This is the online version of our daily newsletter, The Morning Win. Subscribe to get irreverent and incisive sports stories, delivered to your mailbox every morning. Chris Korman is filling in for Andy Nesbitt.
It’s 4/20. Smoke — or eat — ’em if you got ’em.
And you might, because you could be living in one of the 37 states where medical marijuana is legal. Or one of the 18 where recreational toking is allowed.
But if you’re an elite athlete, you may have to refrain. It makes absolutely no sense, but cannabis remains a banned substance according to far too many leagues and sanctioning bodies.
Those rules, in many cases, have been slowly catching up with science and society: Earlier this year, the NCAA said it would increase the threshold level for positive tests. It also said that a first positive test would not result in players being suspended, a move that puts college more in line with the policies currently being followed in the four major pro sports leagues.
All of this is still not nearly enough. High-level athletics are brutal on the body and mind, in ways that can be mitigated by the use of cannabis (which is not, study after study shows, a performance enhancer). Sports teams that for so long harbored doctors who were all too happy to hand out addictive and destructive opioids should be running to embrace an alternative (the NFL and NFLPA have pledged $1 million toward studying this, which is a start.)
Late last year, I wrote a piece about former NFL tight end Casey Fitzsimmons, whose career ended with a brutal concussion that left him dazed for years. Anxious, in pain and unable to sleep, he turned to what the league had tacitly said for so many years was the solution: booze and painkillers. He became addicted to both.
Using marijuana was anathema to him, not based on experience with it but the stigma around it. “I didn’t want anybody to think I was a pot head,” said Fitzsimmons, who grew up in Montana and now runs a cattle ranch there.
But he finally found relief once he tried weed. It helped him manage his pain and settle his mind.
In the course of reporting that story I talked to one of Fitzsimmons’ teammates, Hall of Fame wide receiver Calvin Johnson. After using his speech in Canton to reveal how hard the game had been on him and pledge to help others through it, Johnson now runs a cannabis business called Primitiv.
His goal, too, is to deconstruct the stigma around cannabis — which of course is applied in a wholly different way to Black athletes. White people are seen as too liable to listen to long meandering songs when they use marijuana. Black ones, as criminals.
“We need to get people to understand that this, truly, is about healing,” he said at the time.
Congress may very well decriminalize marijuana use at the federal level soon, but pro sports more openly embracing its use would go just as far toward changing the narrative.
The cynic in me says pro leagues will embrace marijuana in the same way, and for the same reasons, they have opened up to gambling companies: There’s ad money to be had.
But the leagues don’t need to be following the market on this. We’ve been writing about the issue for years, with much of that coverage focused on actual players extolling the virtues of cannabis.
They should be heard.
Quick hits: A nearly perfect game from an ump… Let them play, refs… MLB’s first jersey ad is a mess… And more.
— I’m not exaggerating in the least when I say this might be one of the most impressive feats in sports history.
— Refs called 20 fouls in the first quarter of the Grizzlies-Timberwolves game. 20! In the first quarter! (Also, who would win in the wild, a Grizzly or a Timberwolf? What a matchup! Get high now if you aren’t excited about this. )
— We do it for the Motorola crest on our shoulders, not the name on the back of our jerseys. Wait.
— Are you guys reading and subscribing to Layup Lines, our afternoon NBA newsletter? You should.