Rob Van Dam On How He Started Smoking Marijuana, Getting Arrested In 2006 For Possession

During an interview with Foundation Radio, Rob Van Dam discussed the first time he smoked marijuana.

“When I first smoked it, it was complete peer pressure. I’ve told this story a few times, but I turned 21 on a wrestling trip in Jamaica. All the other guys that were there, they were all so excited because the ganja was plentiful, you know? I was just out of high school, basically, by a couple of years. I was totally told that it was a bad hallucinogenic, just like acid and PCP. It was all schedule one, the most dangerous drug with no value whatsoever. But then I realized some of the guys I looked up to were in really good shape and would use cannabis, and that gave me enough reason to question it. My first time, we are all sitting in a bungalow in Jamaica, and I didn’t mean to be sitting in rotation. I remember I was eating a hamburger and the joint came around and I was like, ‘oh, no no, I’m good.’ And I don’t know if you know Jimmy Backlund, he was also Jimmy Del Rey in WWE, this guy, and Coconut Kid and Mark Starr. Bunch of these guys who were around back then, but mostly Jimmy, ‘hit it, you f*cking primadonna. Hit it. It’s not gonna kill you. Everyone else hit it, f*cking hit it!’ He pressured me into it and I hit it. Hit it once more when it came back around in the same kind of influence. I didn’t enjoy it the first time, you know, I was paranoid. I was starring at the walls thinking, ‘oh my god, now if I wasn’t uncomfortable around all these guys before, now what the f*ck!?’”

Rob Van Dam recalled getting arrested in 2006 for possession.

“People would ask me if I felt personally attacked or violated because when I got busted for the possession of marijuana, I had to drop the WWE Championship and the ECW Championship. A little while later, Jack Swagger, I think got busted for marijuana. I don’t know, maybe he failed a test. I don’t know what his situation was but the fans were all over like, ‘hey, he still gets to go to WrestleMania, that’s not fair!’ I kept saying it’s progress, you know what I mean? I was a sacrificial lamb but we’re moving in the right direction. The fact is, if you go back to, holysh*t, let’s say 55 years. Guess what? We had segregation. Like, black people were not allowed to hang out with white people. Go back years before that, we [white people] used to own black people. You couldn’t, you know, that’s just — it’s a movement and people that only live in the now, they seem to be lacking in understanding of that, so they’re just blown away, their mind is surprised by every little thing they do so they cancel someone from culture.”