After spending large portions of last season on a soapbox with a bum toe spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and alienating many football fans in the process, Aaron Rodgers has a new favorite talking point: ayahuasca.
A fan of an intensive therapy called Panchakarma that calls for forced vomiting, nasal clearance and bloodletting who also refused to get vaccinated, Rodgers revealed last month that he took ayahuasca in South America on multiple occasions and credited winning back-to-back MVP awards to ingesting the plant-based psychedelic.
While that story temporarily fell off the radar, it re-emerged earlier this week when Rodgers’s teammates celebrated scoring a touchdown on Sunday Night Football against the Bears with a mock ayahuasca ceremony in the end zone.
That celebration, which Rodgers initially claimed he had no prior knowledge of before stating it had been discussed before the game (very cool), gave the 38-year-old quarterback a reason to go on “a small tangent” about why ayahuasca isn’t a drug during his weekly appearances on The Pat McAfee Show.
“Ayahuasca is not a drug,” Aaron Rodgers said, via USA Today. “It has properties in it that have hallucinogenic abilities. But it’s not a drug. We’re talking about plants here…It’s a very important point to make. This is how words are created in society to create a certain bias against certain things. I do think it’s important to go on this ridiculous tangent how words are used to create bias. Those biases create fears and those fears prevent people from doing their own research or having their own idea and truth in a situation.”
While there are certainly some grains of truth in what Rodgers told McAfee about ayahuasca, it is tough to take his views seriously after everything he spouted about COVID-19 last season. While perhaps not quite as insufferable as Tom Brady’s appearance on the Let’s Go! podcast with Jim Gray, Rodgers’s spots on McAfee’s show are getting fairly nauseating. (Just like Panchakarma. ) Perhaps they will improve if Rodgers is “called” to take ayahuasca again, which he said he would do.
“I don’t think that was the last time,” Rodgers said of his most recent hallucinogenic tea time. “Once you sat with the medicine one time you kind of know what that feeling is that more lessons to be learned. Some people sit 100 straight days and still feel called years and years down the road to keep on doing it. I had such a beautiful experience I’m pretty certain it won’t be my last.”
It also won’t be the last time we hear about Rodgers and ayahuasca.
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