Marijuana is becoming more and more accepted in the US as many states have legalized the use of medical marijuana. A few states have recently even legalized the use of recreational marijuana.
Chances are you have seen some cases on the Internet where patients with certain conditions have had tremendous help with treatment from medical marijuana. However, UFC veteran Diego Sanchez said on this week’s episode of The MMA Hour (transcribed by Scott Harris for Bleacher Report) that after getting his medical marijuana license and experimenting with the treatment for a few months, he encountered a situation where he thought he could have died.
“I hit the ground, and I felt something inside my heart,” Sanchez said of his scary incident after a sparring session. “It wasn’t, like, a muscular injury. It was something internal. … I just laid down and said, ‘I’m done for the week.’”
Sanchez added, “The moment I laid down at the back of [that gym], I instantly knew it was because of that medical marijuana.”
Sanchez said that he was high on marijuana during that training session and felt like his heart was palpitating or perhaps not receiving enough oxygen.
“Whatever happened, it was serious,” Sanchez said. “I could feel something going on, and I was very, very terrified that if I got my heart rate back up that I could, like, die or something.”
Sanchez initially did not seek out a doctor but eventually went to get checked up worrying that his career could be in jeopardy. To his relief, the doctor told him that his heart was fine and that feeling he had was a “muscular injury.”
“My lungs were being affected,” Sanchez said not fully believing that what he felt in that particular incident was a muscular injury. “And I still had the mentality to train like a warrior, so when [the heart issue] happened to me, that day at the gym, I was still experimenting with medical marijuana. … I did it, and I loved it, and I got my medicinal medicine. … I’m not judging. I’m saying that medical marijuana’s not for everybody, and it’s not for me.”
This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 4/19/2017.