EP 22: Antonio Harvey — Ending ‘Stoner Stigma’ For Athletes
For NBA legend Antonio Harvey, athletics are life. He’s spent the entirety of his 25-year career in and around professional sports, playing ball domestically, for teams like the Lakers, Clippers, and Grizzlies, as well as internationally. He’s coached, has spent 12 years as a broadcaster, and he also hails from a family of athletes. Both his father and older brother played professional football, and his daughter is a pro soccer player in Europe today.
Being an athlete is, simply, Antonio’s everything. And cannabis has helped make him a better one. Antonio’s history of utilizing cannabis to help his body recover goes back to his time in the NBA.
“I was fortunate my older brother, having come from the NFL — and cannabis in the NFL is way more prevalent than people know and people want to admit — had been utilizing cannabis his entire career,” Antonion says. “When he retired or got toward the end of his career, he kind of turned me onto it toward the end of mine. And it was really about sleep.”
One of the aspects of professional athletes’ lives that “never gets talked about,” Antonio says, is their fraught relationship with sleep. There were plenty of times when, after shuttling straight from a game to a new hotel in a new state for the next night’s game, he wouldn’t fall asleep until 7 a.m. Just as often, there were days when he wouldn’t sleep at all but would instead have to go straight to morning practice.
“I had to find ways to sleep so I could get my recovery,” he says. “And that’s where cannabis came into play.”
As a celebrated athlete who now owns his own CBD business, Antonio is helping eliminate “stoner stigmas” and ensure we talk about CBD and cannabis like the tools for the recovery they are. In this episode of “Good Dudes Grow,” Gary and Antonio talk about normalizing cannabis as medicine, why athletes’ knowledge of their bodies make them key advocates for (and beneficiaries from) it, and how the relationship between pro sports and the cannabis industry needs to change.
What You’ll Learn:
- Antonio’s journey to growing a CBD business that helps athletes utilize cannabis as a medicine and integrate it into their everyday lives
- Why dosing is so essential (and why athletes may naturally be more adept at it)
- The group of leaders, even more than athletes, who Antonio believes needs to vocalize their cannabis use to end stigmas
- And much more!
Favorite Quote:
“From day one, I was in love with the plant. I already knew how it made me feel. But then to be in a building growing this plant kind of changes your affinity for it… I’m fully ingrained and engulfed in the science behind why I feel how I feel after I utilize cannabis. And so as I got more and more into the science and learned more about the endocannabinoid system and how it impacts the body, I started realizing that all the guys I knew that utilize and smoke cannabis — none of them were doing it to get high. They were treating something.”
— Antonio Harvey
Connect With Antonio
How to get involved:
Gary Roberts is the founder and CEO of Pure Body Zen, a company based not only around creating and selling high-quality CBD products, but one that is on a mission to change the landscape on how mental health and addiction are treated. Gary has founded a non-profit called Promises Recovery Centers for those who need it as well as creating the first-ever educational training facility for Physicians, Therapists, and Mental Health advocates using innovative therapeutics like psilocybin, Mdma, and LSD.
You can learn more about Pure Body Zen on their site, on LinkedIn, and on Instagram.
If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to visit the show on Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and review! We love hearing from you!
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