Tag: NBA

Why Does Mexico’s President Disparage The NBA’s New Cannabis Policy?

Written by Johnny Green on September 11, 2023. Posted in Policy.

Outgoing Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is not a fan of cannabis consumption, nor is he a fan of current cannabis policies in the United States. He will soon be replaced by a new incumbent after the dust settles on the 2024 election, as both major political parties in Mexico have nominated other people for the upcoming election.

It appears that the outgoing politician is getting crankier by the day, particularly towards cannabis policy north of his nation’s border, and for reasons that do not quite make sense to me, he extends that resentment to the National Basketball Association (NBA).

During one of his recent daily press conferences, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador aired grievances against the United States in regard to the nation’s overall approach to drug policy. He described it as “very misguided” and asked why the NBA permits cannabis use by its players.

Mexico’s president was referring to changes made to the NBA’s cannabis policy earlier this year via the signing of a new collective bargaining agreement that removed random cannabis testing for NBA players. Previously, NBA players were randomly tested four times a year and held to the lowest THC threshold out of all of the professional sports leagues (ten times less than the Olympics’ threshold).

It’s worth noting that the NBA does not technically allow its NBA players to consume cannabis. The new collective bargaining agreement still has provisions and processes for teams to mandate that a player enter the league’s substance abuse program if they deem the player’s cannabis use to be problematic.

Regardless, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s fixation on the NBA’s cannabis policy change is puzzling given the fact that it has nothing to do with U.S. politics. The NBA, just like every other sports league and basically every employer, gets to set its own cannabis testing policy.

This is not the first time that Mexico’s current president has disparaged the NBA’s current cannabis policy. Back in April, he tweeted various nonsense about the War on Drugs, with a heavy emphasis on fentanyl, then tried to pivot those grievances towards the NBA, seemingly indicating that because the NBA doesn’t randomly test for cannabis now, somehow that contributes to the fentanyl epidemic.

Cannabis prohibition does not work, and that is true in professional sports just as much as it is in society. It does not lower cannabis usage rates. All it does is provide authorities the ability to selectively enforce prohibition policies on individuals that they do not like, and that is unacceptable by every measure. Hopefully Mexico’s next president will be on the right side of history.

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The NBA Made The Right Move By Dropping Cannabis Prohibition

Written by Johnny Green on July 16, 2023. Posted in Entertainment.

In late June, after months of leaks in the media, the National Basketball Association (NBA) officially removed cannabis from its list of prohibited substances. The NBA had refrained from testing players for cannabis going back to 2020, however, with the new collective bargaining agreement signed into effect by both the league and the player’s union, cannabis prohibition in the NBA finally came to an end.

In addition to allowing players to consume cannabis when ‘off the clock,’ players will also be allowed to invest in the cannabis industry directly. It is no secret that active NBA players have already invested in the emerging legal cannabis industry, however, those investments were passive in nature, and players can now tout their investments publicly.

Under the old NBA testing guidelines, players that had more than 15 ng/mL of THC in their bodily fluids were subject to disciplinary action, including suspension from play, although not all players were treated fairly.

NBA players such as Clifford Robinson had league cannabis policies selectively enforced on them in order to ‘make an example out of them,’ presumably to further the league’s prohibition agenda.

While it is an amazing thing that the NBA finally got on the right side of history, I am sure that it’s a bittersweet moment for the players and their families who had to endure the harms of the league’s previous policy.

I was blessed to be friends with Clifford Robinson in the later years of his legendary life, and I saw firsthand the level of stigma that he still had to deal with well after he retired from the NBA, even while living in a state (Oregon) where cannabis was legal for adult use. No one should ever have to deal with such illogical nonsense, including professional athletes.

Fortunately, no other players’ careers will be negatively impacted by NBA cannabis prohibition, and ultimately, that is worthy of celebration. Cannabis is not harmful to athletes, nor is it capable of enhancing an athlete’s performance to such a degree that it warrants being labeled as a ‘performance-enhancing substance.’

Hopefully the NBA sees that the sky above NBA arenas is still intact, and realizes that it should never go back to its previous regressive cannabis policies.

NBA To Continue To Not Test Players For Cannabis

Written by Johnny Green on October 20, 2021. Posted in Cultural.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is one of the most popular professional sports leagues on earth and is made up of players and coaches from literally every corner of the planet.

Unfortunately, the NBA has had a cannabis prohibition policy in place for multiple decades, which has resulted in needless harm being caused towards a number of players including and especially International Cannabis Business Conference alumni Clifford ‘Uncle Cliffy’ Robinson (RIP).

Testing players for cannabis made no sense prior to any state/country legalizing cannabis for medical and/or adult use, and it makes even less sense now that reform is spreading.

Every NBA team is now located in a state that has legalized cannabis for at least medical use, and many teams are also located in states that have legalized for adult use. In the case of the Toronto Raptors, the team is located in a country that has legalized cannabis entirely.

Thankfully, the NBA announced that it will continue to refrain from testing players for cannabis, which is a continuance of a temporary policy that was originally put in place at the start of the pandemic.

The NBA needs to make the policy permanent, as well as apologize to every player that was needlessly harmed by the NBA’s historic cannabis policy. Anything less is unacceptable.

Below is more information about the NBA’s recent decision via a news release from our friends at NORML:

For the second season in a row, the National Basketball Association has announced that it will suspend the practice of randomly testing players for marijuana.

A spokesperson for the league announced last week that it will “extend the suspension of random testing for marijuana for the 2021-22 season and focus our random testing program on performance-enhancing products and drugs of abuse.”

Commenting on the policy, NORML’s Political Director Justin Strekal said: “The NBA, like a number of sports leagues, has wisely recognized that it is inappropriate to subject players to drug detection testing for their off-the-court use of cannabis. Their actions are part of a growing trend, and we anticipate that their decision will propel other organizations and companies to make similar changes to their drug screening policies.”

Recently, both the NFL and MLB have amended their drug testing policies so that use of the substance is no longer an offense resulting in a suspension. Last month, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced that it would be reviewing its marijuana-related drug testing guidelines for international athletic competitors.

A literature review published in September in the journal Sports Medicine reported that athletes do not perform better under the influence of either cannabis or THC, but that the use of marijuana and/or CBD may aid in their recovery following competition.

Also last month, the nation’s second largest private employer – Amazon.com - announced that it had dropped pre-employment screening for marijuana and that it was reinstating eligibility for former applicants who were denied consideration under its former policies.

Since 2015, cannabis-related testing in the workplace has fallen over five percent, with jurisdictions where marijuana use is legal for adults experiencing a more significant decline.

Several states - Nevada, New Jersey, New York, and Montana - now limit employers’ ability to pre-screen certain job applicants for past marijuana use, as do a growing number of municipalities, including Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.

Additional information is available from NORML’s fact sheet, ‘Marijuana Legalization and Impact on the Workplace.’

Will The NBA Reform Its Cannabis Policy?

Written by Johnny Green on November 23, 2019. Posted in Business.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is popular all over the globe. What once started as a North American sport has spread across the planet, resulting in the NBA now being comprised of players from countries from all over the world.

Look at any team’s roster and you will see players from a number of different countries, all of which have huge followings in their home countries. Because of that, cannabis policy reform in the NBA would provide a huge boost to cannabis reform efforts in every country that is represented by players in the league.

Currently, the NBA prohibits players from consuming cannabis with THC in it. As calls for cannabis reform in professional sports leagues have ramped up in recent years, along with the explosion in popularity for CBD products, there has been some confusion as to whether CBD is prohibited by major professional sports leagues.

For professional sports leagues that prohibit cannabis, drug testing policies are in place that seek to detect the presence of THC, and not CBD. Some CBD products contain trace amounts of THC, and that could result in a player failing a drug test due to THC build-up, but the failure would be due to the presence of THC, not CBD.

The current drug testing threshold for the NBA is very strict – a mere 15 ng/mL of THC metabolites. To put that number into perspective, Olympic athletes are held to a standard of 150 ng/mL. An NBA player that violates the league’s cannabis policy can be forced into a mandatory drug rehab program, and/or fined, and/or suspended. There are no exemptions for medical cannabis in the NBA.

The NBA commissioner that instituted the cannabis prohibition policy that is currently in place in the league is David Stern. While Stern served as the commissioner of the NBA he suspended players like retired NBA Allstar Clifford Robinson for cannabis use.

In Robinson’s case, he was suspended multiple times by the NBA for his cannabis use and was the recipient of a ridiculous amount of stigma from the league that still lingers to this day. Clifford Robinson was a featured speaker at our event in Portland, Oregon last year.

David Stern has since changed his stance on cannabis and is now calling for the NBA to reform its cannabis policy. Per CNBC:

“I think it’s time to take a whole new look at it,” Stern, 77, said in an interview Wednesday with CNBC at the SeventySix Capital Sports Innovation Conference in Philadelphia.

Stern said his feelings about marijuana have shifted with the recent surge in medical use of THC and CBD — the two main compounds in cannabis — to treat pain, anxiety and other ailments.

“In many cases in sports,” Stern said, “the opioid crisis begins with players being prescribed pills for their pain, and if there is another substance, whether it be CBD or THC that eases pain, then I’m all for it.”

David Stern joins a growing list of people (including regulators and politicians) that have had a change of heart when it comes to cannabis policy but only after they are no longer in a position to directly act on it. To date, David Stern has yet to issue an apology to the players that he punished for their cannabis use, or for any role that he may have played in contributing to the opioid crisis that he mentioned in his recent interview.

The NBA’s anti-cannabis league policy goes beyond just testing for THC. If a player is the subject of a cannabis offense away from the team, such as an arrest for cannabis possession, they can also be punished.

That policy perpetuates institutional racism, which is obviously unacceptable. If a player of color is statistically far more likely to be arrested for cannabis possession in society, and the league punishes players when they are subjected to those situations by law enforcement, then that same player of color is statistically far more likely to be punished for cannabis by the NBA compared to their caucasian peers.

Commissioner Stern may or may not be sincere in his calls for NBA cannabis reform, but regardless, his voice will hopefully provide a boost to reform efforts in the NBA, which will, in turn, provide a boost to reform efforts elsewhere if reform in the league is achieved.

When will the NBA end its harmful cannabis prohibition policy? Hopefully sooner rather than later, however, there is no current timetable for such a policy change. A lot of words have been said by the current NBA commissioner, however, meaningful actions have remained elusive.

Sport cannabis is a new frontier for the emerging cannabis industry, and if leagues like the NBA get on the right side of history, it will open up huge opportunities for players via endorsement deals, for cannabis companies that create products and services that cater to athletes, and ultimately the league itself will no doubt benefit via receiving a sizeable stream of new advertising revenue and revenue from partnership deals from the cannabis industry.