Is it high time that marijuana be removed from the NCAA’s banned drug list and testing protocols for college athletes? The National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports (CSMAS) seems to think so. And according to a June 16 statement from the NCAA, the final “weed out” could occur as early as this Fall.
The CSMAS alone does not have the authority to enforce such rules changes. Instead, it would have to be a “joint” decision, so to speak. The governing bodies for NCAA Divisions I, II, and III would each have to introduce proposed legislation to remove the cannabinoid class from the NCAA list of banned drugs and then choose to adopt such legislation. In the meantime, while such legislative action is being considered, the CSMAS will see if the NCAA Board of Governors is willing to support the removal of cannabis testing from NCAA championship events.
There’s a good chance that the governing bodies of the three NCAA Divisions will ultimately agree with the CSMAS recommendations. After all, the governing bodies for Divisions II and III did ask the CSMAS for their take on the NCAA’s current cannabis policy when the CSMAS met this past week in Indianapolis, Indiana. And during those discussions, the CSMAS concluded that NCAA drug testing should be limited to those substances that actually offer an unfair advantage to users by enhancing their athletic performance.
The CSMAS also determined that marijuana doesn’t appear to enhance athletic performance in any NCAA sport. The currently available scientific evidence seems to support such a conclusion, assuming that competitive eating doesn’t become an official NCAA sport. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has kept marijuana on its prohibited drug list, which is in line with what a review article published in the journal Sports Medicine in 2011 said. This article, which was authored by two members of WADA (Irene Mazzoni, PhD, and Olivier Rabin, PhD) and a toxicologist from the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse (Marilyn A. Huestis, PhD), did indicate that “cannabis can be performance enhancing for some athletes and sports disciplines.”
However, subsequent review articles have concluded otherwise. For example, one such article published in the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine in 2018 included the following line: “Although cannabis use is more prevalent in some athletes engaged in high-risk sports, there is no direct evidence of performance-enhancing effects in athletes.” And one of the co-authors of this 2018 review article, Alan Vernec, MD, is actually the current medical director for WADA. In fact, in a July 22, 2021, Scientific American article, Diana Kwon quoted as David McDuff, MD, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland, as calling marijuana “performance-detracting rather than performance-enhancing.”
Additionally, the CSMAS recommended a significant shift towards a harm reduction philosophy and approach when dealing with cannabis use. Harm reduction focuses more on mitigating the potential negative impact of cannabis use rather than simply trying to prohibit or discourage its use. This can come in the form of having more “blunt” discussions and education about the different ways that cannabis can be used and what may be safer versus riskier practices. This can also include re-orienting testing strategies so that they aim more towards identifying problematic use of cannabis rather than just any type of use.
The June 16 NCAA statement indicated that the approach to cannabis would be “similar to the approaches taken with alcohol.” Technically, most college students can’t legally drink alcohol. But come on. Expecting college students to not drink alcohol can be like expecting your significant other to just go to the Olive Garden for a bachelor’s or bachelorette’s party. Many colleges have not been taking a “Keg party? What is that?” approach to handling the alcohol use. Instead, the approach to alcohol has been more oriented towards accepting the fact that many college students will indeed use alcohol and, rather than treating alcohol use as some kind of “moral failing,” focusing more on preventing the dangerous uses of alcohol.
The CSMAS based this latest round of recommendations on what was discussed at the Cannabis in Collegiate Athletics Summit that the NCAA hosted at their national office in Indianapolis from December 7 through 8, 2022. There the over 60 attendees reviewed what’s current known about current cannabinoid use, its physiological effects, its relationship to mental health, and the evolving political and legal landscape. The goal of the summit was to develop consensus recommendations for cannabis research, education, and policy for collegiate sports.
All of this is a sign that the CSMAS has been “weeding” the tea leaves. Not banning athletes for using marijuana may have seemed un-be-weedable a few decades ago. But the times they are a-changing. As more and more states legalize the recreational use of pot, it’s likely going to become harder and harder for college athletics to continue to enforce approaches that have been used in the past.
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