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Like you, Allen Iverson has gotten too high before. And perhaps like you, too, it seems to happen almost every time he smokes. Which, he tells me, is why he’s sparked up so infrequently since his rookie season in the NBA. He says he doesn’t like talking about his past run-ins with weed, but deep down, he seems excited at the chance to confess his sativa-inspired sins. He looks up and reluctantly flings me a blessing.
“You want me to tell the story,” he asks, smirking. He knows the answer is obvious. Who in this world would pass up a chance to hear Allen Iverson’s treasure trove of puff-puff parables? I sure wouldn’t. We’re sitting under idyllic palm trees on a multimillion dollar compound in Los Angeles called “the Hideaway.” The 16-year NBA veteran Al Harrington is laughing by Iverson’s side. Iverson and Harrington have been inseparable the last few months: Iverson is a brand-new ambassador for Viola, Harrington’s cannabis business. They’ve been busy: hosting warehouse launch parties in Hollywood with former big time hoopers and fighting off mobs of fans in Southern California towns while scurrying to packed promo appearances.
But for the moment, I’ve pulled Iverson aside for story hour. “Man, look,” Iverson laughs, beginning to reminisce. “This shit crazy.”
There was one night in 2014—he was in his old stomping grounds on the Virginian peninsula, hanging out with a man he lovingly describes as “Top Muhfuckin Smoker.” Iverson and “Top Muhfuckin Smoker” headed to an old refuge of Iverson’s, Applebee’s, to get some grub before a party appearance. They lit up outside the restaurant and Iverson started buzzing. “I’m alright! I was fine! Fine like a muhfucka. But, then, I just felt it, dog,” Iverson says, grabbing his chest and wobbling like a penguin to demonstrate.
Iverson told his homeboys he needed to straighten up, so he decided to walk down the street to find a Corona—“so I could even it out, “ he says. “I start walkin’ up an interstate. A interstate! N-gga, I’m on the interstate wit cars flying by just walkin' down the road trine find a bar!” He got kicked out of the bar. Why? Because Allen Iverson doesn’t carry ID in his home state. As he told the bartender that night: “I don’t have no muhfuckin' ID.”
So he walked back down the interstate to the Applebee’s. (Whether or not Applebee’s stocked Corona remains a mystery.) Then through the door came the guy from the bar, telling Iverson he was ok to drink there. Having now walked on an interstate twice in one night, Iverson was irate. “Fuck you, man!” Iverson says. “Gone head ‘bout ya business!”
Iverson headed back to the car where “some gangsta shit” was playin’ on the radio. He grew reflective in that moment. “I see every muhfucka that I love passin' by, all my teammates, I see my girl, I see my kids, I see her with another dude holdin’ hands, I’m thinkin' all the worst shit in the world. The door was closed and I was waitin' for the door to open and a muhfucka to kill me. At one point I even laughed, ‘like, damn, I’m goin out like this?!’” Frightened, he left the car. “Bout 10 minutes later, I swear to God, I woke up and I was laying down in a ditch.” What? “In a ditch!,” he says. “I’m in a muhfuckin’ ditch! I’m lookin around for people who see me gettin’ up off the ground. I sat back in the car and I said, ‘This is it, man.’ I heard a car burning rubber and then BOOM. I was back. I was myself.”
Iverson claims that, after that night, he “never smoked again.” There’s a brief silence between us and I scooch up in my chair, cross my legs and wait for him to continue. There couldn’t just be one story, right? He licks his lips, “....until 2018 in Chicago” when, apparently, some “white boys got me that shit from the dispensary.”
“And the liquor store wasn’t open so I couldn’t get my usual champagne. So my dumb ass,” he yells, “after I done made it through this last experience, told them, ‘Let me hit that muhfucka.’” His friends insisted that he shouldn’t. “Fuck that, n-gga!” Iverson says. “I’m a grown, muhfuckin man! Lemme hit that muhfucka!” Iverson takes an imaginary drag from his joint and closes his eyes, woozily shaking into a trance.
The night went on as usual: the frequent, mindless laughing and joking that can happen when friends have a good time. Everyone got stoned. And then...“We stopped at the white boys’ house and I wanted to smoke again,” Iverson says. “All I had to do was just stay like I was right then, man!!” As a basketball player, Iverson was defined by his refusal to listen to anyone but himself. In this case, Allen Iverson didn’t even listen to Allen Iverson. “We sat outside his house, smoked that bitch, and I. Start. Trippin. Man,” Iverson says, laughing at his past wallow.
Iverson wound up going home. “I go down to the basement and start running laps in my man cave,” he says, convincing me of his newest method. “I’m trine sweat and run it out of me! I’m doin’ push ups and sit ups, all kinds of shit.”
Iverson looked up and noticed it was the next day. He’d been in his basement trying to get rid of his high for hours. He tried, “watchin Martin and Sanford & Son. All funny shit. And I couldn’t go to sleep. I’m thinkin’ if I fall asleep I’ll wake up and I would’ve shook the shit. I woke up the next day and I was like that. I woke up the day after and I was like that. For three days, dog.”
The whole room can’t help but laugh.
Because he’s Allen Iverson, getting too high has all manner of weird consequences. It’s gotten him into trouble, and put him on the wrong end of this country’s racialized drug laws. It almost tanked his rookie season in Philadelphia with the Sixers, when David Stern’s NBA wanted to clean up his image by any means necessary.
Iverson entered the NBA as the game was making a massive shift: the Bird vs. Magic race wars of the eighties and Michael Jordan’s global dominance of the nineties were in the rearview. What would basketball be? Who would be its stars? Jordan had proved that athletes could be global megastars. But Iverson wasn’t the next Jordan: he was something cooler, more authentic and accessible. He was wearing durags and faux furs to games before the era of #LeagueFits. Shit, he was the runway.
Iverson’s rebellious nature made him a hero to Black kids across the world—and to white teenagers in the suburbs who could never “Be Like Mike” but could certainly try and emulate Allen. But as far as the league was concerned, he was a menace—maybe the sole reason the NBA’s infamous dress code came to be. He hated that, for the record. “You are taking that [individualism] away from us. You taking our identity away, you’re taking away from who we are and you’re making us uncomfortable,” Iverson says of the ruling. He says he never thought fans would deify him for the authentic way he dressed. “When you make somebody wear something they’re not comfortable wearing to work...it’s supposed to be about the job you do. The hell with your appearance.”
Iverson wound up in the league’s crosshairs for more than just his fashion sense. He never meant to be much of a smoker. But as his rookie season in Philadelphia started, he couldn’t put the drug down. “I used to smoke every goddamn day. It was the best feeling in the world,” he says. “I used to smoke and not drink shit. I used to smoke a blunt and drink a Corona and I’d be straight for the rest of the day.” He was arrested in August 1997, when police found a joint in his car on his way home from a party. In lieu of jail time, he agreed to random drug testing, every month, for two years.
“Once they put me through that program for a year, I felt like it wasn’t worth it,” Iverson tells me. The mood in the room grows somber for a spell. It made parts of his rookie season with the Sixers miserable. “I had to take a hiatus,” he says. “That’s what mighta turned me into a maniac with this Dom Perigon. Cuz I can’t smoke no damn more.”
Without weed, Iverson developed a reputation as a drinker. By 2010, the press always had a story about Iverson The Alcoholic. ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith wrote that Iverson would “drink himself into oblivion” or “gamble his life away” on trips to Atlantic City. Establishments were rumored to have banished Iverson from their rotundas, afraid he wouldn’t be able to pay his debts.
Marijuana, he says, never felt like an option. “[Weed] always had a negative stigma with it,” he says. “Until all these years later you find out you’ve had it all wrong. I remember getting arrested for having a blunt and being all on ESPN. I was taunted when I was playing. Called ‘Weed Head’ from people in the crowd. ‘Where’s the marijuana? Who’s got the blunt, AI?’ I had to go through that throughout my career, particularly when I was younger. And look how far it’s come now.” He pauses. “That stigma,” he says. “Them criticizing it as they were, it’s like, y’all had it all wrong.”
In part, that remorse is why Iverson’s in LA. Harrington has built Viola (named after his grandmother, who found cannabis helped relieve pain from her glaucoma) into a $100 million business. More importantly, he wants it to be a Black-owned business selling a drug that has been used to over-police and over-incarcerate Black Americans. Iverson is a crucial part of the plan.
“Bringing someone like [Iverson] along, it amplifies the message,” Harrington says. “We sitting here and doing this not only for us, but we doing this for our people. We doing this for the culture...we want to have an impact in our community.” Harrington’s hope is that the same drug at the root of racially targeted arrests and the fraying of too many of America’s Black communities could also help rebuild them. Iverson was in. “When he explained to me the positive shit that would come from it, as far as helping people, that was a no brainer to me,” he says.
There’s an obvious sort of logic to the Harrington-Iverson partnership. Think about it: what if Iverson had been able to smoke in some of the NBA markets he played in during his Hall of Fame career? Iverson is open about his struggles with alcohol—and still became one of the greatest point guards of all time. Imagine if he could have smoked!
Iverson seems like the perfect weed spokesman for other reasons, too. The NBA that pushed back aggressively against his image and behavior now boasts about its progressive bona fides. And the punitive drug laws that once sent Iverson into the league’s drug treatment program are slowly crumbling as more and more people understand their often-racist applications.
But the sale and marketing of legal cannabis is not without its complications. Dispensaries in Los Angeles often look like Apple stores, yet they’re not free of all the eccentricities that come with selling a drug. The night before I met Iverson, an overly familiar white clerk at a dispensary tried to steer me away from the “weed that white people smoke,” complete with a wink. It was weird as fuck—and a far cry from the cozy vibe Iverson and Harrington provided at the Hideaway, where your joints were rolled by a pool and a friendly face might hand you a glass of champagne.
Practically speaking, Viola’s collaboration with Iverson yielded a new strain: “Iverson 96,” a powerpunching grape stomper and kush mints combination that Harrington made taste, he says, like Dom Perigon champagne. Which, somehow, still hasn’t provoked Iverson to try his own weed. “I don’t really know who else I would’ve went to but [Iverson],” Harrington says.
Harrington hopes working with Iverson can be the latest step in cannabis’s long path to acceptability. He’s struggled to sign up corporate sponsors, and to convince active NBA players to promote a drug that’s still illegal in most states in the country. “Even my best friends in the league, they didn’t want parents knowing they smoke or support a cannabis brand,” Harrington tells me. “But, this year will be the year we will be surprised. I know personally of a few athletes that’ll push that line, and say they use and why they use,” Harrington says. He said three “top 20 in the league type guys” are going to do so.
“It’ll open up the conversation. These guys do use cannabis on a daily basis and that stigma of, you smoke and you’re unproductive or lazy, that shit goes out the window,” he says. Harrington is a living example, telling me how he smoked when he played in the Big3 League. “Right now in professional sports — being that it’s pretty much allowed in all leagues right now, in some shape, form or fashion — the level of play is still through the roof. 85 percent of the players in the [NBA] smoke, bro. Or use some type of cannabis...It’s a safe and alternative way to deal with shit. Yes, we are supermen. We do make a lot of money. But we have a lot of stress and shit on our plate. Constantly. So what is our vice? What can we use to get away? What’s available to us? Cannabis is recreationally available or decriminalized in 18 NBA markets. So, I pay taxes in this state, I hoop in this state, and you’re trying to tell me I can’t go to the dispensary? It makes no sense.”
“We doin’ god’s work at the end of the day,” Harrington argues. “Black people, we founded America, we built America on our backs and don’t own none of it. Cannabis is now this new opportunity. The difference is this time around?” Harrington says.
“We have resources.”
“How you know I was smoking weed in New York?” Iverson asks me. Given it’s story time, I ask Iverson to rattle off his most famed weed tale. His usual bravado cracks for a second and he stares a hole directly into my chest, hoping I’d back down. But Iverson — the retired rascal he is — can’t help but chuckle, as the fresh grey nestling his jawline curls tightly into a grin. He eventually acquiesces, but prefaces the fable with one note: “This is real shit,” Iverson tells me. “I swear to God, this is a true story.”
His path down the road to momentary dope dependency came right after Iverson got to the NBA. In the summer of 1996, Diddy called Iverson and wanted him to play at Rucker Park, a place he famously said was “harder to play at than The Garden.” Iverson scored a few buckets and met Diddy at the rapper’s studio with a few of his homeboys. Iverson was in awe of what he saw: the singer Brian McKnight vibing in the corner, Diddy’s mother walking in with plates of food for hungry men, and the rapper Lil’ Cease who was known for rhyming with Lil Kim.
Iverson had been smoking, at least, since he was a sophomore at Georgetown. So, the atmosphere was nothing to him. Until he saw his idol. “Biggie was in there,” he says, almost gushing. “He was doin’ ‘You’re Nobody Til Somebody Kills Ya’...So, I’m like a kid in the candy store. I’m 21 years old and I come in there and see Big’ in the booth doing a song off Life After Death.” After a routine conversation, the most important question of the night is asked.
“Are you trying to smoke?” Iverson recalls Biggie saying.
After a few joints, Iverson asked Diddy where the bathroom was. Following some hazy instructions, the young Iverson stumbled around the studio looking for the lavatory in a funky get up. “The whole time, I got on a fuckin’ Janet Jackson shirt where the muhfucka had his hands on Janet Jackson tiddies,” Iverson says, reminiscing on the 1993 Rolling Stone cover. “But, it was an alien cartoon picture instead.”
Forgetting his choice of clothes for the evening, the young Iverson absolutely lost his shit. “When I looked at my shirt: all I was thinking of was the Janet Jackson cover, but the muhfucka looked like an alien!” I remind him that, you know, he was actually wearing a shirt with an alien on it. “But,” he points out. I'm missing a key detail. “I’m high as hell! So, I’m wiping my shirt like what the fuck is this shit. I keep wiping my shirt and it wouldn’t come off.”
Iverson tried everything to snap himself out of it: he stayed in the bathroom so long, his homeboys asked, “N-gga was you takin’ a shit?!” He ran around Diddy’s studio, smashing his Timberland boots into the ground, causing a ruckus. He says he did this because, “I couldn’t feel my fuckin’ feet.” The room began spinning and he couldn’t feel his face anymore. Somehow, Iverson eventually made it back to the studio Diddy and Biggie are in, only for another predictable question to be thrown his way.
“A.I.,” Lil’Cease asks. “You trying to smoke again?”
Iverson, always authentically himself, replied how you’d imagine.
“Yeah!” he said.
“He asks me do I want the hash or the chronic,” Iverson recalls, then his face goes dark. Lifeless. Depleted. “I want the chronic,” Iverson said.
“Well, you had the hash last time!” Cease admitted.
The thought of that night horrifies Iverson even now. He’s shaking, for effect, almost letting a bead of sweat run off his brow. He can laugh about it today. But Iverson says he came to a valuable conclusion that day as a 21-year old. “Fuck smokin,” he thought. “Fuck hash. Fuck weed. Fuck it all. Bitch, I ain’t doin nothin but drinking from now on.” Holding his hand to his head, he says, “That fucked me up, man.” Apparently mistaking Janet Jackson for an alien was enough to get him to consider giving it up.
“I got thru the shit and I vowed that I would never smoke ever again in my life,” he says. “If a muhfucka gave me a billion dollars right now and said they just needed me to hit this blunt, I would not do it. I swear to God on my life. Kill me dead if I’m lying. That scared the fuck outta me. So, weed ain’t my shit...no more. I’ll stick to the muhfuckin Dom Perigon, man.”
