All you Stephen King and Edgar Allan Poe horror fans should read the Brittney Griner book “Coming Home” and get your needed goosebump quota. It’s a hair-raiser. With the Paris Olympics starting Friday, Griner is in France as a member of the U.
S. women’s basketball team. Traveling abroad on a plane, going through customs, having her bags X-rayed and checked by foreign agents and drug-sniffing dogs no doubt brought back flashes of her 2022 arrest for “drug smuggling” in Moscow and the 10 months she spent in Russian jails and penal colonies as a result.
Released nearly 20 months ago from what was supposed to be a nine-year sentence, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder from the ordeal. Makes sense. She stupidly packed two small cartridges of cannabis oil when she was flying from the U.
S. in February 2022 to join her UMMC Ekaterinburg EuroLeague pro team. Even that tiny amount of marijuana residue is a crime in Russia.
Even if you have a medical prescription for it, as Griner did. She had already played eight years for Ekaterinburg and felt Russia was “my second home.” She didn’t understand that Russia is not a home — not for Americans, anyway — and not while former KGB lieutenant colonel and current dictator Vladimir Putin rules the household.
How dumb was it to carry in the vape cartridges? Let her explain: “In Arizona, cannabis is legal. In Russia, it’s forbidden. I knew that.
Honest to God. I just totally forgot the pen was in my bag.” T.