After years of surgeries, rehab and a recovery machine built for return-to-play, the former NBA forward stopped asking whether cannabis could help and started asking harder questions about how it actually worked.
Al Harrington didn’t come out of basketball looking for another celebrity weed lane.
He came out of it with a body that had absorbed 16 seasons of professional punishment, a long and personal relationship with the plant, and a growing suspicion that most of the recovery industry, cannabis included, wasn’t asking serious enough questions.
That’s the more interesting story. Not that a former NBA star believes in cannabis. Plenty of them do. Not that he has a product line. Plenty of them have that too. What separates Harrington, at least right now, is that he sounds genuinely less interested in the wellness pitch than in whether the products behind it were actually built to do something real.
He got there the hard way.
“What frustrated me most was how little focus there was on the long-term,” Harrington told High Times, reflecting on traditional pain management and recovery after retirement and multiple surgeries. “Traditional rehab is usually about getting you back on the court, but there’s not always a real plan for what comes after that. There should be more attention on what habits, routines, and treatments need to become part of your lifestyle so you can stay healthy long after the rehab process is over.”
That’s a bigger idea than sports medicine usually allows. The whole recovery machine is built around return-to-play. Patch the guy up, get him moving, get him back out there. What happens to the body after the season ends and the cameras move on is a different conversation, one that professional sports has never been especially good at having.
Cannabis entered that gap for Harrington first as relief, then as something else.
“Once it became part of my daily routine, I started noticing benefits that went beyond a specific injury,” he said. “I was feeling better overall, and that made me curious about what was actually happening in the body. That curiosity pushed me to start asking deeper questions about how recovery really works.”
That’s the turn. Not from pain to comfort, but from relief to investigation.
And once you start asking what is actually happening in the body, you start asking harder questions about the products built around those promises. About formulation. About delivery. About absorption. About whether the people making them are doing anything more rigorous than dressing up old ideas in clean packaging.
The cannabis wellness boom gave us plenty of sleek bottles, soft-focus promises and celebrity-backed products that seemed designed to sell a mood more than solve a problem. Harrington, by his own account, started moving in the opposite direction.
“That shift happened when I started talking to people who were actually doing serious work in the space,” he said, describing when he stopped treating CBD as a trend and started caring about the mechanics behind it. “Hearing about clinical trials and seeing real data made me realize it was more than just a trend. Then connecting with Avicanna opened my eyes to the level of innovation happening with formulations and delivery systems. That was a game changer for me.”
That’s where Avicanna comes in. The Toronto-based biopharmaceutical company has spent nearly a decade doing serious cannabinoid R&D, running more than 25 pre-clinical and clinical trials and commercializing products across 24 international markets. Its work with re+PLAY centers on patented transdermal delivery technology designed to push cannabinoids deeper into tissue than standard topical creams reach. A real-world evidence study on musculoskeletal pain involving 71 patients showed a 35.4% improvement in health-related domains after one month. A separate study on a rare skin condition was led by the head of dermatology at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. These are company-affiliated studies, worth reading with that in mind. But they’re real, and they represent exactly the kind of technical credibility Harrington says he started looking for.
“My relationship with Avicanna really pushed me toward the science,” he said. “Aras [the co-founder and CEO] was able to break things down in a way that made sense, and then he’d back it up with studies. That made it easier to really dive into the research and understand what was happening beyond just personal experience.”
None of this came from nowhere. Harrington has been in cannabis long enough that his credibility doesn’t depend on this relaunch. He founded Viola, one of the more recognized athlete-built brands in the space, and has been publicly connecting cannabis to pain, recovery and personal history for years. The name itself came from his grandmother Viola, whose experience with medical cannabis helped shift his thinking about the plant entirely.
He brought that up here, too.
“For me, it wasn’t just about being an athlete,” he said. “Growing up, I was always told cannabis was a gateway drug. That mindset stuck with me for a long time. But when I saw how it helped my grandmother medically, it completely shifted my perspective and made me approach the plant with a lot more openness and curiosity.”
That might be the most relatable part of his story. Not the fame, not the 12 surgeries, not the entrepreneurial success. The fact that he arrived at cannabis with the same skepticism millions of Americans did, then stayed around long enough to get genuinely demanding about it.
“I was approaching it from the perspective of someone who put their body through an 18-year professional career,” he said, on whether he noticed most cannabis wellness products weren’t asking the same questions he was. “I was looking for real solutions for long-term wear and tear. A lot of products in the space weren’t necessarily being developed with that kind of athlete-level demand in mind.”
That’s a sharp observation, and not just for athletes.
Cannabis has matured as an industry. That maturity doesn’t automatically produce rigor. There is still a lot of language in this space pretending to be insight. A lot of products that want the credibility of science without doing the harder work of earning it. Harrington seems increasingly aware of that gap, and increasingly uninterested in pretending it doesn’t exist.
“Doing it right means having intention behind it,” he said. “You need a real plan for what you’re trying to address and how cannabis fits into your overall wellness. It’s about respecting the plant and using it responsibly, not abusing it. That’s the difference between real wellness and hype.”
In an industry that still too often rewards noise, that line sounds almost radical.
Because the most interesting thing about Al Harrington’s cannabis story in 2026 isn’t that he’s still in it. It’s that after 16 seasons, 12 surgeries, a grandmother’s healing and a decade of watching an industry take shape around him, he sounds less like a celebrity endorser and more like the kind of consumer this market badly needs more of. One who wants the plant, but also wants the proof.
At a time when cannabis brands still sell the feeling first and the details later, Harrington keeps asking about the details.
In this industry, that might be the sharpest edge of all.
