Breaking Real Bad: Inside the Sam Hurd Drug Case (1 Viewer)

[Faust]

Breaking Real Bad: Inside the Sam Hurd Drug Case

 

[Warrior]

Gates

 

[None_More_Black]

Good read. Thanks.

 

[Yenrub]

Interesting story

I kind of agree with his former high school coach when he says "where's the money? If Sam is this big kingpin who's moving kilos here and there, where is the money to support all of that?"

 

[Leroy's Aces]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/football/bears/chi-sam-hurd-sentence-20131113,0,1399364.story

15 years. Better than a life sentence at least. I hope his time goes well and he gets out early for good behavior if possible.

 

[MAC_32]

Great article.

And another sentence that leaves me with no faith in our justice system.

 

[loose circuits]

wow, very good read to know the whole story behind everything

 

[Ministry of Pain]

Thanks Faust, good work as always. Great story to read and even if Hurd was not the big kingpin, seems like he was not innocent of all wrong doing either. I'm sure he wishes he could go back in time a few years.

 

[zftcg]

Read that today. I'm always a little skeptical of articles like that that are clearly repeating one side's spin, but I agree based on what they present that Hurd sounds like an idiot who is guilty of some small-time drug dealing but also got screwed over by acquaintances who made stuff up about him in order to get their own sentences reduced.

Fifteen years still seems a little excessive for a non-violent offender, but at least it's not life.

 

[Faust]

Excerpt from Peter King's MMQB:

Beneath the surface in the Sam Hurd case.

I highly recommend the superbly reported Michael McKnight story on our site detailing the long, winding and drug-addled road that led Sam Hurd to a 15-year prison sentence last week. But McKnight, who worked on this story for 22 months, raised another point that’s more significant to today’s NFL, and that’s the recreational use of marijuana.

First, the rules: By NFL bylaws, all players are tested for recreational drugs once a year, sometime in a 16-week period between April 20 and Aug. 9. If a player tests positive in that solitary test, he is eligible to be tested at random after that. If he is clean, he can do recreational drugs, such as marijuana, without fear of the league as long as he doesn’t exhibit any aberrant behavior or get caught publicly (as with Dwayne Bowe last week). So the vast majority of NFL players are able, as long as they behave, to smoke marijuana at will after the spring/summer test. And reading the McKnight story, the overwhelming impression was Hurd was a mass user of pot—and he had friends in the league whom he supplied.

Three questions with McKnight about his story, and his impression of the pot culture in the league:

Me: Are there more Sam Hurds in the NFL, and if so how many?

McKnight: I think there are more Sam Hurds in the NFL. I don’t think there are more athletes who are dipping their toes in the world of cocaine trafficking, but in terms of guys who somehow procure large amounts of weed and give it to teammates … I would estimate there are between five and 10 other players like that. Meaning five to 10 other NFL locker rooms have a guy in the room who … if marijuana is your deal, you find out within the first month or so that That guy in that locker over there, that’s the guy you want to go to.

And moreover, people in that circle don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. The feeling is that a great number of those teammates need it. Whatever players need to get themselves right for Sunday, you do it. Whether it’s prescription drugs or whether it’s a sex addiction or whether it’s five hours of massage therapy on Friday … whatever it is to get yourself ready for kickoff Sunday, you do it. And there’s not many questions asked on what that is. You just do it. So that’s how these guys look at marijuana. It’s a support system for the life of an NFL player, or at least a handful of NFL players, who manage pain, relieve stress and kind of get high and smoke with their friends at one of their buddies’ places after practice just to kind of wind down. It’s a stressful world they live in. That doesn’t necessarily condone that behavior, but it does help us understand it a little better.

Me: So you believe marijuana basically is a pain-killer for players?

McKnight: A lot of players suggest that marijuana is one way to heal their bodies and help them become more like the people we’re surrounded by in public life every day. It’s just a starkly different world than you and I live in.

Me: Why did Sam Hurd do it?

McKnight: There’s the $64,000 question. I would hope the story lays that out a little bit better than I can explain it to you. But it was a swirl of agendas and misinformation, misunderstanding. It was a guy who frankly allowed his head to get screwed on wrong. He allowed his addiction—what I think was more of a psychological addiction to marijuana than a physical addiction—to just cloud everything. Pardon the pun. But he had a need for large quantity of marijuana. It fueled his every day. His craving for marijuana overrode many systems in his psyche telling him Hold on, don’t do this. The evidence suggests that. The 19 hours I spent interviewing Sam Hurd in a federal detention center suggests that.

 

[Ministry of Pain]

Again, ty Faust, great article by both King and McKnight. I posted about the testing of marijauna in another thread and this confirms what I had read and heard that the players kind of know when the testing is and as long as they ### they are in the clear for the season.

 

[Doctor Detroit]

Thanks for posting, very interesting.