At the peak of his career, Ian Wright was one of the most fearsome forwards in the English top flight and is regarded as a legend by those of an Arsenal persuasion.
But his career could have been derailed at an early point had the fact that he smoked cannabis in his formative years been discovered after a random drug test.
In his new autobiography A Life in Football: My Autobiography which is being serialised in The Sun, the former player turned pundit admits that he smoked weed from about the age of 17, although he emphasises he was never addicted to it and smoked it on a casual basis.
By the time, his career had started to take off, he was still using marijuana by the time he was at Crystal Palace and as he reveals, could have tested positive in his early '20s.
"I'd been around weed smokers from a very early age, and recently it had become something of an end-of-the-week ritual. It didn't even dawn on me that I was doing anything wrong," he writes.
"We beat West Brom 4-1 that Saturday, the whole team came into the dressing room still excited and then the drug testers arrived.
"It's the first time I'd ever seen them and I panicked inside -- I've been smoking cannabis, less than 24 hours earlier, and if that test comes back positive that's it. It is literally all over for me."
It turned out to be a near miss for Wright as the testers picked some of his other team-mates to undergo random tests.
But the lesson was learned by Wright, as he concludes: "From that day to this I never smoked a spliff again."
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