Before playing in the NBA for 16 seasons, Al Harrington, a native of Orange, didn’t touch cannabis while growing up in New Jersey, he says.
“I had some cannabis users in my family, and they were always shunned,” he said. “They were being outcast from the family because they did that. So it was something that I was afraid of, stayed far away from.”
After a late-career meniscus surgery turned into an infection, Harrington gave cannabis a chance and said it gave him a far better feeling than prescription medication. He recommended it to his grandmother, Viola, who suffered from glaucoma and had trouble reading.
“And she said, ‘Well, what is cannabis?’ And I said, ‘It’s marijuana, weed.’ … And she laughed so hard, she said, ‘Boy you better get out of my face. I’m not smoking no reefer.’ I said, ‘This will be our secret. I won’t tell nobody.’ And she tried it. I went to go check on her an hour and a half later, and she’s downstairs crying, reading a Bible. So it’s the first time she’s seeing the words in her bible in over three and a half years.”
Harrington named his cannabis company, Viola Brands, after his grandmother. The company has stores in several states, including the first in New Jersey, in Hoboken. And Harrington just received a license to open dispensaries in New York state.
