Calvin Johnson opens up about the reality of painkillers and injuries in the NFL

In an upcoming Megatron interview with E:60, he opened up about playing injured, concussions, and the day-to-day use of painkillers.

Calvin Johnson’s interview with E:60 that will air tomorrow will likely shine a huge light into the NFL’s culture of playing hurt. Johnson reportedly said that retiring would have been much more difficult if the Lions had been good, but that wasn’t the only portion of the interview. Johnson had some choice things to say about concussions in the NFL as well.

Johnson was never officially diagnosed with a concussion in his nine-year career.

The normally soft-spoken Johnson has become more vocal about his career in his retirement. He also described the ease with which NFL doctors used painkillers, telling ESPN:

"I guess my first half of my career before they really, you know, before they were like started looking over the whole industry, or the whole NFL, the doctors, the team doctors and trainers they were giving them out like candy, you know?“f you were hurting, then you could get ’em, you know. It was nothing. I mean, if you needed Vicodin, call out, ‘My ankle hurt,’ you know. ‘I need, I need it. I can’t, I can’t play without it,’ or something like that. It was simple. That’s how easy it was to get ’em, you know. So if you were dependent on ’em, they were readily available."

There has got to be some kind of violation that will come with this. The concussion controversy, if you can call a debate about whether concussions affect your brain negatively or not a controversy, is slowly putting more pressure on the NFL to do better in the areas of player safety and caring for injuries.

The days of “suck it up and rub some dirt in it” are over. There are 40-year old men who cannot remember what they had for breakfast that day because they were told that they just had their bell rung instead of being properly diagnosed and treated. Football is a game, one that is meant to be shared. You can’t teach your son how to throw a football if you can’t remember your own son’s name.

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