By NAN Staff Writer

News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Fri. Jan. 15, 2021: A Caribbean sports star has gone from Olympian to owning a medical marijuana dispensary.

Jamaican Olympian Michael Frater has officially opened 4/20 Sports Therapeutic Bliss, a medical marijuana dispensary in St. Andrew, Jamaica.

Frater, 38, had been forced into retirement because of injury. But he that revealed that cannabis treatment helped him to recover from a bad knee, which affected him for several years.

Now he says his medical marijuana dispensary is geared towards benefitting ailing persons. “I started studying a lot about it and realized that a drug that has been taboo for most of my life is really a miracle drug. It’s really a drug that once taken properly with the proper prescription, the medicinal purposes are exponential,” he said.

Frater represented Jamaica at the senior level for more than a decade, winning gold medals as a member of Jamaica’s world-record-setting 4x100m relay teams at the World Championships in Daegu, South Korea in 2011 and again at the London Olympics in 2012.

He also won a silver medal in the 100m at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. He was also a 100m champion at the 2003 Pan American Games in the Dominican Republic. However, about five years ago persistent problems with his knees forced him to retire.