Playing football isn’t easy on the body. Just ask Jim McMahon, the famed former NFL quarterback, now a Scottsdale resident.
During McMahon’s career, which included a Super Bowl win with the Chicago Bears, he got beat up quite a bit and used prescription drugs to treat the chronic pain and arthritis caused by his playing career. Like so many others, McMahon became addicted to the pills and at one point was taking 100 Percocet pills a month.
The pills, he said, almost killed him. But McMahon credited cannabis for helping him overcome the painkiller habit.
“I’ve enjoyed this plant since 1973. I didn’t know at the time how good it was for me, just what it did for me,” McMahon told the Business Journal. “It made me feel good, it made me eat and it made me sleep. That’s what it’s supposed to do.”
McMahon, along with two other former NFL players and cannabis activists Kyle Turley and Eben Britton, are using their stories of consuming marijuana instead of prescription pills to deal with pain caused by playing professional football to market their new cannabis company.
Going all in on 'medicinal herb'
In 2021, McMahon, Turley and Britton launched California-based Revenant, a cannabis brand that is geared toward helping symptoms related to illness and injury, according to its website. This past week the brand started selling in Arizona at the Mint Cannabis dispensary in Tempe.
McMahon said he’s been looking to get into the cannabis industry for a while, but it needed to be the right circumstance.
“I moved out to Scottsdale in 2010, right when [marijuana] became legal medically,” McMahon said. “I tried to get into the business then, but the laws and regulations changed so many times, I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. Plus, there are a lot of shady folks in this business – just like any other business.”
A few years ago, McMahon and Turley, who is very vocal in his activism for cannabis use, connected. When Turley told him his was going to start Revenant, McMahon said he wanted in.
“The reason I got into this was to tell people this is not a drug but a medicinal herb,” McMahon said. “Hopefully the demonization is going by the wayside as it should.”
The dope on celebrities and marijuana
All three founders of Revenant are very passionate about cannabis use and have personal stories about how it helped them, especially as active and retired NFL players. But they aren’t that unique in the cannabis world right now. Actors, musicians, athletes and all sorts of other celebrities are hopping into the space.
Seth Rogen, Snoop Dogg, Jay-Z, Mike Tyson and Wiz Khalifa are just some of the well-known people putting their names on cannabis products.
“For many of these celebrities, especially those in various aspects of the music and entertainment industry, cannabis use has long been part of the entire mythos surrounding a particular persona. In many cases, the eldest among these luminaries have been openly using cannabis since before it was legal to do so,” said Marie Saloum, the owner of GreenPharms, an Arizona cannabis dispensary company. “Now that it’s becoming increasingly decriminalized, the desire to collaborate with cannabis brands — or, in some cases, start their own brands — seems like the only logical move.”
Because the legal marijuana industry is still young and just recently decriminalized, it also makes sense for cannabis growers and distributors to partner with well know people to get the public interested in their products, Saloum said.
“How each celebrity-related brand fares in the market tends to vary. However, for the most part, at least during initial rollouts, they generally tend to do pretty well, likely due in part to the advantage of name recognition,” Saloum said. “When it comes to products affiliated with Willie Nelson, Cheech & Chong or Snoop Dogg, for instance, you can pretty well surmise from the size of their respective fan bases that they are going to do OK.”
At GreenPharms, Saloum said there is a product – 22 Red – that is a good, potent product that would do well on its own, but the company that produces it is headed by the drummer of the metal band System of a Down. Saloum said that has helped the product’s sales.
Federal laws and regulations don’t allow for cannabis products to be transported across state lines, so for a brand to open in a new state and market it has to essentially begin from scratch and everything from seeds to the final product has to be produced in-state, under specific state guidelines.
This makes it harder from cannabis brands to grow nationally but is why having the brand of a celebrity or famous person and their story about cannabis connected to the product can boost sales.
