Jake Plummer Blasts Jerry Jones for CTE Comments, Talks Drug Usage in NFL

Former NFL quarterback Jake Plummer believes football players don't get enough support for their physical and mental health, and he pointed toward comments from Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to illustrate his opinion. 

Ryan Koenigsberg of BSN Denver spoke with Plummer on Wednesday about the various issues players face during and after their careers, including painkiller addiction, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and depression. The quarterback has watched as friends and former teammates deal with those problems, and he thinks the amount of money professionals make leads to less sympathy.

"I have a hard time with it because everybody says, 'Oh, poor NFL millionaires. Oh, you poor people.' They don't understand," Plummer said. "Maybe they should have a little more to say about the owners that are billionaires, they're not millionaires; they're billionaires."

Plummer eventually apologized on Friday during an interview with Fox Sports 910, via Will Keys of Scout.com: "It came out, I said it, I'll own it, I'll stand by it. I don’t know Jerry Jones personally enough to call him that, which is probably why I shouldn't have used that word."

In March, Mark Maske of the Washington Post noted Jones was asked whether he believed a direct link had been established between playing football and brain disease. Jones said, "we are very supportive of the research" but didn't think the results were definitive yet.

"No, that's absurd," Jones said. "There's no data that in any way creates a knowledge. There's no way that you could have made a comment that there is an association and some type of assertion. In most things, you have to back it up by studies."

Plummer told BSN Denver those comments irked him:

"

Like Jerry Jones, who says it's 'absurd' that there would be a link between brain trauma, football and CTE. Shame on him for saying that, that billionaire assh--e. It's the worst thing in the world for a guy like that to say. That's where we're sitting; grown-ass men are asked to go out there for millions of dollars—which, yeah, it's a lot of money—bang themselves around and completely f--k their lives over for their 40s and 50s. So yeah, poor football players is what I say. If you're a grown-ass man, you should be allowed to make grown-ass decisions.

"

Last September, PBS' Jason M. Breslow provided the results of research by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University, which showed 96 percent of NFL players and 79 percent of football players from any level who were studied showed signs of CTE in brain tissue.

Plummer, who left the league in 2007 and is now 41, explained to BSN Denver that he's had hip surgery along with sharp aches and pains. He's now an advocate for the use of CBD, a cannabis compound he takes daily. It remains banned by the NFL, but he hopes that will change.

"They should be able to say, 'I'm going to have some CBD and puff on this fatty, relax after a football game and take the pain away,'" he said. "Not get tested for it like Josh Gordon, who now can't play the game that he's been playing since he was a kid because he smokes marijuana."

He also noted the pressure to keep a spot in the lineup or on the roster led players to use their "drug of choice," often painkillers, just to make it through the season. He hopes taking CBD off the banned-substance list, which he states "should happen soon," would be a major step to safer treatment.

"I just don't see anything wrong with allowing grown men to take something that's going to help them and quite possibly save the game," Plummer told BSN Denver.

For now, he's part of a project with the "When the Bright Lights Fade" campaign that's working to push for research into the benefits of NFL players using CBD. "My job is to reach out to old teammates, reconnect and let them know I still care about them, that I still love them," he told Koenigsberg.

In 2014, Chris Strauss of USA Today reported NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell stated the league would consider medical marijuana if health experts deemed it a "legitimate solution."