The NCAA’s rules on student-athletes’ marijuana use are crystal clear — don’t take the risk.
In a Sept. 22 USA Today article, the University of Oklahoma Football Head Coach Lincoln Riley, said the NCAA marijuana rules are “archaic” after the suspension of three players from his team.
Those “archaic” rules are in place to keep players away from unnecessary drug and substance abuse that can affect their performance, according to the NCAA’s powerpoint on what student-athletes need to know about marijuana.
An Aug. 2019 article published in Nature, an international journal on science and technology, touched on the performance-enhancing aspects of cannabis.
“Athletes seem to be able to ‘titrate’ their cannabis use to get just the results they want,” Olivier Rabin, World Anti-Doping Agency’s senior science director, said in the Nature article.
According to the article, Rabin likens it to drinking just enough alcohol to be sociable at a party.
By “titrate,” Rabin is referring to athletes controlling their dosage levels to get some of the positive effects of marijuana, such as reducing competition anxiety, without any of the negative effects, like paranoia and increased heart rate.
Promoting substance reliance by comparing marijuana use to using alcohol to be social is not healthy advice.
Drugs like marijuana have wildly different effects from person to person, which are dependent on a number of factors like potency, method of use and an individual’s tolerance.
Whitney Ogle, who was quoted in the Nature article, is a physical therapist and cannabis researcher at Humboldt State University who conducted a study of 126 people playing a wide range of sports while under the influence of marijuana.
“About 40% of respondents reported adverse effects, which included elevated heart rate and being too high to continue with their workout,” Ogle said in the article.
Despite all the risks, some student-athletes are still using marijuana.
According to a study regarding the risks of marijuana use in college student-athletes and nonathletes in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, “[marijuana use prevalence] rates were higher than expected, considering that athletes stand to lose more than nonathletes from marijuana use with respect to athletic eligibility status and performance impairment as a result of the physiological effects of marijuana smoking.”
Student-athletes could also be receiving sport-related scholarships that rely on the players to actively participate in their sport to the highest level possible.
Why jeopardize your obligations to your sponsors with reckless drug use?
The NCAA’s powerpoint created by the organization’s Sports Science Institute relays the harmful effects of both short-term and long-term use of marijuana in student-athletes.
The San Jose State football program has referred the Spartan Daily to this webpage as its stance on the issue.
It is important to note that marijuana is still a Schedule 1 drug defined by the Drug Enforcement Administration as “drugs with no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
Although marijuana is legal to use medicinally and recreationally in California, that’s not the case everywhere in the U.S.
This is especially important because college teams travel for away games to states with different marijuana laws. So when athletes use marijuana, they choose to take that risk, which affects their team and their school in return.
In a 2003 report titled, “Marijuana as doping in sports,” published in the Sports Medicine journal, the researchers concluded that marijuana users would need to enter programs for them to realize the effects of playing with marijuana in their system.
However, researchers predicted these programs would ultimately fail because users would choose the pleasurable effects of drugs over international sports regulations.
“Such attitudes would avoid the disregard of international principles of honesty, equality and worthiness of life that are present in different sports activities, whether official or not,” Daniel Campos and his team of researchers said in the conclusion to their study.
Student-athletes should choose to live life with less substance use and abide by the NCAA’s guidelines not only because it's the right thing to do, but also because it’s the smart thing to do.
