Something that I found was beneficial to me and help me perform and make everyone money and make everyone happy. It was something that I hid. I remember having to walk up and talk to the general manager and, you know, he's like, what's this? I felt so silly. It's like I turned into like a criminal and a drug addict.

It didn't feel good. I appealed to the NFL because it's just what you do. At the time, the NFL's substance abuse, they tested for 15 nanograms per milliliter. that's pretty much the lowest you can test. When you drug test, you piss in an A bottle and then you piss in a B bottle, and they keep both. When you do an appeal, they test the B bottle to check. So my A bottle was just barely over the limit, and they came back and they said, okay, if you will stay in the drug program until the middle of the next football season,

so eight weeks and you stay clean, then you're out of the drug program. And I said, no. I put it back on them to have to make a decision. How come? Because I thought I had a strong enough case that I wanted to put it on them to say, are you really going to suspend one of the best players? It's like a speeding ticket for going 58. Exactly.

And I was putting them in a position to make a choice. They were going back and forth. It was during this time where it was in limbo that I failed the third test before I decided to retire. And you're how old, 26 or 7 or something? I was 27. I'm going back and forth. And then I had one of those conversations with God. obviously I'm a risk taker.

The roll the diet and see what the fate say. So I said, I'm going to do my thing. And if I fail a drug test, it's the sign that I need to retire. If I don't, it's a sign that I need to play. At the time, I was really enjoying the offseason. I went to Jamaica, and then I went to the Bahamas, and I got the call from my sister, you got a FedEx. My heart started beating.

They say at the end of your life, your whole life flashes in front of you. And I had that moment. My whole life flashed in front of me, and I saw that pretty much everything that I was at that moment was because of football. And it was like on the brink. But I started thinking about it. I have enough money. I have my body attacked. Why am I going to go get the ball 500 times and get my body destroyed?

It just stopped making sense temporarily. I picked up the phone and I called Dr. Brown, the head of the NFL's drug program. His job is to say, we got the drug test and, you know, this means that I'm going to have to call. the commissioner. And so I said, listen, Dr. Brown, don't worry about calling the commissioner because I am out. What did he say to that? He said, are you sure? And I said, yes. I said, it's obvious that I probably should be doing something else. And I said, thank you for everything, because Dr. Brown and I had grown close at that point. He said, well, I wish you the best of luck. When I hung up the phone, it was like this million pound weight lifted off my shoulders. It was a sense of liberation that is hard to put

into words. That sounds beautiful, and I'm happy you had that. How long were you able to enjoy that million-pound relief of freedom? The story gets much more interesting. One of my really good friends at the time, Dan Lebitard. He was doing some stuff for ESPN, and he was a columnist for the Miami Herald. He knew the story, he knew this background, because we were close friends. And so as soon as I retired, because the NFL substance abuse program is confidential, nobody knew that it was connected to failing a drug test. It wasn't even part of the conversation. Dan is extremely articulate and he knows me.

He was really telling the story and he put a really positive bent on the story. Like a young athlete who doesn't want to beat up his body and realize that he's finally free. And who has a lot of curiosity and interest in the world beyond football. Exactly. You got it. So he was toothed and out of horn and it was great.

And I was like the hero. I was walking around, high fives. And then I was on the phone talking to Dan one night, and Dan and I had always planned that we were going to write a book together. And I said, Dan, I can't wait to talk about the drug test. And Dan was like, what drug test? I said, oh, yeah, I felt a drug test right before I retired. Plot twist. I was young, right?

I didn't realize the situation that I put him in because he's like a journalist. So he's going to feel like he was covering for you. Exactly. If the story breaks, it ruins his reputation. And so I say it to him not thinking about it, and I can start to feel the panic in his voice about what is he going to do. He's a very principal person. Did he express this to you that you would put him in a position that was difficult? I'm sure he did, knowing Dan, I was young and idealistic, and there was like a conflict between friendship and honor. And I was like, well, what are you going to do? I could tell he's in a state of panic. We leave as like, well, you make a decision, good night.

When I woke up in the morning, the news was everywhere. He massaged it. He tried to put me up as an advocate. But the story was he rather smoked weed than play football. There had been some reporting about the second drug test that Ricky Williams had failed, but the third test, which would have led to a suspension, was not known about until Levitard published his piece in the Herald. By this time, Williams had established himself as one of the best running backs in the NFL. In 2002, his first season with the Dolphins, he led the league in rushing with more than

1,800 yards, and he had 16 touchdowns. This success had a lot to do with how the media treated his quitting. Here's one headline from a Florida newspaper. Ricky Williams reveals a higher love than football. Everyone thought I was a drug addict or I was endangered. my career for a drug. What I learned about social anxiety disorder, and if we think about it, it's built into the phrase, social anxiety, the people that I'm surrounding myself with, give me anxiety. And I could make that about me, but I realized when I changed my environment and I was around

other people, that I wasn't anxious. I was thinking, do I want a life where I'm making money that I don't even feel is worth it? And I'm always anxious and feeling judged and not even appreciated for the parts of myself that I love, it just didn't add up anymore. John Wooden, the famous UCLA basketball coach, who became a leader of leaders outside of sport even. He said this thing one time that I think about a lot. He said that you should be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are. When I think about you, the reputation is what became very public and often negative, whereas now you're talking about

what your character really was. Were you discovering who you actually were then? Yeah, a wonderful question. What came up for me at that time was I was realizing how far apart my character and my reputation were. It was one of the most uncomfortable times of my life. That feeling of everyone knowing, oh, I thought my life was over. It woke me up. to something that is true about me that if I'm by myself, I don't feel any negativity about it, and it has value to me. But if people know about this, then I feel ashamed. And that can't be healthy. Yeah. I thought I need to change my environment because I could see there are environments out there that I could be myself, and I wouldn't be a shame or a disgrace to the game.

So those other environments where you could be yourself and kind of grow into yourself, because you were still young, were those environments? mostly around the healing universe? The first impulse was I wanted to travel. I had aspirations to be an intelligent person, but my intelligence had all been invested in being a football player. There are so many things about the world and about life that I was ignorant of.

To me, there's no better way than to travel to have those kinds of experiences. I was traveling in Samoa. I spent a couple of months in Australia. I naturally started to gravitate towards people who were healers. I started to get a completely different reflection of what was valuable about me. As a football player, my sensitivity was something that I was made fun of for. And around the healers, my sensitivity was appreciated.

It was acknowledged. Oh, wow. Did you look back at your football career with appreciation or with kind of mixed feelings? What was that like? It was an evolution. I had felt I had lived more in those three months than I had the previous 27 years of my life. So I could appreciate the value of first getting away because I had to come to terms with that first. When I was in India doing my yoga teachers training, the schedule reminded me of training camp.

I realized that everything that I learned in football, if I just applied it to being a better person, it would give me the same kind of benefit. So I found an environment where my work ethic and my ability to just hit it was rewarded, but instead of rewarding me with money and fame, it rewarded. me with character. The structure of football, it allowed the aggressive side of myself to express freely, and I was rewarded for it. Outside of that context, I probably would have gotten myself into some kind of trouble. People like me, they need football or something like that early in life, because that structure helps us gain a sense of control and mastery over certain things.

But it gets to a point where there are diminishing returns. This part of me is full grown now. Why am I still doing this? It's time for another part of myself. to be developed. So why did you go back to football then? You retired in 2004, but then decided to return in 2005. I ended up here in Northern California studying alternative medicine, where I met a yogi who did my astrology chart, had a spiritual awakening, and I realized, well, if I'm going to get my life back on track, I probably have to go back to football and clean that mess up. But it's hard to make a comeback when people are calling you a disgrace to humanity. That's coming up after the break. I'm Stephen Dubner, and this is freaking on

Radio. In 2005, Ricky Williams unretired from the NFL and returned to the Miami Dolphins. He had a decent season, not great. The next season, he failed a fourth drug test. The penalty for that was a full year suspension. A few years earlier, when he had abruptly quit the NFL, the media response was indignant. This time, some of it was just hateful. Smoking weed is more important to him than playing professional football. always hated football. A disgrace to humanity, Ricky Williams. Watching the clips of sportscasters and other athletes, including former athletes like Joe

Thaisman and so on, hearing what they said about you, it took my breath away now. They're calling you a disgrace to the game, a disgrace to humanity. It blew my mind to hear that now. So I can't even imagine what that felt like for you then, if you paid attention to it. Maybe you blocked it out. know, but if you didn't block it out, what was that like? It was further validation and justification for myself of why I don't need to be in that world. But Williams still wanted to play football. So he survived his one-year NFL suspension

by playing in the Canadian Football League for the Toronto Argonauts. And I met an osteopath who did this work on me. I noticed like, wow, whatever you're doing, it's really opening up my mind in my body and it's improving the way that I play. He said, you should study this a little bit and see if you can figure some stuff out. I took his advice and it saved my life. It took layers of trauma off my body and allowed me to play at a high level for an extended amount of years. Was the trauma all physical trauma or was there also mental, anxiety, anything like that? How did that all intersect? When you're a professional athlete, it's hard to separate mental and physical trauma. And I would even say existential trauma because something that we all have to do is make a living.

The hero man archetype is you have to be good at making a living. So something about being injured in the NFL, it's like a deep wound because the thing that has made you, who you are, and everyone is giving you as adulation for, you realize how fragile it is. A bone breaks and you feel like you have nothing to offer. That hurts deep. I've wrestled with that a lot of times in my career with injuries. On top of the physical trauma, that actually came from the game, locked in there, was also the emotional trauma. I think especially for African Americans, there's like a deeper potential trauma because our value is what we can offer to other people through our physical bodies. But I will say, it inspired me to develop more of the mental side myself, because it's easy for a lot of people gifted in sports to never be motivated to develop their minds or other parts of their personalities. I know you had childhood trauma, you had sexual abuse by your father when you were really young. I don't know if you want to talk about that. I certainly don't want to lead you into it if you don't want to. But when you think about yourself as a healer and whether it's cannabis or other healing methods that you embrace, can you talk about how successful you find it can be for other people's childhood trauma, whatever type it might be.

Yeah. Studying alternative medicines, all of them have a spiritual basis that says the root of all illness is not knowing who you truly are. I think a lot of times when we're kids, a lot of times the way we judge or filter information is through our parents' reaction to it. I mean, who knows? But I think I have a good enough memory in that moment, as a four-year-old, he didn't touch us. He just masturbated in front of us. So I think I had an awareness of like something's going on. Because obviously the next morning on the way to school, when I told my mom about it, I didn't know I was telling on my dad. I see. And then the other kind of big issue with my dad, and my dad had me take pictures of polarities of him naked. That was the last straw.

So for me, more of the trauma was that I was the one responsible for getting rid of my dad. The story that I get is from the parents or the outsiders telling the story. That's what I'm hearing. Imagine someone 20 years later hanging out with a friend that they really trust. and there's cannabis in the room, the topic comes up, and they reflect on the situation, and they can see their parents' opinions, they can appreciate themselves in it. And it's a different version of the story. What stories in our memory is not what happened.

It's the last time we thought about what happened. Do you think cannabis helps you get to the truer version of the story? Yes, exactly. 100%. Yes. Interesting. So you become more reflective. I'm curious how you might connect the effect of the campaign.

cannabis to help you know your true self like that with the healing stuff that you've learned. Like, are they totally different mechanisms? Are they similar? How do you think about that relationship? They're accomplishing the same ends. There are different ways of getting there. But there's a lot of the body work that I do. It puts people in an altered state.

It's difficult to solve a problem from the same level that created it. And many indigenous cultures believe that you can't be healthy without having access to the other side. Because we are our whole beings. The way we're raised, so much of our attention is outwards. We forget about the soul. We forget about who we are on the inside. And if we stray from living that way, it tends to cause pain and anxiety. So here's the thing that I don't quite understand in the story. Like, it's an amazing story. It's got all these ebbs and flows and discovery and challenge and all that, like all good stories have. What I don't get is once you got on the path to becoming a healer and you recognize that in yourself,

why did you keep coming back to football? Part of my healing for me is to have a message that I can share with the world. And part of the reality of that is the world has to take you seriously. And I thought if I can come back and be myself more and not do football in a way that alienates myself, but do it in a way that my character and my reputation can align more that I have a shot. After a year in Canada,

Ricky Williams went back to Miami and the NFL. He was hurt. most of the following season, but he put together a few good seasons after that, a nice way to end his eventful career. By the time he retired for real, Ricky Williams had become a fan favorite and a model for some other players. I see that I've made an impact. I hear it when I hear young African Americans, athletes, they say, because of you, we have more freedom in how we can be as a professional athlete. Back when I was growing up, if you smoked and you were on the team, a lot of coaches would just run you off. But if you're the best player on the team, then the coach

kind of protects you and guards you. It was rare to have the best player on the team not be afraid to be a rebel. And it opened doors for a lot of people. We have all these stories in history and in religions about how difficult it is to develop in a world that's trying to pressure you to be something else. I've tried to make my life a testament to that truth. One of the most powerful moments in my life is related to the University of Texas. Because after the drug test, after all of that stuff, the University of Texas erected a statue. And then they named the football field after me. This idea of I can tell the story of staying true to who I am, it worked. You can do it. You can do it. It's really beautiful. I mean, I'm so happy for you that things have worked out the way they have.

It just makes me smile to think about this journey that you've been on. What share of NFL players do you think are using cannabis now? I'd say 70 to 75. And how did they use it typically? Like, I've heard you say that not many guys will smoke before a game, for instance. The smokers will, but that's always going to be a smaller percentage. It's probably larger now than it was then, because if you're in a state that's legal, it's harder not to.

If we're being realistic about the age group and being social, it's just everywhere, it's more difficult to not do it. But then if they're not consuming cannabis, they're taking Ambien, they're taking Vicodin, they're taking inseds. there's stress and pain that is generated by being a professional football player, and if a player can't find a way to manage that, they ain't going to make it. I'm biased, but I think you'd be stupid to not at least consider cannabis as a means of taking care of yourself.

It's tough to fact-check what William says about cannabis use in the NFL, but it wouldn't be that surprising. Over the past few years, the NFL has significantly loosened up its policies around cannabis. They're even funding research into using cannabis. for pain management. The other major American sports leagues, the NBA, NHL, and MLB have also relaxed their cannabis policies. And Ricky Williams, well, Ricky Williams, in addition to his healing work, now runs a cannabis company in Northern California called Heisman, H-I-G-H-M-A-N. I went back to the psychology professor Angela Bryan to ask where she thinks we are at this moment

in the long and strange relationship between drugs and humans. One thing we know about humans, honestly, not even humans, sloths, dolphins, chimpanzees, no matter if you have a brain, you try to alter it. That's been the animal condition for as long as we've been in existence. It always kind of baffles me that we have these moral judgments about people wanting to alter their consciousness. I had a big cup of coffee this morning. That's a drug. It's a mind-altering substance. And that one's fine.

But then if I were to wake and bake and hit my dab rig in the morning, people would think, oh, horrors. I love that saying. If you have a brain, you try to alter it. Of course, there are a lot of ways to alter your brain, like listening to podcasts. So thanks for listening to this one. Thanks also to Angela Bryan and Ricky Williams. And from last week's episode, thanks to Floyd Landis, Louisa Thomas, April Henning, and Aaron DeSouza.

If you want to let us know what you thought of these episodes, our email is Radio at Freakonomics.com. Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, I am taking the week off and Steve Levitt is in the host chair, trying to figure out how to repurpose existing drugs for new cures. From the moment that that drug, Sierra Leimis started saving my life, I just haven't been able to stop thinking about how many more drugs are out there they could treat more patients in need. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself.

And if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. It's also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Teo Jacob. with help from Dalvin Abouaji. It was edited by Ellen Frankman. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Jeremy Johnston and Eleanor Osborne.

Special thanks to Yasmin Hurd for background research help. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Elaria Montenicourt, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening. Ricky, if you would just say your name and what you do, we'll start with that. What do I do? I don't know how to answer that. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.

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