About 10 years ago, Al Harrington’s grandmother, Viola, was dealing with medical effects from a bout with glaucoma. Viola told Al that she had tried all the medications her doctors had prescribed, but nothing was helping.
While she was hesitant at first, Al was able to convince his grandmother to give medical marijuana a try. After all, he was playing for the Denver Nuggets at the time and had great access to top-tier medical marijuana in Colorado.
After Viola tried medical marijuana for the first time, Al found her crying...tears of joy. She was reading her bible, something Viola had not been able to do for years.
“My grandmother came to visit me when I was playing in Denver, and she was complaining about her eyes with her glaucoma,” Harrington told Spencer Israel and Javier Hasse on Benzinga Live. “I told her about some of the stuff I was reading, at first she was against it. But I convinced her to try it and when I checked in on her an hour and a half later, she was reading her bible crying. That’s what inspired me to start my cannabis journey.”
Harrington’s career has been unconventional– most athletes wait till after their playing careers are finished before starting a business venture. But Harrington knew he was passionate about cannabis from that moment with his grandmother, so he started Viola in 2011, while still playing in the NBA.
Harrington also told Benzinga about a "big raise" but did not disclose who the major investor is. He added that a lot of the money will be used for marketing and branding, to take Viola to the next level.
“We’re really going to focus on branding. We are also doing a licensing agreement that will get us into four new markets,” Harrington said. “Just really excited to allow the brand to stretch the wings. A lot of our awareness and branding is at the national level, but I just feel like we have that awareness that we can start to move and migrate toward the east because most of our business has been on the west coast.”
Currently, Viola products are sold in Oregon, Colorado, California and Michigan. For Harrington, Viola is not simply about selling marijuana to people who need it. He also has a mission of social equity and evening the playing field.
“Once I made the investment, I was just trying to put one foot in front of the other. But then I started to realize I was in rooms and never with people that looked like me. I thought about how I grew up and my cousins that were locked up for cannabis, and thought ‘how is this right that this industry has become a billion-dollar opportunity and there are no people of color that are part of it?’ That’s when I realized that I needed to shift and use my platform and use my voice as a voice for the voiceless,” Harrington said.
Harrington also runs the Harrington Institute, which offers a six-part course as an introduction to the cannabis industry. Harrington believes that education is the first step in allowing people to have access to the billion-dollar industry of cannabis.
Watch the full interview here:
