Sanders says he didn’t start smoking until he got into the NBA, when he was 22. He did it to cope with … well, everything.

“I was young in the league,” he says. “I was using it to handle where I was going. I wasn’t really managing my life at a high level. That was helping me to cope. But in hindsight, while I was coping on a day to day, on a larger scale, it was hindering. Because there were other skills that I needed to learn. Now, being away from marijuana, I’m able to look back on it and understand it and indulge in these other coping mechanisms. I’m older now, too. I feel my brain’s more developed. There’s different things that, chemically, are put in place now, that make me, I feel like a stronger individual, where a crutch doesn’t seem as appealing as it did before. There’s a lot of value in me learning things on my own and dealing with issues head on.”

Sanders failed four drug tests during his five NBA seasons, all believed to be for positive marijuana tests. His issues with the league and its marijuana policy are as philosophical as anything. He says now that he hasn’t smoked in two months, and he won’t when and if he gets with a team.

“I understand that, because I can see now, through hindsight that, it may make me feel better at the moment, (but) it’s only adding,” he said. “Because it’s a banned substance. As long as it’s banned in the league, it’s going to add to the problem. It’s not going to help, ultimately. It’s kind of hard to see when you’re kind of indulged in it … that comes with knowledge and understanding and research. People are seeing, for whatever reason, you put an x on this my whole life, now we’re understanding it more and seeing the benefits of it. And that was a battle that I was in when I was playing.

“I understood the health components of it and I did my research. But it all comes down to, that may all be all fine and dandy, but it’s not federally legal yet. It’s a banned substance. That was always the final answer. It was a battle that, you can fight the battle in different ways.”

After he reached the buyout with the Bucks, he announced his retirement on The Players Tribune, saying “I’m a person, I’m a father, I’m an artist, a writer, painter, I’m a musician … and sometimes I play basketball.” He spent a month at Rogers Memorial Hospital in Oconomowoc , a quiet town a little more than half an hour from Milwaukee, in treatment for his emotional disorders.

“It’s a lot of youth there, a lot of kids that were younger than me,” Sanders said. “While I came in with my own issues, I was also able to mentor a lot. And I was able to kind of be of help, open my eyes just to a lot of things, where you can really put your importance in life, the values system that we set up. It made me extremely grateful for anything I did and didn’t have. It just opened my eyes to my situation, how big the picture was. It helped me to make my decision. It definitely did.”

Both while at Rogers and afterward, Sanders took stock of what had caused him so much anxiety.

“A lot of guys in the league, we come from different situations,” he said. “The way drama works, it just stores in your body. Certain things, they don’t really go away. You just learn to cope. Things kind of come back when you’re a young man in your early twenties, that you may not have thought about for 10 years. It’s kind of how the mind works. So you have to learn. Understanding is huge. I studied the mind a lot, I studied the nervous system a lot. Through my understanding, it helped me to cope better, to kind of pinpoint what I think I need.”

And here lies the rub, not only with Sanders, but with other players trying to deal with anxieties and other disorders. Substance abuse is frequently a derivative of a larger mental health issue or issues.

We’ve gone down this road before, with World Peace and Royce White and Delonte West and other players who needed extra support and counseling to deal with their unique maladies. The NBA maintains that while there remains no specific mental health policy in the Collective Bargaining Agreement, players have access to mental health professionals and treatment programs as part of their benefits package. And the league continues to maintain that mental health professionals not affiliated with its teams cannot have decision-making authority over the best courses of treatment for players. There are, the league argues, mental health resources available through the team and Players’ Association.

Sanders says he has a support system in place that will be best for him if he returns.

“That’s something that, when I stepped away, I started to establish on my own,” he said. “Those are things that I’m going to bring with me to the NBA. Until the NBA figures that out, I’m going to have my own personal support system, that I’m able to go to, that I didn’t have before. I had one, but it wasn’t very a strong one. And I understood that. You get hit with these different obstacles and you get put in these different positions, and these crises come up, and there’s nothing to do but go play basketball. But you have to handle these different things, and sometimes you can’t do it by yourself.”

His friends in his non-hoops community believe he’ll be able to balance everything. They love him whether he goes back to the pros or not.

“I was always like, ‘I don’t really care, dude,’ ” Korched said. “We’ll play basketball, we’ll play 2K, we’ll play video games and talk about basketball. But I don’t really care if that’s something he wants to do, and being in the community, all of his friends are like that, too. I think being in that space where he actually got to be himself and not have the whole professional athlete type situation, or having to worry about being the celebrity dude walking around, gave him a really good feeling to know that, okay, I can do both, as long as it’s the right people involved.”