National Football League

Hurd: I smoked pot all day, shared it

Published Nov. 12, 2013 12:00 a.m. ET

Sam Gardner

Sam Hurd will be sentenced Wednesday for his role in a 2011 drug trafficking operation, and now that he’s meeting the prospect of a life in prison head on, the former Cowboys and Bears receiver is opening up about everything from his role in the process to drug culture in the NFL.

Speaking with The MMQB, Hurd said he spent the last few years of his career — which began in 2006 as an undrafted free agent out of Northern Illinois — smoking high-grade marijuana “all day, every day.”

“Whatever was considered the loudest weed in California — I wanted a notch above that,” Hurd told the site, saying he would import two to 10 pounds at a time from the West Coast. “I had educated myself on different strains and potencies and growing techniques. I was very selective. It was like wine.”

Hurd also said he smoked marijuana and sold it at cost to several friends during his time in Dallas, including “20 to 25” teammates on the Cowboys.

Hurd didn’t mention any players by name, aside from former Cowboys safety Patrick Watkins, but according to his estimate, which he called “conservative,” at least half of the NFL smokes weed during the season and can avoid testing positive for the substance by knowing when the annual sample will be collected.

“Early in his career,” Michael McKnight wrote for The MMQB, “Hurd had been entrusted with a secret known by only a few of Dallas’s veterans: Tests for marijuana occurred at roughly the same time each year.”

There are plenty of reasons not to believe what Hurd is saying. This is, after all, a criminal who is likely spending the rest of his life behind bars. But at the same time, Hurd’s situation leaves him with little to lose, and can’t help but make one wonder just how prevalent marijuana use is around the league.