When Cocaine Ruled the NBA: “Drugs were everywhere, it was like a fad” | sport

The anecdote is shared by none other than Michael Jordan The Last Dancethe Netflix documentary about his final season with the Chicago Bulls. In 1984, then-rookie Jordan, who would make history in the sport, was in a hotel on the eve of an away game. He looked for his teammates and knocked on doors until one of them opened. “I came in and basically the whole team was there. And they were things I had never seen in my life as a small child. You have your lines [of cocaine] Over here, over here are your weed smokers, over here are your women. The first thing I said was, “Look, man, I’m out.” Because all I could think about was that right now I’m just as guilty as everyone else that’s in this room for coming and this place ambushed,” Jordan recalls.

It’s not for nothing that the Bulls were known as “the traveling cocaine circus” before the arrival of the player who would become their biggest star. The publication in the USA by Forbidden, The memoir of Micheal “Sugar” Ray Richardson, the first player expelled from the sport for drug use, has brought back into focus an era in which the NBA was almost more known for its players’ off-court excesses than for the spectacle they offered.

Drafted fourth overall in 1978, Richardson wasn’t a huge star, but he was a highly rated point guard who was selected to the All-Star Game four times. However, his career was cut short in the 1985-86 season: after failing a third drug test, he was banned from the league for life, an unprecedented punishment that David Stern, elected NBA commissioner in 1984, served as a warning to the NBA Player used: The era of abundance was over. By this time, drug use among NBA players had increased so much that in 1980 The Washington Post published an article estimating that between 40 and 75% of league players used cocaine, while one in ten smoked marijuana.

“Let’s get together when the game is over.”

Those numbers, as incredible as they may seem in 2024, don’t seem far-fetched based on some confessions from players like Richardson. “During warmups, guys from different teams were like, ‘Yo, man, I got what you’re looking for.’ Let’s get together when [the game] is over’ […] Drugs were everywhere – it was like a fad,” the former player said The Guardian Newspaper. To the point where, as he explains in his memoirs, some teams began spying on their players, such as when Robinson was traded to the Golden State Warriors. “When I came to Oakland, I lived in a Holiday Inn and was high almost every day, especially when I was injured. I also became immersed in the area’s famous nightlife, so much so that the Warriors began hiring private investigators to follow me.”

Robinson’s case was the most notorious – due to the punishment he received – but by no means the only one to come to light related to drug use by NBA players at the time. Marvis Barnes, also known as “Bad News”, was a power forward who played for several teams in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Detroit Pistons and Boston Celtics. His biography, Bad newstells how he went from being a key player in the league to a five-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. But even more tragic was the story of Len Bias. Considered one of the most promising college players of his generation, he was selected second overall in the 1986 NBA Draft by the Boston Celtics. After the ceremony, he decided to celebrate with some of his teammates. Less than two days after securing his future as an NBA player, he suffered a cardiac arrhythmia caused by cocaine use that ended his life.

Bias’ death and Robinson’s suspension coincided in the same season, marking a turning point in the competition’s history of banned substance use. Stern’s plan was to make the NBA a global entertainment product, but first he had to stop the post-game events from coming to an end. He introduced drug testing in every game and provided players with treatment and rehabilitation programs. In the short term, he may not have ended all drug use cases in the league, but he did change their dynamic.

Since the 1990s, marijuana and derivatives have been the substances that show up most frequently in NBA testing, with sanctions (both sporting and financial) regularly imposed each season. Until now. Last year, the players’ association and the NBA signed an agreement whereby recreational cannabis use would no longer be monitored in tests for the first time. It is the first concession, a sign of the times, of a competition that did its best to forget a wild time that still lingers from time to time.

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