Athletes operate at the bleeding intersection of human performance, popular culture, cannabis policy and the law – often taking place explosively in the public eye.

Use of cannabis by professional athletes is common and widespread, despite the continued legal and career risks.

Why do so many athletes choose cannabis? And how are athletes a bellwether for the general population?

A Powerful and Gentle Therapeutic

More and more athletes have been “coming out of the green closet” and speaking publicly about how cannabis supports their health and quality of life. I’m one of them – I’m an Ambassador for the nonprofit Athletes for CARE, and I’ve written previously for Project CBD about the therapeutic benefits cannabis gave me as a longtime rugby player.

While cannabis doesn’t qualify as a physiological “performance-enhancing” substance in the sense of doping, it can certainly help support overall wellness – and thus, optimal athletic performance. And that is the holy grail for athletes.

Athletes push to our utmost limits in both competition and training. Success requires immense consistency behind the scenes – we spend thousands of hours of our lives training our bodies to continually surpass our best.

We’re held to account by our teams, leagues, the public, and – often most of all – ourselves. We have to perform again and again, despite the injuries and pain that come with the territory.

But this effort isn’t just physical. The pressure on many athletes is immense. And the mental and emotional aspects of health, wellness, and performance are truly inseparable from the physiological.

The necessary foundation of high performance is a few broad factors that affect us all: pain, inflammation, sleep, and mood. For an athlete to be able to achieve their best, these factors need to be optimal or at least neutral.

And as it happens, cannabis therapeutics directly assist with all of these factors. Cannabis has natural analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties, as well as helping with rest and recovery. In proper amounts, it has anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) effects, and many people attest that it also helps them to manage depression.

But unlike the array of intense pharmaceuticals prescribed for these conditions, cannabis is gentle to the body and has few side effects.

There have been some recent breakthroughs in athletes prioritizing the mental aspects of their health and speaking openly about caring for their needs. The leadership of superstars such as Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles has an impact that cannot be underestimated.

However, both of those legendary athletes took a firestorm of public criticism for their decisions to withdraw from major events.

Harsh and Unnecessary Punishments

Personal health decisions shouldn’t be up for public debate, but the lives of athletes remain under a microscope.

The collision between athlete wellness and unscientific cannabis policy burst into the public spotlight in June 2021 when star sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson won the 100-meter final at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials but then received a one-month competition ban for testing positive for THC.

The suspension in effect prohibited Richardson from running in the Tokyo Olympics, causing a huge public outcry at the perceived unfairness of the situation. Richardson subsequently revealed that she had used cannabis (legally, in Oregon) to ease the sudden shock and grief of the news that her birth mother had passed away.

Richardson paid a steep price – athletically, career-wise, and financially – simply for using the most effective yet gentle and accessible medicine of her choice to meet her wellness needs.

But terrifyingly, the price can be even steeper: personal freedom.

On February 17, 2022, American basketball superstar and Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner was detained in Russia on an accusation of cannabis possession, and remains incarcerated there as of this writing. Russian security forces claimed that her luggage contained vape cartridges filled with two grams of cannabis oil.

For those unfamiliar with that product sizing, one-gram vape cartridges are a small, standard-sized product containing an amount suitable for light-to-moderate personal use. Two such cartridges equals a very modest amount of cannabis.

However, under Russian law the two-gram allegation could carry a maximum 10-year sentence.

Griner’s arrest also occurred only days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, fueling speculation that she is being used as a pawn in the geopolitical struggle.

On May 3, 2022, there were finally reports that the U.S. government now considers Griner to be "wrongfully detained" by the Russian government, which means that her case is assigned to a special envoy for hostage affairs. While this is a positive step, currently she has been incarcerated for almost three months and the potential timeline for her repatriation is completely unknown.

These high profile incidents underscore both the bind that athletes face to use the therapeutic solution that is most effective for their medical needs, and the urgently painful need for cannabis law reform.

Racially Disproportionate Law Enforcement

The fact that both of these athletes are Black women highlights the related issue of systemic racial disparities in the enforcement of U.S. cannabis laws against people of color, particularly Black people.

While the rate of cannabis use and sale in the U.S. is comparable across racial categories, nationwide a Black person is almost four times more likely than a white person to be arrested for cannabis possession.

This is not a situation limited to certain regions or states. A 2013 ACLU report summarized, “The racial disparities in marijuana arrest rates are ubiquitous; the differences can be found only in their degrees of severity.”

A 2020 ACLU analysis of arrest data shows that this unjust state of affairs continues. Every single U.S. state showed racially disproportionate arrests, varying from 1.5 times more likely at the lowest to 9.6 times more likely at the highest.

Black athletes are not an exception to the racially-charged tilt of cannabis criminalization, even with the social prestige of athletes in the U.S. For example, legendary former Portland Trailblazer Cliff Robinson, who became a pioneering cannabis advocate and entrepreneur after retiring from the NBA, often spoke about the ways that cannabis had been harshly used against him.

In recent years, Robinson’s supporters highlighted his unfair treatment at the hands of local police in a 1997 incident in which he was ultimately charged with possession of cannabis. In June of 2020, Portland’s mayor officially apologized for the racial profiling incident, just months before Robinson passed away from lymphoma that August.

These injustices – individual and systemic – are not an accident of history. They are the product of the well-documented origins of legal cannabis prohibition: as an explicit tool for racism and xenophobia.

The criminalization of cannabis in the U.S. began as a racially- and politically-motivated campaign that was anti-scientific in its rejection of the available medical evidence.

But the anti-cannabis crusade was then supported by government-created “reefer madness” propaganda that – while completely fabricated – took root and flourished as a cultural stigma that continues to cause harm today.

Athletic Policy and the Movement for Reform

These cultural influences and the false idea that cannabis is harmful have played a major part in law- and policy-making related to the plant – including in athletics. Law and culture support and justify one another, and we see these factors dovetail in the arena of athletic regulation.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) sets athletic policies for the Olympics and sports leagues around the world. To be put onto WADA’s Prohibited List, a substance must meet at least two of the following three criteria:

Use of the substance has the potential to enhance performance;
Use of the substance can cause harm to the health of the athlete; and
Use of the substance violates the spirit of sport.

While WADA’s staff made some half-hearted attempts to argue that cannabis can enhance performance in some scenarios, it relied more on “the spirit of sport” as a justification to place the plant and its components on the Prohibited List. Writing for WADA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), the authors of the 2011 journal article Cannabis in Sport: Anti-Doping Perspective explained,

“... the spirit of sport criterion does not rely on established scientific facts; rather, it relies more on ethical and societal considerations encompassing a wider view of sport beyond physical achievements and health.”

They then noted that “Cannabis is classified as an illegal substance in most of the world,” leaning on the unscientific prohibition to conclude that “the consumption of cannabis and other illegal drugs contradicts fundamental aspects of the spirit of sport criterion.”

To make things crystal clear, they went on to state, “The international anti-doping community believes that the role model of athletes in modern society is intrinsically incompatible with use or abuse of cannabis.”

The criminalization of cannabis – though not based upon medical science – was one justification for WADA to place the plant and its components on the Prohibited List.

The founder and first president of WADA, Dick Pound, told Yahoo Sports, “People were worried about sport appearing to thumb its nose at criminal law," so the organization included cannabis with addictive drugs like cocaine and heroin and, “it just sort of stayed there."

There have been minor reforms: in 2013, WADA raised the threshold for a positive THC test and removed cannabis from the out-of-competition Prohibited List, and in 2018 removed CBD from the list altogether. But as states across the U.S. and countries around the world have legalized the plant, WADA regulators have not kept pace with the evolution.

Suspensions have continued, with deeply deleterious effects on the careers and wellbeing of athletes. Athletes are unable to use cannabis products as their effective therapeutics of choice, or must endure extra stress when they do.

Athletes have been suffering for years because of WADA’s unjust prohibition of cannabis, which is why Athletes for CARE publicly petitioned WADA in 2019 to remove THC and cannabis from the in-competition Prohibited List.

Interestingly, as cannabis is increasingly decriminalized, WADA has pivoted away from the illegality argument – falling back on “societal” concerns.

In response to a USA Today story about the petition, a WADA spokesperson equivocated, "It is important to note that the list is not static but evolves based on new scientific evidence, as well as, to a lesser degree, changes of use and cultural elements."

Change on the Horizon?

The international outcry over Richardson’s suspension extended to the halls of Congress, with Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Jamie Raskin (D-MD) sending a letter to WADA declaring, “We urge you to reconsider the policies that led to this and other suspensions for recreational use marijuana.”

The lawmakers went on to explain:

“This suspension is the result of [the US Anti-Doping Agency]’s antiquated prohibition on the use of cannabis products by U.S. athletes… The ban on marijuana is a significant and unnecessary burden on athletes’ civil liberties.”

In the hot seat, WADA implicated USADA for administering the drug-testing procedures and punishment, while USADA proceeded to point the finger right back at WADA for setting the international policies that it follows.

However, it must be noted that US foreign policy heavily influences international drug policy – to put it mildly. In its response to the congressional letter, WADA pointed out that historically, the U.S. has been “one of the most vocal and strong advocates for including cannabinoids on the Prohibited List.”

The pressure did bring an unprecedented reaction from WADA, though: in September 2021, the agency announced that in 2022 it would review its ban on cannabis (while clarifying that the plant will remain on the Prohibited List for the 2022 athletic season).

It’s unclear what the timeline might be for the completion of the review, but there are definitely many athletes worldwide who are eagerly awaiting a potential positive movement.

Moving Forward

Athletes are expected to be role models in the public eye, while at the same time continually achieving superhuman physical feats.

But with an increased public conversation about the mental aspects of health, could the rules of being a “role model” be shifting?

Shifting towards honesty and transparency? Towards a more holistic and accurate view of health? Re-integrating the use of plant helpers and food-as-medicine for our wellness?

I like to hope so, and I’m doing my best to be a part of this movement.

It’s scientifically well-established by now that cannabis is medicine. And as elite athletes well know, it can be very useful in supporting overall wellness and performance.

Many are also interested in the effects of cannabis in brain health, keeping a keen eye on emerging research supporting cannabinoids as neuroprotectants – a potential bulwark against brain injuries and diseases including TBI and CTE.

But in the meantime, most athletes are not going to wait years for the results of studies that governments make – they know that cannabis works for them.

Many other folks have begun to explore the plant, and discovered the same.

Let’s erase the unscientific stigma together.

Erasing Harmful Myths of Cannabis Use with Professional Athletes