During Sunday’s win over the Chicago Bears, Allen Lazard and Aaron Rodgers took part in an ayahuasca-inspired celebration after connecting for their first touchdown of the year.
Rodgers made headlines earlier this offseason when he revealed his past experiences with the hallucinogen. So of course, NFL fans were quite amused by this celebration.
During his weekly appearance with The Pat McAfee Show on Tuesday, Rodgers said he wasn’t happy with the headlines referring to ayahuasca as a “drug” with negative connotations.
“You just used the word ‘drug’ to refer to ayahuasca. I saw a few articles people sent me about us doing the tea celebration. And I just want to stop you there right away because the reference to ayahuasca, or even marijuana, putting the tag ‘drug’ on them is a manipulative word that creates a bias against those specific things. And it happens all over society,” Rodgers said to McAfee.
“… Drugs, you think about drugs, you start labeling marijuana a drug – which is a plant. Ayahuasca a drug, which is a plant. Psilocybin a drug, that’s a fungi also comes from the Earth. Then you think about ‘medicine’ … What is medicine? I’m gonna take my daily medicine, my aspirin – that’s a drug. I’m gonna take my cough medicine – that’s a drug, that’s not a plant. I’m gonna take my whatever fill-in-the-blank medicine that’s a pharmaceutical – those are drugs,” he added.
“Ayahuasca is not a drug. It has properties in it that have hallucinogenic abilities, but it’s not a drug. We’re talking about plants here. I think it’s a very important point to make. This is how words are used in our society to create a bias against certain things and I do think it’s important enough to go on this ridiculous tangent that I went on to remind people how words are used to create bias in certain situations. Those bias create fears and those fears prevent them from doing the research themselves or looking into it or having their own idea or truth about certain situations.”
During an appearance on the Aubry Marcus Podcast earlier this year, Rodgers revealed that he consumed ayahuasca on a trip to South America before winning back-to-back NFL MVP trophies in 2020 and 2021.